This week I chose to watch The Shining, for most of my life Steven King has been one of my favorite authors and that has not changed. There have been many novels written by Steven King that have since been made into movies, and one that I have always been interested in watching was The Shining. This movie I think for me is most known for the seen after jack chops in a door in the hotel in which you can hear his saying in a sing-song voice “here’s Johnny” and so for me knowing that this scene is so widely known and accepted for an act of craziness it pushed  me off of watching this movie before now because its to “main stream” and everyone in the world knows about this movie.

Another one of the more iconic scenes for the movie is when Danny is riding his bicycle around the hotel and he comes face to face with 2 little girls who tell him “come play with me” we can tell from the scene that Danny is quite scared of what these little girls may be up to since Jack’s family is supposed to be in the hotel alone. We know that after the family first gets to the hotel Danny is seen telling one of the workers of the hotel that he sees “flashes” that may actually come true, so if we follow the fact that Danny can see things that may or may not be there it makes us wonder if these girls would be safe o even if they are alive.

When Stanley Kubrick was first writing the screen play for The Shining, he had his own personal copy of the novel which he was able to write his own notes on and to be able to map out the way that he wanted the movie to come off, Kubrick writes in his notes “Maybe just like their [sic] are people who can shine, maybe there are places that are special. Maybe it has to do with what happened in them or where they were built.” This is said about the cook, Dick Halloran whom shares his own telepathic ability similar to Danny’s. We can not be sure of what Kubrick was intending when he wrote this passage however we get frightening looks into Danny’s ability throughout the movie, such as when Danny tells his father that he is worried that Jack will hurt him and his mother. We as well see Jack waking from what he calls a horrible nightmare in which he claims to have dreamt about hurting them. So maybe it is the fear in which Danny feels regarding his “shine” that makes it possible for him to hold on to it, or maybe it is just that he is still young and can see his shine as an imaginary friend instead. I can spend all day thinking about the reasons that Danny and Dick have their shine however the fact is they just do. There may not even be a reason they have it, but maybe one day we will be lucky enough to get more answers.

Roger Ebert writes “Who is the reliable observer? Whose idea of events can we trust? In the opening scene at a job interview, the characters seem reliable enough,” this is in reference to Jack’s job interview for the job involving the hotel and while it appears that jack is a responsible and nice enough guy we are later shown a scene in which Wendy tells someone about the fact that while drunk and angry Jack dislocated Danny’s shoulder and that even though he was drunk he really did not mean it and that Jack would never hurt anyone on purpose. We see two sides of jack through the movie as he starts out nice and appears to only want what is best for his family however we soon see that as he spends more time in the hotel he gets much meaner, yelling at Danny and Wendy for interrupting him while he is writing or telling Wendy not to come back if he is typing and then changing it to do not come into the room if he is even in there at all because it will distract him and he will not be able to get any work done and it will be her fault. So is it Jack that is unreliable by himself or is it the house that drives him to be hostile, for me, I lean a lot more that it is Jack himself that is the problem, he gets angry easily and his anger mixing with his drinking turns him violent even though he would normally never do such a thing.

“The director’s horror masterpiece deserves its cult status, but now after its motifs have been quoted endlessly for years, its thrills have worn thin.” This was written by Anne Billson and is the exact reason that I have waited for so long to watch it, I thought that I had seen every scene there was in the movie in one way or another, or that I had heard every line and that this movie wouldn’t be able to give me anything to look forward to. This thought was the only reason I refused to watch this movie for years. However, I am happy to say that after watching this movie for the first time’ I really loved it. There was a mix of passion in the movie from the actors that made the horror movies of the earlier times actually worth watching. This movie was made in a time that the acting had to be better then the special affects are, and this movie does that. She goes on to say “I became fed up with the ubiquity of the film’s tropes, the endless quotation and recycling, and started seeing its flaws again, particularly Kubrick’s contempt for his characters and his cruelty to women (you can see him bullying Duvall in the making-of documentary) and the underlying sense of an A-list director slumming it in a genre he essentially despises.” There are underlying scenes from the movie that make it appear as if this was a “back burner” project, spending so much time building up the tensions with Danny riding his bike through the hallways and watching Dick make the trip from Florida just to have him die, and having Jack and Danny run though the maze before Danny makes it out alive all just seem to be wasting time until the movie can end. But overall I would have to say that this movie exceeded my expectations, it was more detail and more horror then I had previously thought.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CMbI7DmLCNI&list=PL0FF36A84512D5EEF

https://mymodernmet.com/the-shining-stanley-kubrick-personal-notes/

https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/great-movie-the-shining-1980

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2016/oct/27/stanley-kubrick-shining-stephen-king