The Shining

Released: 1980
Horror
Starring: Jack Nicholson, Shelley Duvall, Danny Lloyd
Director: Stanley Kubrick
Running Time: 142 intensely scary minutes
Rated: R for nudity, language, violence

The breakdown:  A family moves into an old hotel isolated in the snowy mountains.  The father was offered the job of watching over the hotel while all the guests and employees leave over the winter season as it is impossible to reach by any means.  He figures it would be good for him to write a novel there, but the hotel has other plans for him.


One of the most scary films I have ever seen!  I saw this version first and then read the Stephen King novel afterwards.  The two definitely are very different stories, but I like both.  If you like Stephen King or this movie, you've probably heard how much Stephen did NOT like this movie.  So much so that in 1997 he did his own miniseries on television.  We can talk more about this at the end.  On to the movie!
So Nicholson made this role iconic and I don't know if he's more known for any other role than this (maybe the joker in the Michael Keaton Batman movies or One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest), but I think this is the best he's ever been. 

WARNING!  I'm talking about plot in great detail and if you've never seen this movie, you should!  And if you want to see it in the future, do NOT read any further as I will probably ruin it for you.

So, Nicholson plays this father (named Jack, easy to remember) who's trying to take care of his family best he can and is struggling to make a good living, he used to be a school teacher, but he has a problem with alcohol (book and film differ a lot here).  He gets what he thinks is a great opportunity to be an off-season hotel caretaker for the Overlook Hotel.  Of course, it's over the cold snowy winter (6 months!) and the hotel shuts down since the roads are impassable during that time of year, but the father decides to bring along his family and wants the quiet and solitude to focus on his new career of writing a book.  It just so happens this hotel was built on top of an old Indian burial ground.  The Overlook Hotel has a name that's significant and meaningful here.  One could say that the hotel overlooked (in the worst possible way) the people that it was built upon; during construction in the early 1900's they had to fight off some Native American attacks.  Jack is warned that a previous caretaker got cabin fever and killed himself and his whole family during his time there.  Jack is not deterred at all.  His son Danny (character name and real name) has ESP and has a bad vision about the upcoming stay at the hotel.  He has an imaginary friend named Tony that "speaks" through Danny's finger.  Danny sees the hotel lobby.  The elevator doors open and a flood of bright red blood cascades out all over the floor.  He usually goes into a trance like state when these visions occur. 
Jack's wife, Wendy is (I think) splendidly played by Shelley Duvall (depends on how you look at it, we'll discuss more later).  Anyways, Wendy tells Danny's doctor (who's checking over Danny for his "weird episodes and imaginary friend") that her husband has recently given up drinking after hurting their son on a night of binge drinking.  The doctor says Danny is probably just under emotional stress, nothing is really wrong with him.  So things are looking up for the family, so it seems.

