It is now day seven and we are officially a week into our marathon. To celebrate, I thought a little Kubrick/King action might be appropriate. Now, Stephen King has written some high quality horror stories that were turned into films (e.g. Misery, Pet Sematary, Carrie, It, The Mist…) but none as frightening as The Shining. Paired with the direction of Stanley Kubrick, The Shining makes for one quality horror flick.
Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) is hired to be the off season caretaker for the Overlook Hotel in Colorado. Along with him come his family, a wife named Wendy (Shelley Duvall) and a son named Danny who talks to a man in his finger named Tony. These three will be the only people in the hotel for the entirety of winter.
Danny has this special telepathic gift called “The Shining.” While staying in the Overlook, Danny sees disturbing images of things that have happened in the hotel including the murders of twin girls. In the bar, Jack, a recovering alcoholic, has a run in with the ghost of a past employee of the hotel who had slaughtered his wife and two daughters years before. When the ghost tells him that he should kill his family, Jack begins to go insane and attempts to murder his family.
Honestly, I’m not even sure that Jack needed the ghost to help him go crazy. Between being stuck in a giant hotel all winter and the only people for him to talk to being his incredibly frumpy and obnoxious wife and his finger talking weirdo of a son, I’m not surprised he didn’t go insane much faster.
The funny thing is, there is an elevator full of blood, a crazy ghost lady in a bathtub, scary twins whose bodies are strewn across the floor and blood all over the walls and yet, the scariest part of the whole movie really might be Shelley Duvall’s teeth. I shudder to even think about it.
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