The horror genre is one of the most polarizing and perplexing of the last quarter century, and for many, the first horror film to come to mind is “The Shining.” Few can deny the cultural and historical impact that “The Shining” has had not only on the genre, but on the film industry as a whole. While original author Stephen King has called it “a big, beautiful Cadillac with no engine inside,” how has the film become one of the indisputable cult classics on the 1980’s (Jagernauth, 2006)?

“The Shining” was, shockingly, poorly received when it was first released in 1980. Interested theatergoers typically fell into one of two categories: fans of the iconic Stephen King book of the same name or fans of the horror genre, and neither group came out particularly pleased with the results. For book fans, they were dismayed to find that the film had edited out some of the most iconic parts of the book. No longer did the film end with the hotel burning down or hedge animals coming out to haunt the characters. Instead, they were replaced by a family that was inherently dull and a story that ended completely differently, as Director Stan Kubrick believed that it would be “a cliché to just blow everything up (Nickalls, 2017).” For the other interested party, “The Shining” broke many of the norms that people had come to associate with the horror genre and not in a way that they found to be pleasing. To film critic Aaron Pruner, it was as though the film wore a “mask” that was unveiled as the story progressed, as the audience watches an alcoholic school teacher in Jack Nicholson unravel into a homicidal maniac (Pruner, N/A). Pruner argued that there an intellectual component that was unprecedented in horror films, probably due in large part to the fact that Kubrick was not a fan of the genre on the whole. So while everything points to the film being considered “conventional” by modern day standards, it challenged the norms and stereotypes that can now be considered common in today’s mindsight.

The cultural impact that the film had on the genre is unquestionable, but something that few casual fans are aware of was how technologically advanced the film was for its time. The Steadicam, now a mainstay in almost all movie filming, was invented by Garrett Brown in 1975 with the goal of allowing for a smooth shot when the operator was moving. Kurbick was so impressed by the invention that Brown was asked to do the filming for the movie, something that Brown considered an honor. Filming the movie posed many challenges, and Brown credited it with being the film where he “really learned to control the damn thing (Konow, 2013).” To Brown, it “was an opportunity to bear down on technique that you wouldn’t find anywhere else,” and many of the lessons that he learned through filming The Shining were instituted throughout the industry. This method of filming was one of the major reasons that The Shining stands out, especially in iconic scenes such as when young Danny is riding his bicycle through the hotel and when the actors are going through the maze. While these scenes would have been normally notably choppy in previous attempts, the Steadicam made them visually smooth and generally more pleasing to the eye.

While the film received generally negative reviews, one particular review caught my eye in my research. Originally published in the New York Daily News, where critic Ernest Leogrande does little to hide his disdain for the film. As he describes the initial scene, he adds one particularly biting comment:

“The camera veers out away from the car toward the horizon as if to bear down on something significant… and then comes back to the car. The movement is a sort of portent for the direction of the movie, which takes two and a half hours to go nowhere (Leogrande, 1980).”

While I would definitely not say that I am a fan of the genre, let alone one of the most iconic representations of it, I found myself taken aback by the comments. They seemed excessively harsh, with little appreciation for the film as a whole. Comparing the film to other horror films of the time such as “Dr. Strange” and “Lolita,” Leogrande argued that it was “painful to see it produce so little and such a sorry contrast” for its peers. While I am unsure they knew it at the time, I would argue that the fact that it was such a contrast was the whole point of the film itself. No one had tackled horror the way that Stan Kurbick was attempting, and he was intentional about trying to put his own spin on the genre. The film did not want to fit the mold on these other films, so they set out to break out the norms that Leogrande seems to be particularly fond of. Revolutionary films tend to be inherently polarizing, so I am more interested in seeing the long-term effects of the film, such as how it affected current films and directors, than what one person felt on it’s initial release.