Although Stephen King, author of the novel it’s based on, hates it for deviating from the source material, Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining might be the greatest horror movie ever made. It certainly has more technical consideration and filmmaking prowess behind it than your average horror flick. There’s no movie quite like The Shining.
Shooting without a complete script, Kubrick was more concerned with atmosphere than a story when he was making The Shining. Eschewing jump scares in favor of haunting visuals and slow-burn character development, Kubrick crafted a unique horror masterpiece.
Updated on December 10th, 2020 by Mark Birrell: It should come as no surprise to anyone that The Shining, known the world over as one of the scariest movies ever made, has a lot of terrifying moments. We couldn't limit all of the timeless in the movie to just a top 10 so we've added an extra 5 to count down the scariest moments in The Shining. These scenes remain some of the most famous from movie history and every horror fan should know them back to front.
Jack murders Dick Hallorann
The Shining set itself apart from so many of the popular horror movies that would emerge throughout the 1980s simply by not being about the kills. In fact, there's really only one murder in the story's course of events.
The moment that a fully gone Jack Torrance leaps out in the lobby to murder poor Dick Hallorann, however, is still quite a big shock in the movie. Especially considering all the incredible distance that Dick traveled just to be killed the moment he walked in the door.
Jack talks to Lloyd
One of the most iconic scenes in the movie is when a still-cracking-up Jack enters the Gold Room of the Overlook Hotel and sees a friendly-yet-sinister bartender there named Lloyd.
It's touched on earlier in the movie that Jack has had trouble with alcohol abuse in the past and this has caused his behavior to be erratic. The breakdown of Jack's mind is scary within itself throughout the scene. But the story that he recounts about how he seriously hurt his young son, Danny, by accident in a moment of uncontrolled anger is even more chilling.
The photograph
There are many memorable moments from The Shining that, while still very effective, have left audiences collectively scratching their heads over the decades.
One of the most famous moments from the movie comes right at the end as the camera moves over an old photograph in the Overlook dated from 1921. In it, the audience can clearly see Jack standing amongst partygoers in a packed Gold Room, a wide grin across his face. Has Jack really been there all along? Has the Overlook simply consumed him entirely now? Fans don't really know for sure and the uncertainty adds to the eerieness of it all.
Jack's icy fate
In another instance of The Shining playing against the tropes that would develop in the horror genre throughout the 1980s, the big bad killer of the movie not only ultimately fails quite miserably but also dies in a fairly foolish manner.
After chasing Danny out into the snow in a blinding fit of rage, Jack is outsmarted and loses Danny, as Wendy escapes with her son, an increasingly fatigued Jack is forced to sit down and the movie quick cuts to his frozen corpse sitting motionless the following morning. As horrible as Jack is in the movie, his fate is still one of the most horrific.
"All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy."
Perhaps the most well-known scare from the whole movie, this horrifying moment comes as Wendy Torrance finally realizes that her husband has lost his mind, and had been losing it for quite some time.
Flicking through the large stack of pages for the book that she had assumed Jack had been writing, Wendy finds that he has been sitting at his typewriter, day after day, typing the exact same phrase over and over again.
Jack describes his nightmare to Wendy
Although Jack angrily told Wendy not to come into his workspace in the hotel lobby while he’s writing, she goes in to make sure he’s okay after he collapses at his desk. As it turns out, he fell asleep while he was working and then had a nightmare that was so terrifying that it woke him up.
Wendy asks if he’s all right, and he explains that in his nightmare, he murdered Wendy and Danny, and chopped them up into tiny pieces. In the job interview at the start of the movie, it was already hinted that Jack would eventually do this. And in the end, he tries (but fails).
Wendy sees a man in a bear suit
Over the past four decades, The Shining has been picked apart, shot by shot, by hundreds of viewers looking for hidden meanings, ranging from film scholars who adore the work of Kubrick to conspiracy theorists who think that Kubrick was involved in faking the Moon landing.
And the one moment that continues to vex fans of The Shining is Wendy seeing a man in a bear suit on his knees, committing a sex act, in the movie’s final act. No matter how you view the meaning of the movie as a whole, there’s no way to make sense of this moment.
Jack chases Danny through the maze
An early scene in The Shining introduces us to the Overlook Hotel’s on-site maze as Wendy and Danny head into it for a fun day out. The maze comes back in the climactic sequence with a much more terrifying bent. Jack charges through the hotel with an axe, looking for Danny. He catches him in the kitchen, but the boy manages to flee outside into the snow. He disappears into the maze, where Jack promptly starts chasing him.