They arrive at the hotel on it's closing day when the sun is still shining and the blue sky is cloudless.  The hotel is HUGE and looks amazing to stay at.  (I love the old 70's style interior design of the place with touches of Native American here and there.)  The family gets a tour and is introduced to the chef (played by Scatman Crothers, I love him!) Dick Hallorann.  Hallorann shows he has the gift of ESP too by calling Danny the nickname his family uses, Doc.  The chef offers Danny some ice cream without speaking, i.e. telepathically, but the chef calls it "shining".  Danny and the chef have a private conversation over ice cream about the hotel.  Danny is aware of room 237 through his "shining" and asks if there is anything to be afraid of in the hotel, but particularly about room 237.  The chef tells him the hotel has many memories in it, but some are bad ones.  He also says the whole hotel has a "shine" to it, but make sure Danny stays out of room 237.  I love Scatman Crothers, he's so like a warm grandpa type in this film, it's hard not to like him.
So a month passes, things are fine.  Jack's book is not coming along though, he's a bit frustrated.  Danny and his mom explore the hedge maze that is out in the front of the hotel grounds.  It's huge and looks easy to get lost in.  Days pass.  Wendy's concerned that she can't get through on the phone lines (because of heavy snow fall recently) but she does have a two-way radio with the U.S. Fire Service to check in with.  They confirm the lines are down, but that that's normal during this time of year.  Danny has more frightening visions of the hotel.  His curiosity gets the best of him as he's wheeling down the hallway on his bigwheel toy near room 237.  He looks at the door and tries to decide whether to go in or not.  He tries the doorknob, but it is locked.  He rides his bigwheel around the hotel often and on another go around later of the same floor, he stops where twin little girls are blocking his way.  They ask him to play with them, but he has a vision of their bloody death and covers his eyes with his hands.  He remembers what Hallorann told him, if he sees things here, they are just like pictures in a book.  They are not real.  Meanwhile, Jack is getting more and more frustrated and begins to have emotional outbursts that lean towards the violent side. 
Danny is lured by a tennis ball that rolls towards him in the hallway where room 237 is.  This time, the door is standing open and Danny goes in. 
Later when Wendy sees Danny again, he's visibly shaken and upset and she accuses her husband of abusing their son.  Jack needs to get away.  He goes into the Gold Room which is a ballroom and sees no one at first.  He sits at the empty bar and says out loud, he'd give his soul for a glass of beer.  Just then he slips back in time (maybe), many decades into the hotel's history and deeper into his own madness.  All of a sudden a bartender is there in front of him....a ghostly bartender named Lloyd.  Lloyd serves Jack a drink and Jack tells the bartender all about the problems he's having with his family.  At this point Jack thinks nothing is wrong with him having a drink and conversation with a person who either really isn't there or is a ghost.  Jack is starting to lose it (though one can argue that the character at the beginning of the movie was a bit crazy already).  It could also be argued that Jack raised the bartender if he has a "shining" gift like his son also has.  Danny might have inherited his father's gift.
Wendy is running towards Jack at the bar all of a sudden and the bartender and all the alcohol disappear.  She says Danny said a woman in room 237 was responsible for his injuries.  She believes someone else is in the hotel with them.  Jack still seems drunk when he speaks, telling his wife he will go look, but he thinks she's out of her mind (a bit ironic). 
In Florida, the chef has a terribly bad feeling (possibly a telepathic message from Danny) that something is going wrong in the hotel in Colorado and immediately calls the hotel with no response.  He then calls the fire service and cannot reach them.  Then he catches a flight to Colorado and borrows a Sno-cat to get to the hotel.  These scenes are cut into the movie bit by bit over time showing his frantic pace to try to help the family, but it does take him a while to reach the hotel.  At this point in the movie he has not arrived yet.  We will see him later when he does get there.
Meanwhile back at the hotel, Jack investigates room 237.  He opens the bathroom door inside the room and sees a pretty naked woman in the tub.  He's intrigued as she gets up and moves towards him.   She stops in front of him and begins seducing him and he's happy to be seduced.  He lets her run her hands over his chest and neck and then he kisses her.  But as he looks at the reflection of them in the mirror over her shoulder, he sees something much different.  She's a partially decomposed corpse and wrinkled old hag.  He's shocked and revolted.  She begins laughing at his willingness to cheat on his wife with a dead lover, or the hotel is just messing with him to see if it can.  He's now back peddling out of the room and we see what Danny saw earlier.  A floating bloated cadaver in the tub rises and starts walking towards Jack with her arms held out in front of her.  He flees from the room, the heart of the evil spirits of the Overlook, and locks the door behind him. 

Jack tells Wendy he didn't see anything in the room.  They argue about whether they should stay or not to get their son to a better place.  Danny's ESP kicks in while he is sleeping in another room.  He goes into a trance and hears his parents conversation.  He sees the word REdrUM scrawled across a door in red.  Jack is raging and storms out of the little apartment to get away from his wife who he thinks is trying to screw his job up.

