The Shining

"The Shining" is one of the greatest horror movies ever made. They love it for the wrong reasons.

Mention the film to a casual fan & he'll inevitably reply, "Heeeeere's Johnny!"

This is not exactly news. A lot of people love Stanley Kubrick's 1980 adaptation of Stephen King's novel.

Ugh. That is the problem. In a great performance by Jack Nicholson, what everyone remembers is the scene where they goes way over the top.

Granted, at the time - topical "Tonight Show" reference, back when that didn't mean dissing Jay Leno, all that - it was stunning stuff. But over time, the rest of the performance has held up better.

Nicholson plays Jack Torrance, a sobered-up author with a trouble relatives life looking to set things right & get some writing done in the isolation of taking care of an giant hotel, closed for the winter. They & his wife, Wendy (Shelley Duvall), & son, Danny (Danny Lloyd), will be snowed in; in-season caretaker Dick Hallorann (Scatman Crothers) sets them up with food & supplies before taking off, leaving them alone for the winter.

Only they are not alone. Jack has regular conversations with ghosts of past employees. The isolation drove a previous winter caretaker insane, & they murdered his relatives.

Jack appears to be following the same path, as the famous scene in which Wendy discovers that his "work" while he is been there consists of "All work & no play makes Jack a dull boy" typed again & again over hundreds of pages.

But Danny has the "shining," a psychic ability that lets him see things that have happened & that will happen - & those things are not nice ("REDRUM! REDRUM!"). It is a gift they shares with Dick. Works out a little better for Danny than it does for Dick, but that is getting ahead of the story.

There's scares aplenty, but what is most effective is the creeping sense of dread & doom that Kubrick & Nicholson bring to the movie. Nicholson doesn't pop up with an axe & start chopping in the most-famous scene.

How they gets there is the nice part, slowly disintegrating in to madness. Kubrick takes his time, which is unusual for horror movies. But it is appropriate here, because Kubrick's version of "The Shining" (King was behind a 1997 TV remake) is not a horror film .It's that & so much more.