‘The Shining’
Stanley Kubrick’s ‘The Shining’ is a dark psychological kind of horror film that has quite disturbing imagery that happens to take place in well-lit rooms in the magnificent hotel where three main characters reside with a possibility of a fourth character, the mirror, who might be the magnifier of all the madness happening around them. Jack Torrance, the film’s main character, is a recovering alcoholic and child abuser who manages to secure a job as a caretaker at an isolated hotel together with his wife and child. His employer, Mr Ullman, briefs him on the previous caretaker’s suicidal and murder tragedy but Jack brushes it off after reassuring Dick that will not happen to him. Soon after everyone leaves the hotel, is when the psychic madness begins.
This film depicts a very disturbed man, Jack, who is trying to escape the reality of life, which include his responsibilities to his family and his employer. When Wendy looks through Jack’s typing, the camera slowly closes on her, and as it does so, Jack emerges in profile, in silhouette. One minute the camera’s panning across those out of focus photos on the wall, (the spirits of the cast), the next, and the whole right-hand frame is bent into Jack’s malignant sense of the present. It is a jump scare, but it doesn’t come at you all at once, but slowly, and there are so many hidden messages in just that one transition, all at once. It suggests that Jack is in some way, the hotel. It suggests a creeping enclosure- strangulation. You know what Jack’s attitude to Wendy’s going to be, so it also suggests predestination and the inevitability of evil. That single transition is a masterpiece all of its own. The ability of Danny to feel energies from the past show how human behaviour can reverberate itself through generations and how much society is connected.
Kubrick has managed to make ‘The Shining’ look surreal and have viewers doubt what happened and what is deemed as hallucinations. Jack’s body not being able to be found after he is seen falling in the labyrinth remains a mystery and raises questions if whether he died and absorbed into the past as suggested by the 1921 photograph of a couple of the hotel’s party-goers where he appeared to be present.