Whenever Stanley Kubrick tried his hand at a genre, it became one of the all-time greatest entries in that genre. 2001 is one of the greatest sci-fi movies ever made, Dr. Strangelove is one of the greatest comedies ever made, Paths of Glory is one of the greatest war movies ever made, and The Shining is one of the greatest horror movies ever made.

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Adapted from Stephen King’s novel of the same name - but deviating wildly from the source material - The Shining has aged much more gracefully than most of the other horror hits of the 1980s, thanks to Kubrick's direction, a pair of powerful performances, and many other elements.

Kubrick’s Unparalleled Command Of Tension

Jack Torrance slipping into madness

Stanley Kubrick is one of the greatest filmmakers who ever lived, ranking alongside such legendary names as Akira Kurosawa and Jean-Luc Godard. There was cinema pre-Kubrick and then there was cinema post-Kubrick.

The director’s command of tension is unparalleled, as seen in The Shining’s long, patient Steadicam takes and the jarring cuts between Danny’s vision of the Grady twins’ ghosts and the shocking reality of their chopped-up, blood-soaked corpses.

All The Disturbing Imagery

Blood emerging from an elevator in The Shining

Disturbing imagery is timeless. An image that was truly unsettling a few decades age, like Norman Bates in the basement doorway wearing his mother’s clothes or Rosemary Woodhouse looking down at her newborn Satanic child, will still be just as unsettling today.

Thanks to Kubrick’s uniquely gonzo vision of the Stephen King novel, The Shining is filled with unnerving imagery that’s still terrifying today: a pair of axe-murdered twins, gallons of blood gushing out of an elevator, a smiling Jack at the forefront of a photograph taken in the 1920s – the list goes on.

Shelley Duvall’s Powerful Turn As A Terrified Spouse

Wendy Torrance with a baseball bat in The Shining

While the star of The Shining is Jack Nicholson as the deranged Jack Torrance, what really sells his reign of terror is the psychological effect it has on Jack’s embittered wife Wendy, played by Shelley Duvall.

Duvall’s convincing turn as a mother who desperately wants to save herself and her son from being murdered by her husband conveys the very real fear of the situation.

The Implication That The Hotel Might Not Even Be Haunted

Jack drives his family to the Overlook Hotel in The Shining

In Stephen King’s source material, Jack Torrance is a good man who is corrupted by the demons of the Overlook Hotel. In the movie, he’s a hot-tempered abusive father at the end of his tether and it’s implied that the isolation alone would drive him to try to murder his wife and son, whether the hotel is haunted or not.

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This change is one of the main reasons King didn’t like Kubrick’s adaptation of his novel, but it undeniably makes The Shining a scarier story.

Wendy Carlos & Rachel Elkind’s Creepy, Foreboding Score

The opening titles of The Shining

One of the most powerful tools in a horror filmmaker’s toolkit is music. Hitchcock originally planned to play Psycho’s shower murder in silence, but Bernard Herrmann’s iconic track “The Murder” undeniably improved the terror of the scene.

In The Shining, the gloomy, foreboding tones of Wendy Carlos and Rachel Elkind’s score are used to create an overriding sense of dread as the Torrances head to their supernatural doom.

The Countless Ways To Interpret Its Meaning

Danny with an Apollo 11 sweater in The Shining

Kubrick’s construction of The Shining is so meticulous and complex that any possible explanation of the film is undermined or disproven by another scene. As a result, the movie never gets old because it’s impossible to make head or tail of it.

There have been dozens of interpretations of The Shining over the years. Some viewers even think it’s Kubrick’s confession that he helped to fake the Moon landing, based on Danny’s Apollo 11 sweater.

John Alcott’s Groundbreaking Steadicam Cinematography

Danny in the hallway in The Shining

Along with Rocky, Marathon Man, and Bound for Glory, The Shining was one of the first ever movies to utilize the then-newly invented Steadicam.

Cinematographer John Alcott’s use of the Steadicam is still one of the greatest uses of the technology. Alcott used the Steadicam to follow Danny’s little tricycle around the sinister hallways of the Overlook, one of the most memorable shots in the movie.

The Sheer Terror Of The Climactic Maze Chase

The Shining maze

After Jack snuffs out his son’s hiding place in the kitchen, Danny races out into the snowy hedge maze. Jack chasing Danny through the chilly maze with an axe makes for a terrifying climactic set piece.

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The Steadicam makes a reappearance in this sequence, ominously swooping around the narrow snowbound pathways of the hedge maze as Danny flees for his life. This whole sequence is marked by its unrelenting terror.

Jack Nicholson’s Unsettling Portrayal Of Jack Torrance

Jack in the bathroom doorway in The Shining

Jack Torrance is sort of an everyman in the book, but Jack Nicholson took the role to some very dark places in Kubrick’s film adaptation. Namely, Nicholson’s Jack Torrance is shown to be seething with rage bubbling just under the surface before he even gets the job at the Overlook.

Upon arrival at the hotel, the movie version of Jack just gets angrier and angrier until the intense isolation drives him to take up an axe and go after his unsuspecting family.

The Ambiguous Final Shot

Jack in the photograph at the end of The Shining

Since conclusive endings are inherently comforting, the best horror movie endings tend to be hauntingly ambiguous, like Dr. Hannibal Lecter “having an old friend for dinner” in The Silence of the Lambs or Peter and Fran escaping in a helicopter in Dawn of the Dead.

The Shining has one of the most unforgettable final shots in movie history. The photograph of Jack at a 4th of July party in the 1920s set to Al Bowlly’s rendition of “Midnight, the Stars, and You” has sparked all kinds of discussion.

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