Ghost Movies
The Shining
Release Date: 1980-06-05
Runtime: 143
User Rating: 5
Rated 5 times.
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The
Shining (1980) is a film by Stanley Kubrick based on the novel of the
same title by Stephen King. The film stars Jack Nicholson as frustrated
writer Jack Torrance and Shelley Duvall as his wife Wendy. Although it
can be seen as a horror film, The Shining defies many of the
conventions of the genre.
The film features the first extensive use of the Steadicam to create long and elaborate tracking shots.
Synopsis
Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.
The new job
We are introduced to Jack Torrance, driving up to the Overlook Hotel in
the mountains of Colorado, to be interviewed for the position of
caretaker for the winter, where the snows often completely block the
path to the hotel and make it inaccessible. Jack sees this as an
opportunity to start off a writing career. However, the manager informs
Jack about the previous caretaker, Charles Grady, who killed his wife
and two daughters, cutting them into pieces. Jack, however, seems
unfazed by this, saying his wife, Wendy, is "a confirmed ghost story
and horror film addict."
At home, Wendy asks Danny, their son, whether he is excited to go to
the Overlook for the winter. We are introduced to Tony, "the little boy
who lives in [Danny's] mouth," who speaks through Danny, accompanied
with a change in voice and a wiggling of Danny's finger. "No he ain't,
Mrs. Torrance," Tony says. Wendy tries to cheer him up, saying that it
will be fun, but he is not shifted.
Later, in the bathroom, Danny asks Tony what the problem with the
Overlook is. Tony is reluctant to show Danny, but Danny pleads with him
and we see some horrific images cutting between lift doors releasing
torrents of blood and two twin girls in blue dresses and white
stockings. We see Danny screaming (but we hear nothing), and he passes
out.
The doctor arrives to check Danny over. She asks him about what he
remembers, and about Tony, to which Danny refuses to let much about him
slip. The doctor and Wendy talk, and we discover that Jack is an
alcoholic in recovery, and hurt Danny one evening while he was still
drinking. Jack came home from his job as a teacher, and Danny was
playing with his father's papers, which were strewn around the room.
This irritated Jack enough to yank Danny up by the arm, dislocating his
shoulder. However, this gave Jack the impetus to give up alcohol.
The next day, hotel closing day, we see Jack, Wendy, and Danny in the
car driving through the forests up towards the Overlook. They discuss
the Donner party, a group of explorers who resorted to cannibalism
after being snowbound. Wendy is a little distressed about the
discussion of such a violent topic in front of Danny, but Danny says
that he saw it on the TV. Jack sarcastically tells Wendy, "See, it's
okay. He saw it on the television."
Jack meets with the hotel staff, who invite him and his family to get
an idea of the facilities in the hotel, but Jack tells them he has to
collect his family first. They find Wendy, and we are introduced to the
inside of the Overlook hotel with its elaborate furnishings and
picturesque rooms. Wendy is considerably impressed. Danny is in the
games room, throwing darts at a board. He gets up to remove them from
the board, and when he turns around, two girls are at the door, in blue
dresses and white stockings, staring at him. Danny is frozen to the
spot, and watches the two girls turn, arm in arm, walk out the door.
The family is introduced to the caretaker's quarters, the hotel's hedge
maze, and the snow-cat vehicle. However, as they are shown around the
hotel, the manager tells them the hotel is built atop an "Indian burial
ground, and I believe they actually had to repel a few Indian attacks
as they were building it."
We then see the kitchens of the hotel, and we meet Dick Hallorann
(Scatman Crothers), the head chef of the hotel, and Wendy is shown the
myriad of food supplies in the hotel. Dick however, calls Danny, "Doc,"
a nickname only Wendy and Jack call him. Wendy asks him how he knows,
but Dick says that he thought he heard her call Danny that some time
before. Later, though, Dick speaks to Danny telepathically, whilst
talking to Wendy.
