31 Days of Fright, Day 13: The Shining

Welcome to day 13 of 31 Days of Fright here at Road To The Movies! In today's episode, Gabe spends some family time with...

THE SHINING
1980
Rated R

Now, I know someone is going to call me a bad parent, but here's the thing: You have to know your kids. You have to know what they can and can't handle, what will push them in one direction or another, which influences to let in and which to keep out. Mind you, I'm not saying I've got all that nailed down. I'm just saying that you should know. Now that I think about it, maybe I am a bad parent...

If there's one thing I do know, its that - with very few exceptions - the images we conjure regarding horror movies are far worse than what's actually in the movies. In my son's case especially. He has a very active, very graphic imagination. So when he told me he wanted to watch The Shining, I said okay.

The iconography of The Shining is powerful stuff. Jack Nicholson's glare as he stares out the window is enough to give even a seasoned horror vet like myself goosebumps. His demonically grinning face sandwiched between the shattered boards of the bathroom door as he delivers one of the most quoted lines in horror history - Heeeere's Johnny! - is the stuff of nightmares. This is the imagery that congeals in the mind of a child into the skin of a story far more graphic and horrifying than almost anything Hollywood has yet put onscreen. I don't want to subject my son to that out of some misguided attempt to protect him. So we watched it.

I hadn't watched The Shining in a few years, and had forgotten how effective some of the scenes are. It's a Stanley Kubrick film, so obviously it's going to be expertly made, but the method of cutting sharply and quickly away to shots of a screaming Danny - Nicholson's son in the movies, and the child with the titular "shining", or psychic powers - turns scenes that could easily come across as inflated and over-the-top into genuinely shocking, self-contained nightmares. This, I'm sure, was Kubrick's intent. His confidence as a filmmaker positively drips off of every scene.

What was interesting about watching it with a fourteen year-old - and what added an inadvertent level of comedy to the experience - was the fact that Jack's signature line will make absolutely no sense to an audience that doesn't remember Johnny Carson. During the height of tension, as Jack is reaching through the door, my son turns to me and says, "Dad, who's Johnny?"

In the moment, all I could think to say was, "I'll tell you later, son." Now he probably thinks it has something to do with sex.

After it was all over and final credits had rolled, my son told me that - though he didn't think the movie was scary - he thought it was a very interesting story, and that he would have to think about it long and hard before he felt he'd be able to fully understand everything that was going on in that hotel. I don't fully agree. Though there is a lot going on, on a cerebral level, there are some genuinely frightening moments in this movie, and the overall tone and pacing are so consistent and handled so well that the looming sense of dread is present from the first frame to the last, and linger well after the fact.

The movie isn't perfect. Jack's transformation from loving husband to (SPOILER ALERT) ax-wielding maniac just isn't natural enough for me to endorse it, and Shelly Duvall's performance as his wife takes frequent dips in the schlock end of the pool, but the sheer, brazen certainty of Kubrick's directorial hand, and Nicholson's unforgettable performance (I'd swear his face was sculpted by God with this movie in mind) more than make up for these lapses, and secure The Shining an irrevocable position - for me, at least - in the pantheon of horror greatness.

9/10

-GABE


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