The Shining is one of the few horror movies that still scares me.

I say this despite the fact that I’ve lost track of the number of times that I’ve watched Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 adaptation of Stephen King’s third novel.  It’s a film that I watch nearly every October and it’s a film that I’ve pretty much memorized.  Whenever I watch the film, I do so with the knowledge that Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson), the caretaker of the Overlook Hotel, is eventually going to start talking to ghosts and he’s going to try to kill his wife Wendy (Shelley Duvall) and his son, Danny (Danny Lloyd).  Whenever I watch this film, I know what Jack is going to find Room 237.  I know about the blood pouring out the elevator like the Tampax commercial from Hell.  I know what Danny means when he says, “Redrum….”  I know about the twins and their request of “Come play with us, Danny.”  And, of course, I know about the film’s famous ending.

Whenever I start watching this film, I know everything that is going to happen.  And yet, as soon as I hear the booming beat of of Wendy Carlos’s theme music and I see the overhead shot of the mountain roads leading to the Overlook Hotel, I start to feel uneasy.  Whenever Barry Nelson (played the hotel’s general manager) starts to blandly explain that a previous caretaker got cabin fever and chopped up his twin daughters, I smile because Nelson delivers the lines so casually.  But I also get nervous because I know Charles (or is it Delbert) Grady is going to show up later.

(Incidentally, Barry Nelson never gets enough credit for his brilliant cameo as the friendly but guarded hotel manager.  In Stephen King’s original novel, the character was a stereotypically unsympathetic middle manager, a martinet who existed largely to be told off.  In Kubrick’s film, the manager is one of the most fascinating of the supporting characters.)

I still get nervous when I see Wendy and Danny, sitting in their disturbingly sterile Colorado home while Jack interviews for the caretaker job.  Wendy smokes and Danny talks about how his imaginary friend, Tony, doesn’t want to go to the hotel.  With her unwashed her and her tentative voice, Shelley Duvall is a far cry from the book’s version of Wendy.  However, Duvall’s Wendy is also a far more compelling character, an abused woman who finds her strength when her son is put in danger.  Duvall is the perfect choice for Wendy because she seems like someone who you might see in the parking lot of your local grocery store, trying to load the bags in her car and keep an eye on her young child at the same time.  She seems real and her reactions remind us of how we would probably react if we found ourselves in the same situation.  Wendy makes the mistakes that we would all probably make but she refuses to surrender to her fear.

Why does The Shining remain so powerful and so frightening, even after repeated viewings?  Most of the credit has to go to Stanley Kubrick.  Stephen King has been very vocal about his dislike of the film, claiming that The Shining was more Kubrick’s version than his.  King has a point.  Film is a director’s medium and few directors were as brilliant as Stanley Kubrick.  (Along with The Shining, Kubrick also directed Paths of Glory, 2001, Barry Lyndon, Dr, Strangelove, Spartacus, Lolita, The Killing, A Clockwork Orange, Eyes Wife Shut, and Full Metal Jacket.  Stephen King directed Maximum Overdrive.)  From the minute we see the tracking shots that wind their way through the desolate mountains and the empty hallways of the Overlook, we know that we’re watching a Kubrick film.  Those tracking shots also put us in the same role as the spirits in the Overlook.  We’re watching and following the characters, observing and reacting to their actions without being able to interact with them.  King has complained that Kubrick’s version of The Shining offers up no hope.  But, honestly, what kind of hope can one have after discovering that ghosts are real and they want to kill you?  Once Jack Torrance finally accepts that drink from Joe Turkel’s Lloyd and meets Phillip Stone’s Grady, there is no more room for hope.  King’s book ends with the Overlook destroyed and Jack Torrance perhaps redeeming himself in his last moments.  Kubrick’s film suggests that Jack Torrance never cared enough about his family to be worthy of redemption and that the evil that infected the Overlook is never going to be destroyed.  In the end, not even the kindly presence of Scatman Crothers in the role of Dick Halloran can bring any real hope to the Overlook.

The Shining is unsettling because, more than being a ghost story, it’s a film about being tapped.  Physically, the Torrances are trapped by the blizzard.  Mentally, Jack is trapped by his addictions and his resentments.  One gets the feeling that he’s deeply jealous of Danny, viewing him as someone who came along and took away all of Wendy’s attention.  Wendy is trapped in a bad and abusive marriage and there’s something very poignant about the way Duvall both captures Wendy’s yearning for outside contact (like when she uses the radio to communicate with the local rangers station) and her hope that, if she’s just supportive enough, Jack will get his life together.  Danny’s trapped by his psychic visions and his knowledge of what’s to come.  The victims of the Overlook appear to be trapped as well.  Grady’s daughters are fated to always roam the hallways, looking for someone to play with them.  The Woman in 237 will always wait in her bathtub.  Were these spirits evil before they died or were the twisted by the Overlook?  It’s an unanswered question that sticks with you.

As I mentioned earlier, Stephen King has been very vocal about his dislike of both The Shining and its director.  (King once boasted about outliving Kubrick, a comment that showed a definite lack of class on the part of America’s most commercially successful writer.)  Why does King hate the Kubrick film with such a passion?

I have a theory.  Both King’s second novel, Salem’s Lot, and The Shining feature a writer as the man character.  In both cases, King obviously related to the main character.  Ben Mears in Salem’s Lot is charming, confident, articulate, and successful.  He’s a writer that everyone respects and he’s even well-known enough to have a file with the FBI.  Jack Torrance, on the other hand, is a struggling writer who has a drinking problem, resents authority figures (like the hotel manager), and has issues with his father.  Torrance is a much more interesting character than Ben Mears, precisely because Torrance is so flawed.  (King, and I give him full credit for this, has been open about his own struggles with substance abuse and how he brought his own experiences to the character of Jack Torrance.)  I’ve always suspected that, at the time that King wrote Salem’s Lot and The Shining, Ben Mears was King’s idealized version of himself while Jack Torrance, with all of his struggles and flaws, reflected how King actually felt about himself.  (That the Wendy Torrance of the novel is a beautiful blonde who sticks with her husband despite his drinking problem feels like a bit of wish fulfillment on the part of King.)  When Stanley Kubrick made his version of The Shining and presented Jack Torrance as essentially being a self-centered jerk who, even before arriving at the hotel, had a history of abusing his wife and son, it’s possible King took it a bit personally.  Since King had poured so much of himself into Jack Torrance, it was probably difficult to see Kubrick present the character an abusive narcissist whose great novel turned out to be literally a joke.  And so, Stephen King has spent the last 45 years talking about how much he hates Kubrick’s film.

King’s opinion aside, Kubrick’s The Shining is probably the most effective Stephen King adaptation ever made, precisely because Kubrick knew which parts of the book would work cinematically and which parts were best excised from the plot.  As opposed to later directors who often seem intimidated by King’s fame, Kubrick was able to bring his own signature style to the story.  Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining is a masterpiece and one that I look forward to revisiting this October.