Dick suggests to Wendy that he and Danny get some ice-cream. Dick and
Danny speak, and Dick explains to Danny that his telepathy was called
"shining" by his grandmother, who also had the same gift. Danny asks
Dick whether there is something bad at the hotel, and he does not
respond directly, but notes that some events leave a trace on the
places they are at, "say like if someone burns toast." Danny asks what
is in Room 237, and Dick says "There ain't nothing in Room 237, but you
ain't got no business going in there anyway, so stay out! You
understand, stay out!"
The Overlook
The next scene takes place one morning about a month after their
arrival. Jack has slept in till 11:30 a.m., and Wendy asks him whether
he'll do some writing today. Jack tells her he has no ideas yet, but
says to Wendy that he seems to have a feeling of déjà vu about the
place, as if he "knew what was going to be around every corner." Wendy
and Danny go outside to navigate the hedge maze.
Later, Danny is on his tricycle, riding around some of the corridors of
the hotel. He comes across Room 237, and very slowly tries to open the
door. It is locked.
That night, Jack is typing in one end of a large lounge when Wendy
comes in, happily, and mentions that the weather forecast said that it
may snow that night. Jack however, looks unimpressed, and says "What do
you want me to do about it?" Wendy thinks that Jack is being "grouchy,"
but Jack mentions he wants to get on with his work. Wendy says that she
might come back later with sandwiches, but Jack tells her:
Wendy, let me explain something to you. Whenever you
come in here and interrupt me, you're breaking my concentration. You're
distracting me, and it will then take me time to get back to where I
was, understand?...Now we're going to make a new rule. Whenever I am in
here and you hear me typing, or whether you don't hear me typing,
whatever the fuck you hear me doing in here, when I am in here that
means that I am working - that means don't come in. Now do you think
you can handle that?
Wendy says yes, but her jovial mood is gone.
The next day, Wendy tries the phones, but they are down because of a
snowstorm that has arrived. She calls in by radio to the ranger to
confirm this. The ranger tells her to leave her radio on all the time,
for safety. Elsewhere, Danny is pedaling again with his tricycle around
the hotel corridors. Around one corner, he sees the twins again at the
end of the corridor, and we hear them saying, "Come play with us...
Come play with us Danny," and we see the shot cutting between them and
a violent image of their bloody bodies, with an axe in one of the
girls. "Come play with us, forever, and ever," they repeat. It is all
too much for Danny, who covers his eyes. When he removes his hands, the
girls are gone. Tony tells him "Remember what Mr. Hallorann said, it's
just like pictures in a book..."
The day after, Danny asks his mother if he can get his fire-engine from
his room, but Wendy tells him that his father is sleeping in there, and
he shouldn't go. Danny pleads with her, saying he will not make a
sound, and Wendy capitulates. However, when Danny goes up, Jack is
sitting on the bed, looking off into the distance. He beckons Danny to
sit with him, and Danny asks him whether he likes it here. Jack says
that he loves it at the hotel, and wants Danny to have a good time.
Danny asks whether he feels bad, to which he says no, and asks whether
he'll hurt him or his mother. Jack is a little shaken, asking "Did your
mother ever say that to you - that I would hurt you?" Danny says no,
and Jack tells him that he loves him, and he'd never do anything to
hurt him.
Later, Danny is playing with his toys, and then notices that the door
to Room 237 is open. Danny slowly walks up to the door and goes inside.
Wendy is downstairs, in the basement, tending to the equipment.
Suddenly she hears a terrible scream. Wendy drops her clipboard and
runs towards the main lounge, where she finds Jack, asleep, screaming,
in a nightmare. She rouses him, and he tells her that he dreamt that he
killed her and Danny, chopping them up into little pieces. She comforts
him momentarily, and Danny walks in, trembling, sucking his thumb.
Wendy tells him to go to his room, but Danny does not do so. She goes
to him, and finds his sweater is ripped and his neck is hurt. She
wonders how this happened, and then says to Jack, "You did this to him,
didn't you? You son of a bitch!" Jack looks startled and confused.
Wendy takes Danny to his room.
"You've always been the caretaker"
Jack wanders miserably around the hotel and comes across the Gold Room.