The confusing geography of the maze, the use of Steadicam technology (The Shining was actually one of the first movies to ever use a Steadicam), and Jack Nicholson and Danny Lloyd’s compelling performances combine to make this a frightful climax.
“Come and play with us, Danny. Forever, and ever, and ever.”
Even people who’ve never seen The Shining are familiar with this moment. The shot of the twin girls, wearing matching blue dresses, standing at the end of a hallway, staring at Danny on his tricycle, is one of the most iconic in the history of horror cinema. Hauntingly, they say, “Come and play with us, Danny. Forever, and ever, and ever.”
What’s even creepier is the intermittent cuts to the same girls in the same hallway, but with brutal axe wounds. We know from the interview scene that their father slashed them to death with an axe, so this isn’t just a spooky moment – it’s an ominous callback to real events.
The elevator doors let out a tidal wave of blood
The elevator doors of the Overlook opening up and letting out a gushing tidal wave of blood is a truly haunting image. This shot took three takes to get right across a year. Stanley Kubrick kept being unsatisfied with how the blood looked because, in such a huge quantity, it didn’t really look like blood.
It took a week to set up each of these three takes because it was such a complicated shot. But as it has become arguably the most iconic shot in the whole movie, it’s easy to see that all of this work was worth it.
A sleep-deprived Jack hugs Danny
When Danny wants to go up to the room and grab one of his toys, Wendy warns him not to, because his dad is still asleep. He promises to be quiet and heads up there anyway. So, Danny goes upstairs and quietly enters the room. Then, the camera whip-pans across the room to reveal Jack, sitting on the edge of the bed, looking dreadfully sleep-deprived.
He calls Danny over and gives him a hug. In any other movie, a hug between a father and son would be a sweet thing. But in The Shining, it’s one of the most unnerving moments in the movie.
Jack’s conversation with Grady in the bathroom
With this scene, Stanley Kubrick broke the 180-degree rule of filmmaking. You’re not supposed to cut from one camera angle to another camera angle that turns 180 degrees away from the previous angle, because the audience will have no geographical frame of reference for the scene. However, here, it works really well by unnerving the viewer.
180-degree cuts aren’t what we’re used to seeing, so it pairs nicely with the sight of a dead man’s spirit cleaning the jacket of a man who’s slowly going insane. Eventually, Grady drops the niceties and openly tries to convince Jack to murder his wife and son.
“I’m not gonna hurt you. I’m just gonna bash your brains in.”
When Danny turns up with an injury, Wendy suspects that Jack did it, because there’s no one else in the hotel and he previously broke Danny’s arm. So, Wendy grabs a baseball bat and starts swinging it at Jack as he follows her up the stairs.
Jack Nicholson’s delivery of Jack’s monologue in this scene is brilliantly sinister: “Wendy. Darling. Light of my life. I’m not gonna hurt you. You didn’t let me finish my sentence. I said I’m not gonna hurt you. I’m just gonna bash your brains in. I’m gonna bash ‘em right the f*** in!” As Jack advances, Wendy manages to protect herself by smacking him on the head with the bat, knocking him out.
Jack enters Room 237
Room 237 is the room that hosts all of the Overlook Hotel’s demons. When Jack goes into Room 237 to investigate Danny’s claims that he saw an evil woman in there, he kisses what’s left of his humanity goodbye. A beautiful young woman emerges from the bathtub and starts kissing him, but when he looks in the mirror behind her, he sees that she’s an old lady who’s rotting away.
Horrified, he flees the room and doesn’t look back. Jack’s struggles with alcoholism and his ambiguous history of child abuse suggest that he didn’t need the haunting of Room 237 to become a murderer, but it certainly didn’t help.
“Heeere’s Johnny!”
Jack Nicholson apparently improvised this line. As a Brit, Stanley Kubrick didn’t recognize it as Ed McMahon’s catchphrase from The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, so he almost cut it. Thankfully, he didn’t, and “Heeere’s Johnny!” has gone on to become one of the most famous quotes in movie history.
The real terror of this scene comes from Jack hacking relentlessly at the bathroom door, trying to get to Wendy so that he can murder her. But this terrifying act juxtaposes ominously with Jack’s nonchalant attitude. He’s coming to kill his wife with an axe, and yet he’s cracking jokes.