The Shining is without question one of the most beloved and best regarded horror movies
of all time.
For many people, the ghosts are the scariest part of the movie.
For others steeped in horror movie criticism, it might be the strange Overlook Hotel itself.
But the actual scariest part of The Shining might not be what you think.
A lot of horror movies seem to lose their impact over time.
Very few people today above elementary school age would find much to be afraid of in the
Universal chillers of the '30s and '40s, despite the reputations they have as groundbreaking
classics today.
There is no shortage of reasons for this, including the evolving broadening of what
is seen as acceptable in popular culture, viewers being desensitized to things that
were shocking in past eras, and so on.
Regardless of what lies behind this phenomenon, the fact is that over the course of 40 years,
The Shining has maintained its reputation as one of the scariest movies ever made, and
it's arguable that this reputation has only grown over that time.
A big part of its success comes from the way the film plays up the physical space: an enormous,
quiet, empty hotel that maybe isn't quite as empty as advertised.
The fear that we all experience in a big, empty building that anything could be lurking
around the corner is made very real when Danny turns a corner on his tricycle and encounters
the ghostly Grady twins, possibly the most iconic moment in a movie full of iconic images.
Soon the Overlook is full to bursting with ghosts: bartenders appearing from nowhere,
revelers with bleeding scalps, parties filling what should be empty ballrooms, naked ladies
who aren't what they seem, and, you know.
That...guy in the costume.
The lingering notion that anything could be anywhere at any time the way the hotel ghosts
are is one that tends to stay with viewers way more than any jump scare.
The feeling of doubting your own senses and the ambiguity of what should be reality are
a big part of why The Shining remains the major cultural touchstone that it is.
"You went into the room Danny said?
237?"
"Yes I did."
"And you didn't see anything at all?"
"Absolutely nothing."
The Shining poses a lot of questions that are not necessarily answered in the film itself,
or at least not without close or repeated viewings.
In fact, deep readings discussing what The Shining is "really" about are so common that
there's actually a documentary on the phenomenon, called Room 237 after the notorious hotel
room where something happens to Danny.
According to people in this documentary, The Shining is, despite appearances, actually
a movie about American imperialism and the genocide of Native Americans.
"The site is supposed to be located on an Indian burial ground, and I believe they actually
had to repel a few Indian attacks as they were building it."
Or, actually, it's about the Holocaust and that genocide.
Or maybe it's a secret retelling of the myth of Theseus and the labyrinth of the Minotaur.
Or, perhaps most famously, it's Stanley Kubrick's secret confession that he was involved in
faking the Moon landing.
Did you know that if you play the movie forward and backward at the same time, stuff happens?
It's a lot.
With all those conflicting interpretations, at least there's one thing we can all agree
on: this is definitely a movie about a haunted hotel, right?
Right?
A relatively common strategy in horror movie criticism is to ask what's really happening
in the movie if there's nothing actually supernatural going on.
The goal is to figure out the metaphor behind the supernatural presence and thereby get
to the thematic meat of the film.
All of the spooky, scary stuff becomes the result of dreams, hallucinations, rumors,
and urban legends.
While this can often be a useful tool for looking at stories from a new angle, it's
not universally helpful.
That said, maybe there weren't any ghosts in the Overlook Hotel.
"It's just like pictures in a book, Danny.
It isn't real."
Roger Ebert's review of The Shining, for example, features the fairly common interpretation
along those lines that recasts all of the movie's ghosts as visions and hallucinations
by Jack and Danny.
But if this is true and the ghosts aren't even a thing, then what's the real threat
to the Torrance family?
If you only know one piece of trivia about Stanley Kubrick's Shining adaptation, it's
likely the fact that author Stephen King famously hates it.
He hates it so much that he had it remade as a TV mini-series in the mid-'90s starring
the fourth most famous person from the sitcom Wings in the Jack Nicholson role.
If you haven't seen it, here's a spoiler: It's bad.
But King is happier with it as an adaptation than he is with a film regarded as a crowning
achievement in a genre and one of the best films of all time.
"Why?" you might rightly ask yourself.
"Why would King hate Kubrick's The Shining so much?"
Well, according to King himself, much of it has to do with Jack's character.
He never cared for the casting of Jack Nicholson, in part because Nicholson was so well known
for his role in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, in which he plays a patient at a mental
hospital.
This, King thinks, gives away the game by basically telling viewers that Jack will go
crazy.
In fact, King argues that Jack is unhinged from the first moment we see him, which means
he has no real character arc.
For King, the tragedy of the story is seeing an ordinary man overwhelmed by evil, and Kubrick's
adaptation loses that sense of tragedy.
Consider, though: What if this is only part of the reason?
See if you can tell who this is describing: a writer and a father of a young child, whose
issues with rage and substance abuse manifest themselves as antagonism toward that child.
If you guessed that it refers to The Shining's central character, Jack Torrance, you're correct.
If you guessed that it also refers to The Shining's author, Stephen King, at the time
of the novel's composition, you are also correct.
The Shining is a very personal work for King, and Jack Torrance is the character he most
closely identified with, even speaking about how the inspiration for the book came from
his own occasional but very real feelings of antagonism toward his own children.
"I did hurt him once, okay?
It was an accident!"