Jack returns to the Gold Room, but now there's a big party going on with many people in the 1920's.  Jack forgets his anger and moves deeper into the room.  Jack sees Lloyd again and gets a drink.  Jack walks around but bumps into a waiter and has alcohol spilled all over his shirt.  Then he is in the bathroom with the same waiter whose name is Grady.  Jack remembers this to be the name of the previous caretaker that killed his whole family.  Jack asks some questions of Grady, but he denies that anyone but Jack has ever been the caretaker.  Though Grady does fit the description to a tee with a wife and two daughters and Jack saw a picture of him in the hotel, so the denial is a bit confusing.  Grady insists that Jack has always been at the Overlook (meaning forever in one way or another) just as Grady himself has always been there.  Grady also warns Jack (in a very overtly racist way) that Danny is trying to bring an outsider into the hotel (Hallorann).  Grady tells Jack he needs to protect the hotel and correct his family.  It's possible through this conversation that Grady is indeed who Jack believes him to be.  A murdering former caretaker who "corrected his family" when they stood in the way of his duty to the hotel.  If Jack really does have the ESP gift like his son, or maybe just a demented crazy mind, he might project another facet of his personality upon this Grady image, and be talking to himself, or it could just be a ghost that senses Jack losing his mind and gives him a little extra nudge over the edge.

Danny has an episode where he keeps saying redrum and refers to himself as Tony.  Wendy is very concerned and starts looking for Jack though she brings a baseball bat.  Only because she's not sure what he will say if she tells him she's taking Danny away in the Sno-cat alone if he won't come with them.  Jack a long time ago, forbid her from coming into his work area saying that she was disturbing his work.  She slowly approaches this area afraid she will find him and upset him again.  She can't see him, but comes upon his typewriter and sees something very disturbing.  He's only written "all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy" over and over again on what must be hundreds of pages.  She is terrified of what her husband has become. 

Jack sneaks up behind her and asks her how she likes it?  She's terrified but tells him what's going on with Danny.  She wants to take him to a doctor, but Jack says she wants him to leave his responsibility to the hotel behind.   He talks at her backing her up onto the stairs and she starts swinging the bat.  He tells her he's not going to hurt her, just bash her brains in.  Before he can hurt her, she knocks him out with a good solid connection from the baseball bat and drags him into the kitchen.  She locks him in the pantry, and he tries several different ways to convince her to open the door.  She refuses and tells him what she's going to do.  She wants to get the Sno-cat and drive her and her son to the closest city, Sidewinder.  Jack tells her she's in for a nasty surprise, that she should go look at the Sno-cat and the radio.
She runs to the radio and sees it's been destroyed and checks the Sno-cat in the shed and sees wires pulled out and running everywhere.  She realizes, she's stuck there with her now insane husband.  Jack asleep in the pantry is awoken by Grady's voice outside the door.  He's telling Jack the others and Grady do not think his heart is in protecting the hotel.  Grady says Jack will have to take care of the threat to the hotel in the "harshest possible way".  Jack promises if he's given one more chance he will take care of his family for the hotel.
The evil spirits at the hotel open the pantry door for Jack and he's out and he's very angry and incredibly dangerous.