The staff have removed all the alcohol before they left, but Jack
nonetheless sits down at the bar, musing to himself that he would give
anything, even his "goddamn soul" for a drink. He looks up and sees a
bartender, Lloyd (Joe Turkel), and Jack does not appear surprised, but
asks for a bourbon. Jack asks Lloyd, "A little slow tonight?" (there
are no other people staying in the hotel). In a nod to the underlying
subtext of the film, Jack refers to the "white man's burden,"
addressing the Native American theme in the film and the fact that the
Overlook was built on a tribal burial ground. He tells the bartender
about the accident he had with Danny before, saying that it was merely
"a momentary loss of muscular coordination. I mean... a little extra
foot pounds of energy, per second... per second." Then, Wendy rushes up
to him, crying, and tells him that Danny saw a crazy woman in the hotel
who tried to kill Danny. He asks which room he saw the woman in.
Dick, in Florida, hears about the snow drifts in the Rocky Mountains.
Suddenly, his eyes widen as he lies on the bed. He clearly sees
something that we cannot. His head shakes uncontrollably.
Jack, in the hotel, walks into Room 237. He walks slowly up the stairs
in the sunken living room, towards the bathroom. A young woman, naked,
with her hair wet and slicked back, draws back the curtain of the bath,
and walks towards him. Jack moves towards her and they embrace in a
kiss. Jack opens his eyes, and in the mirror, he sees the woman's back
is covered with rotting skin. He pulls back, and sees the woman is
suddenly elderly, and Jack is disgusted, staggering backwards. The
woman cackles as Jack gurgles in disgust, slamming the door on his way
out.
He suggests to Wendy that because there was nothing there, Danny may
have done this to himself. Wendy suggests that maybe they should leave
the hotel and take Danny to a doctor. Jack becomes furious, saying it
is "so fucking typical" of Wendy, that he has "let [her] fuck up [his]
life this far," and he's not going to let Wendy "fuck this up" for him.
Dick tries to phone the hotel, but discovers that the lines are down.
He contacts the ranger, and asks them to radio the family, and that he
will ring back later. In the meantime, Jack goes back to the Gold Room,
and suddenly the room is crowded with people dressed in a 1920s
ballroom manner, and asks Lloyd for a drink. However, he runs into a
butler with advocaat, spilling it on his jacket. The butler suggests
they go to the bathroom to try and remove the stain.
Jack asks the butler his name. It is Delbert Grady. He asks him whether
he murdered his wife and kids, but Grady denies this. Jack says he
remembers seeing him in the newspaper, but Grady says he has no
recollection of it ever happening. Jack says "Mr. Grady, you were the
caretaker here," but Grady rebukes him, "I'm sorry to differ with you,
sir, but you are the caretaker. You have always been the caretaker. I
should know, sir. I've always been here."
Grady tells him that his son is attempting to bring an "outside party"
into the situation. Jack looks surprised, and asks him who. Grady says
"A nigger... a nigger cook." Jack wonders how, and Grady tells him that
his son has an "extraordinary talent." Jack blames it on his mother,
and then Grady tells him about his daughters and wife:
One of them actually stole a packet of matches and
tried to burn it down. But I corrected them, sir. And when my wife
tried to prevent me from doing my duty I corrected her.
Ideas of escape
In the meantime, Wendy is upset. She wonders about the snow-cat, and
how they can get away in the storm in that. However, Danny starts
saying "Redrum, redrum" in Tony's voice, in his room. Wendy hears him
and attempts to wake him, thinking he's had a bad dream. She calls his
name, but it is Tony that replies: "Danny's not here, Mrs. Torrance."
The ranger tries to contact the hotel, but no one responds. Jack walks
by the radio, rips it open and yanks out parts of it, and pockets them.
The radio dies. Dick rings back, and the ranger tells him that there
was no response. Dick makes the decision to journey back up to the
Overlook, despite being caught in a severe blizzard.
At the Overlook, Wendy grabs a baseball bat and goes down to the
lounge, trying to find Jack. She walks to the typewriter, and sees the
sheet in place. Written on it are endless repetitions of the single
sentence: "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy." She looks
through the stack of papers neatly placed to the side, all with the
same repetitions and permutations of layout of that same sentence.