While King's Jack is an ordinary man who is driven to violence, literally transformed,
by the influence of alcohol and the evil presence in the Overlook, Kubrick says that his adaptation
is more about the evil side of humanity as a whole.
As King's criticism rightly points out, Kubrick's Jack is crazy and violent from the beginning.
The hotel just gives him an outlet.
So while King might say he doesn't like Kubrick's film for its narrative shortcomings, isn't
it possible that he also doesn't like what the movie seems to say about him as a person?
If Jack is bad from the start, what does that say about King?
One convincing line of argument about The Shining is that Jack is the only real threat
and that, indeed, there are no ghosts in the Overlook at all.
Jack's visions are the result of cabin fever and/or alcohol withdrawal, Danny's "shining"
visions are dreams, and so on.
Of course, this particular argument raises the question of who lets Jack out of the storage
room after Wendy locks him in there, but there are theories and explanations for that as
well if you want to dig into it.
If there are no ghosts in the Overlook Hotel, the only malevolent force, the only real danger,
is Jack Torrance himself and the abusive behavior toward the wife and son that he brought into
the hotel with him.
Let's look at one of the most notorious scenes in the film, the one the documentary was named
after: the ghost in Room 237.
Taking the film's narrative at face value, we see Danny lured to the room, which is thought
to be locked but is instead open.
He subsequently appears with bruising on his neck, saying a crazy woman tried to strangle
him.
Jack later investigates the room and finds the ghost of a naked woman who is at first
attractive to him but then turns into an old crone with rotting flesh.
He then tells Wendy he saw nothing.
"I think he did it to himself."
Okay, so: If there are no ghosts in the Overlook, who strangled Danny, and how do you explain
what Jack saw?
Filmmaker and analyst Rob Ager suggests that the answer can be found in a scene that seems
otherwise innocuous: the one in which Danny comes in for his toy truck and Jack tells
him how much he loves him.
The short version of Ager's breakdown is that this scene, which is notably scored with very
dramatic and ominous music, is cut off before we can see Jack strangling Danny for waking
him up.
Danny never goes into Room 237, and neither does Jack.
Jack's encounter with the woman in 237 is Danny having a dream that mirrors his own
frightening experience with his father.
"You did this to him, didn't you?"
Many commentators, especially those who espouse the "no ghosts" theory, have noted that in
every scene in which Jack encounters a ghost, there is a mirror present, or in the case
of the storeroom, a polished metal door, and that Jack is always facing them.
From one perspective, this could simply mean that Jack is literally seeing things, misinterpreting
a reflection as something else.
On a more symbolic level, it's a reflection of that evil side Kubrick sees in humanity.
But the fact is that duality and reflection are everywhere throughout the film, from the
REDRUM written on the wall to the Grady twins to the second Jack in the photo at the end,
and so on.
Doubles are everywhere in The Shining.
An exceptional essay from Catapult goes into how the motif of doubles plays into the theory
of the uncanny, the idea of taking something familiar and twisting it just enough to make
it unsettling.
The Shining is all about ambiguity and doubt, and this sense of uncertainty and unease is
the same as that felt by victims of abuse.
The power dynamics of an abusive relationship are partly based on causing one's victims
to doubt their instincts, creating false senses of security through doubt and gaslighting,
turning a home into a place of insecurity and terror, as Jack does to Wendy and Danny,
and, indeed, as the movie does to its viewers.
One of the most discussed shots in the film comes at the very end, after Jack has frozen
to death and Wendy and Danny have escaped, when the camera slowly zooms in on a photograph
from a July 4th party from 1921, which clearly shows Jack among the revelers in the ballroom.
Kubrick has said in no uncertain terms before that this, quote, "suggests a reincarnation"
for Jack Torrance.
"Been away, but now I'm back."
"Good evening, Mr. Torrance.
It's good to see you."
"It's good to be back, Lloyd."
The idea of reincarnation is not isolated to Jack.
There's also the implication that Charles Grady, the previous caretaker of the Overlook
who murdered his family, is the reincarnation of Delbert Grady, the butler who tells Jack
that he's always been the caretaker.
The idea of reincarnation not only reinforces the motif of doubles seen throughout the film,
it also bears the symbolic weight of the cycle of abuse.
Violence is often, but by no means always, passed down from one generation to the next,
as our parents and others close to us are the ones who teach us how to behave and interact
with others, even if only subconsciously.
Somewhat ironically, the novel version of The Shining gives even more focus to the idea
of the cycle of violent abuse by giving the story of Jack's father, himself a belligerent
drunk who abused Jack.
While Jack's father does not appear and is not mentioned in the film, Rob Ager argues
that it is actually him talking to the bartender about accidentally hurting his son.
Nevertheless, the film makes it clear that the history of violence at the Overlook goes
back generations, literally to its foundation on stolen Native land.
Violence begets violence, and the fact that Kubrick decided to leave the Overlook standing
at the end, as opposed to King, who blew it up, lingering on the haunting image of former-life
Jack, hints strongly at the immortality of evil.
While it seems at the end that Wendy and Danny have escaped Jack, and metaphorically the
cycle of abuse, the track record at the Overlook seems to indicate that the lure of evil is
hard to resist.
While deluges of blood and ghostly twins are pretty spooky images, the idea that each of
us plays host to potential violence is a much more haunting idea.
While constantly working to restrain our darker impulses may seem like it will make us dull
boys, consider how it worked out for Jack.
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