Danny back in the apartment (what you could call the quarters where an employee lives at the hotel I guess) has taken red lipstick and written "redrum" on the bathroom door.  Wendy wakes up (she was sleeping somehow?) and sees this reflection in the mirror.  It reads murder.  At that moment, Jack takes an axe to the front door of their apartment looking to murder his wife and child.  Danny and Wendy go into the bathroom and Danny is small enough to slip out the window into the snow, but Wendy won't fit.  Jack bursts through the closed front door and is on his way to the bathroom now.  Wendy watches terrified as Jack's axe blade comes pounding through the door one chop at a time.  She has a butcher knife in her hands unsure of what's going to happen.  In the most famous scene of the movie, Jack pushes his face through the hole his axe has made in the door and he says, "Hereeeee's Johnny!"
She hits his hand with the blade of her knife when Jack tries to reach the door handle.  All of a sudden there's Hallorann outside with his Sno-cat arriving to save the day, or at least try.  Danny meanwhile, has run into a large metal storage cabinet inside the hotel.  Jack runs towards the front lobby to take care of the outsider that has finally arrived due to his son's meddling.  Hallorann is asking if anyone's there and Jack jumps out from his hiding spot and puts his axe blade into Hallorann's chest, leaving him on the lobby floor to die.  Danny screams out, but now Jack knows where to find his son.  Danny runs out of the cabinet with his father following behind still with the axe.
Wendy meanwhile is upstairs frantically looking for Danny.  She hears chanting and opens a random hotel room door and sees a man in a dog costume hovering over another fully formally dressed man on his bed.  Their sex act is interrupted as they look up at Wendy.  This might mean that the ghosts are getting stronger and could appear to anyone, or Wendy even might have a slight gift of "shining" as well.  She runs down into the lobby and sees Hallorann's body and also sees the same vision her son saw at first of the lobby elevator doors opening and a wave of blood rush into the lobby.
Outside, Jack is following his son's footprints left in the snow out into the hedge maze.  Danny has used an old trick though and double backed on his footprints escaping the maze and leaving his father behind.  He finds his mother and falls into her embrace.  He is now Danny again and not Tony.  They find Hallorann's Sno-cat and escape the hotel and Jack.  The next morning Jack is shown dead and frozen in the snow still lost in the maze.
The last shot of the movie is focusing in on a picture of a large party at the hotel in 1921.  At the center bottom of the picture you see Jack dressed in a tuxedo smiling devilishly.

I give the movie 5 out of 5 standing alone without comparing it to the novel.  It's a great intense, scary movie that is a horror classic without using old tried and true tricks like cobwebs, and darkness.  It's not easy to make a terrifying movie using extra bright light bulbs and full sun if you think about it.  One of few scary movies I can think of that isn't darkness or night all the time.