Jack approaches behind her, and asks her "How do you like it?" She is
frightened and turns around. Jack asks her what she is doing here. She
says she wanted to talk, that maybe they should leave and take Danny to
a doctor. Jack mocks her frightened, stammering voice, and asks whether
she has ever thought about Jack, and his responsibilities to his
employers. As he talks, Wendy walks backwards, getting more frightened,
swinging the bat. Jack asks her to put the bat down: "Darling, light of
my life, I'm not going to hurt you. You didn't let me finish my
sentence. I said 'I'm not going to hurt you... I'm just going to bash
your brains in!' I'm going to bash them right the fuck in." She gets
more frightened, and she manages to hit him on the head. Jack falls
backwards down the stairs.
Redrum
Wendy drags the body to the food lockers, and shuts him in. Jack pleads
with her to open the door, but Wendy tells him that she will go and
take Danny to a doctor, and bring someone back to see to Jack. Jack is
greatly amused, and tells her to "go check out the Snowcat and the
radio and see what I mean... Go check it out!" Jack has also sabotaged
the Snowcat. Wendy is stranded there.
Whilst she is gone, we hear Grady's voice on the other side of the
door. He sounds displeased with Jack, telling him "I see you can hardly
have take care of the... business we discussed... that you haven't the
belly for it...that you will have to deal with this matter in the
harshest possible way." Jack is defiant, however, and says "There's
nothing I look forward to with greater pleasure." Grady opens the door.
In their quarters, we see Danny, in Tony's voice, saying "Redrum,
redrum, ...," and takes Wendy's lipstick and writes "REDRUM" on the
bathroom door. His voice gets louder, waking Wendy, who takes Danny in
her arms. She catches her eye on the mirror, which reveals the writing
on the door reversed - it says "MURDER."
Jack is outside, swinging an axe, trying to break into the locked door.
He breaks open a panel and opens the door. "Wendy, I'm home." he says.
In the meantime, Wendy and Danny are trying to escape out the tiny
bathroom window, obstructed by the snowfall, which has managed to build
up as far as the window. Danny manages to escape out the window, but
Wendy cannot get out. She falls back inside, and locks the door. Jack
starts to hack through the bathroom door, smashes through the final
piece of wood remaining, sticks his head through the door and says
"Here's Johnny!", one of the most remembered lines from the film. As
Jack tries to open the door, Wendy slashes at him with a knife. Jack
howls back in pain. He hears a vehicle outside, and turns around and
out.
Dick, meanwhile, has made it in another snow-cat up to the hotel. He
gets inside and asks around the empty hotel. Jack rushes up to him and
immediately swings the axe into his chest. Wendy, upstairs, runs out,
calling for Danny, but not loud enough so Jack will hear. Danny has run
back inside and hides inside a steel cabinet. Wendy walks upstairs, and
sees a couple in one of the rooms. Two people, a man in a bear costume
and a man in evening dress are on a bed. The man in the bear costume
moves down and looks at her, followed by the other. Danny tries to
escape downstairs, and Jack follows him, leading outside into the maze.
Wendy, however, is still inside, and makes her way to the lobby. She is
frightened by a scarred man, who toasts his glass to her, saying "Great
party, isn't it?" In other rooms, she sees skeletons and cobwebs,
arranged in various party scenes. She comes towards the lifts, which
release the torrents of blood as foreseen by Danny before.
Meanwhile, Danny is in the maze, covered in snow. Jack is behind him,
following his footprints, calling out to him. Danny gets far ahead, and
steps backwards in the snow, an old Native American trick, and hides
away to a side branch of the maze. Jack falls for it and keeps running
past him, and Danny manages to escape, with Jack still stumbling around
in the maze.
Wendy makes her way out of the hotel and joins up with Danny, who get
in the abandoned snowcat and make their escape. Jack hears the snowcat
drive off, and fails to get out of the maze in time. He is frozen in
the snow.
As a coda, we see a photograph on the hotel wall, with various
partygoers at a ball. We see in particular a young man who looks the
same as Jack. A sign says "Overlook Hotel, July 4th Ball, 1921."
Quotes
Here's Johnny!
