The Shining
There’s hardly anything more simultaneously iconic and nightmarish than Jack Nicholson in The Shining when he takes an ax to the bathroom door, tears a hole in it in a savage frenzy and wildly wails: “Here’s Johnny!”
I was probably 11 or 12 years old when I first saw Stanley Kubrick’s classic adaptation of the Stephen King novel. I stumbled upon it playing on one of those cable movie channels on a Saturday afternoon. I didn’t know what it was, but regardless, I was terrified. It wasn’t the first — or last — scary movie I had ever seen, but to this day, it’s certainly the only one to keep me from sleeping, still wound up long after the credits rolled. I remember fearing a pair of ghoulish identical twins would be waiting for me to play with them “forever and ever” each time I turned a corner.
After a few days, when I seemed to have finally recovered, I resolved that I never needed to see the film again — that is, until now. Here’s how it went the second time around:
– Immediately, I got chills from the haunting score alone. It was especially jarring when juxtaposed with a car cruising along a scenic mountain landscape in summertime. Nothing frightening had actually happened, and yet I was suddenly very aware of the fact that all of my roommates were out and I was alone in my apartment.
– Only 15 minutes in, the hotel manager tells Jack the story of a former caretaker with cabin fever who murdered his family. It’s some pretty heavy-handed foreshadowing of what’s to come. While this would cripple any other film, here it only had me on the edge of my seat, anticipating Jack’s inevitable downfall.
– I forgot I had decided to do a load of laundry before I started the movie. The sound of the washer when the cycle ended made me jump about a foot off of the couch.
– The excessive gore that plagues today’s horror movies is notably absent from The Shining (unless you count the recurring scene in which blood pours out of an elevator into the lobby, although it serves a symbolic purpose more than anything). In a mildly sadistic way, I liked this — instead of hiding behind my hands and missing pivotal moments, I was transfixed despite my terror.
– One of my roommates returned from class, and the sound of the door opening made me jump again.
– Throughout the film, I realized several aspects of King’s novel are changed or even abandoned altogether. Perhaps the strangest are the parts of the original source material kept without their original context — like the seeming bestiality Wendy witnesses between ghostly hotel guests. Somehow, I found the unexplained nature of such scenes making everything all the more eerie.
– The room had gone dark as the sun set (I’d forgotten this movie is nearly two-and-a-half hours long). I quickly ran to turn on all the lights in each room.
– The anticipation I had been riding for the past two hours finally came to an adrenaline-rushing climax. It was sudden and violent and perfectly chilling. The final scene faded to black, and I made a mental note never to go inside a hedge maze as long as I live.
The verdict? Despite being older and having seen the film once before, The Shining remains the same: It’s the scariest movie I have ever seen and likely ever will.