There is a pretty long list of things to talk about in this film.  All sorts of differences between the novel and the film (or even if you can compare the 2 considering they are so different from each other.)
Stephen King's dislike over the film.
Whether there are ghosts in the hotel or whether it's just a man going mad.  Is it reincarnation or just different personalities?
I've read that people say Stanley Kubrick always wanted to make a holocaust film, but it never quite worked out and that a thread of the holocaust works its way into all of his projects.  With this movie, some say that the Native American furnishings, patterns, the hotel being built on top of a Native American burial ground and other little touches throughout the movie reference Kubrick's belief that the Native American went through something similar to the holocaust.
I feel bad for the actors during the filming process though.  Sounds like from the behind the scenes documentary for the film on the DVD has Kubrick being pretty brutal on them.  He made them do take after take after take to get them to a tired, frustrated place to film the scene the way he wanted.  Poor Shelley Duvall took the worst of it though.  He apparently, had more lines for her character, but didn't like the way she did them so they were cut.  This makes her character quiet, and a lot more meek to the observer.  I thought she did a great job of being terrified though I don't know if that's due to Kubrick's picking on her, or her natural acting ability.
So the differences between the book and the movie.  These are very big differences and I suppose a lot of die hard King fans do not like this movie version.  You could argue they are two different stories.  In King's book the man is completely stable and sane, but a terrible alcoholic (King himself was a self-proclaimed alcoholic at the time of writing the book) who broke his son's arm and then quit drinking.  In the book, Jack had a terrible problem with authority and rebelled against it as much as possible.  In the movie, Jack's alcoholism is only barely mentioned and the authority thing is mostly dropped.  As well, in the movie, Jack's character is a bit loopy to begin with so him going crazy isn't as unlikely as it is in the book.  Also in the book, Jack's character doesn't die in a snowy hedge maze, he blows up with the hotel due to the boiler reaching a critical uncorrected pressure and he lets his family get away in a moment of total sanity.  Jack's character redeems himself a little at the end of the book, while in the movie, he goes off the deep end and stays there.  In fact, they only briefly mention the boiler in the movie, but in the book it's a huge part of the story.  Like I said, at the end of the book, the boiler gets too much pressure built up and it causes a huge explosion that destroys the hotel.  That was part of Jack's job at the hotel, to watch this boiler that needed fixing, but it wasn't due to get done until after the winter season.  It was down in the basement and Jack would go down there and have some alone time.  He also didn't have writer's block in the book, when he went down to the basement once, he found a hotel scrapbook of all the good and bad events that had centered around the hotel.  This gave Jack a ton of ideas for his book, so that was very different from the movie. 
In fact, I don't think you could say the movie was based on the novel really, it's more like a movie inspired by the book.  In addition one of the really scary moments in the book was never in the movie.  Due to special effects not being sufficient in 1980 they didn't even attempt it.  Out front of the hotel, they had a hedge menagerie of animals that were pretty big.  Danny was out playing by himself one day and a tiger began stalking him, but the boy never saw it move, he just kept looking and it would be in a different place.  When reading the book, this was a great scene, but replaced with the hedge maze in the movie.
The biggest difference is what makes the stories so very different.  In the book, it was clear the hotel had a supernatural power over Jack.  Things, bad things, happened there and the hotel kept all the bad energy and spirits there.  This bad energy made Jack go crazy in the book.  It really got a hold of him and there was no chance it was cabin fever or a mental instability that had already existed in him.
In the movie, it's more psychological and motivations are more debatable.  In the film, the hotel is built on a burial ground (bad idea if you want good energy at your hotel) but this isn't the case with the novel.  The movie version of Jack seems a bit weak minded and unstable from the beginning so being in an isolated place in the dead of winter with only a couple people around makes his path to insanity seem a bit easier.  He does almost exclusively only talk to ghosts when he's facing a mirror or a highly polished surface so you could say he's really just talking to himself.  These "ghosts" are just a manifestation of a highly unstable part of him that's always been within him pushing him to do bad things.  The only time that this logic fails is when he's stuck in the pantry and he cannot open the door himself.  It's bolted from the outside and there is no other explanation then the spirits, real ghosts of the hotel, let him out.  Some say Kubrick didn't want all the puzzle pieces to fit together in this movie, which they don't, and that he wanted some stuff to be fuzzy or not entirely make sense.  This would be one of those instances, because I think the movie really pushes you to believe Jack has always been a bit unstable and the environment and stress kinda' just push him over, not really a power the hotel has over him supernaturally.  I read that someone said the movie shows us that any human is capable of insanity and murder.  The book is supernatural, the movie is human psyche. 
There's also the debate of how Jack could "always be the caretaker" according to Grady in the bathroom.  Reincarnation?  A different version of himself only later?  The picture at the end is the most compelling evidence of this.  A picture taken of someone who looks like him in 1921 and the year this movie is supposed to take place in 1980.  I vote for reincarnation though I don't have a lot to back up that belief.  It is interesting to think about how the hotel seems to want caretakers to kill their children.  This would be the next generation in their own family trees.  Perhaps the hotel doesn't like children?  Maybe it's selfish and only wants the caretakers to be there for itself and no one else?

So personally, myself, I think the movie is excellent for a man's decent into madness, though his path to get there is not exactly clear, no matter how many times you see the movie.  It's a fantastic scary trip into the human mind and it stays with you.  Everyone who's seen the movie remembers it. 
The book is a great ghost story, showing how a spooky place can get into your soul and make you do whatever it wants you to do for it.  Even the most stable, sane person can be possessed by evil spirits.  Even the most rational loving man (or woman) can change into a murderer.  I'll have to reread the book now, but I will make a separate post for it somewhere along the way. 
In a separate note:
I have to say the "remade" King miniseries version of his book is of course, true to the book, but unintentionally funny sometimes.  Certainly not good if you're looking to scare an audience.  Although, I'm usually on Stephen King's side for a lot of things, I really love the 1980 movie version and the book version on their own.  The miniseries was a good way to visualize his book, but if you want to know the story, you should always read the book.  The miniseries I can't really recommend.