As Nicholson's character breaks into the bathroom, he ad-libs a line
based on the introduction that Ed McMahon used on The Tonight Show
Starring Johnny Carson. The quote was picked as Number 68 of AFI's 100
Years...100 Movie Quotes.
Analysis
The Shining seems to comment on the absurdity of the ideal
American-style nuclear family. The film underlines the isolation and
total comfort of the Torrance family via the huge open spaces and
endless food reserves at the Overlook. Jack Torrance's monologues and
the "work" he produced ("All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy")
caricature the Protestant Work Ethic. Critics have also noted the
American Indian motifs as well as the Grady character, who represents
an imperialist archetype, suggesting a skewed commentary upon American
history. Broadly, then, the film seems to suggest that escape from a
tainted and dangerously brutal past of violence (Jack Torrance) is left
to a younger generation, embodied in Danny, who "shines" and can detect
the evil within the superficially benign Overlook. Thematically this
seems to tie The Shining to 2001: A Space Odyssey as one of Kubrick's
more optimistic works, via its conclusion, reminiscent of the "new man"
or starbaby. It may also be significant that Danny's vision and
fainting and Grady's murder of his family are explicitly given
psychological rather than supernatural explanations by minor characters
in the film, the doctor and the hotel manager respectively, which
strike the viewer as being barely plausible. This could be viewed as a
critique of materialism.
Trivia
* Vivian Kubrick, daughter of Stanley Kubrick, had a
uncredited guest role as a smoking guest on a ballroom couch.
* The opening panorama shots and all scenes of the
Volkswagen Beetle on the road to the hotel were filmed in Glacier
National Park in Montana.
* The set for the Overlook Hotel was then the
largest ever built, and by viewers popularly and easily mistaken for a
real location. It included a full recreation of the exterior of the
hotel, as well as all of the interiors. A few exterior shots were done
at Timberline Lodge on Mount Hood in Oregon. They are easy to notice
because the hedge maze is missing. The Timberline Lodge requested
Kubrick change the sinister Room 217 of King's novel to 237, so
customers would stay in their own room 217 fearlessly. The interiors
are based on those of the Ahwahnee hotel in Yosemite National Park. The
massive set Kubrick built would be the site of his first use of the
Steadicam.
* The movie that Danny and Wendy watch on television
at the beginning of the "Monday" segment is Summer of '42, reportedly
one of Stanley Kubrick's favorite movies, and a rare insurgence of
modern pop culture in one of his films.
* Although the story is set in Colorado the only
scenes filmed there are an exterior of the Flatirons above Boulder, and
an interior at the now defunct Stapleton International Airport, where
Hallorann is calling to make arrangements to get a vehicle to get him
to the hotel. Scenes of the Torrance family watching the news on
television included several actual Denver newscasters and weathermen of
the time. Negotiations with the Stanley Hotel (the main inspiration for
King's book) in Estes Park, Colorado, broke down over Kubrick's
proposed uses of the facility. It would be used for the filming of the
1997 miniseries.
* The Grady twins' footage is unmistakably
reminiscent of a photo by Diane Arbus, and much of the abstracted
horror appears influenced by Arbus's strange photos of masked revellers
and desexualized nudes.
* After Jack admonishes Wendy for interrupting him,
if one listens to the typewriter carefully, one can deduce that Jack is
in fact typing the phrase "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy."
* Kubrick was able to film all of Danny's parts without "Danny" realizing he was in a horror movie.
* According to the Guinness Book of World Records,
The Shining holds the record for the film with most retakes of a single
scene (with spoken dialogue) at 127 takes.
* Stephen King notoriously disliked Kubrick's
vision. He thought that the novel's important themes, such as the
disintegration of the family, were ignored. He also felt that Kubrick
viewed the source material as below him, and that the film was
Kubrick's way of elevating the material to his level. King also viewed
the casting of Nicholson as a mistake and a tip-off to the audience
that the character Jack would go mad.
* An edit of footage by Robert Ryang, in which The
Shining was marketed as a family based character film, swiftly became a
much downloaded internet favourite on its wide distribution in October
2005.(source New York Times)
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