Why The Shining is Terrifying

[Music] as I thought about the film afterwards and even when it wasn't thinking about it there were things that bothered me about it they became more and more convinced that there is in this film a deeply laid subtext that takes on the Holocaust The Shining that movie was about the genocide of the American Indian so if you watch those three things you begin to understand this deeper story the idea that Stanley Kubrick was involved with faking the Apollo moon landings room 237 is a fascinating documentary centered around Stanley Kubrick's The Shining the film documents the wealth of conspiracy theories that have emerged from different interpretations of the 1980's horror masterpiece with different interviewees suggesting that the movie is everything from a story of sexual hedonism to an allegory of the genocide of the Native American people to even a theory that the entire movie is actually a coded confession from Kubrick about how he helps NASA faked the moon evening it's an enthralling watch but while hearing so many theories makes it difficult to buy into any particular one it does make one thing very clear The Shining is a special movie it has an abyss like quality that draws people to its edges and compels them to stare down endlessly into its shadowy depths and I'm very much one of them The Shining terrifies me and I've briefly documented the miles childhood trauma the film caused me in a previous video but what I'd like to do today is try and dive a little deeper and shed some light on what exactly about this movie is so frightening and why so many people feel so compelled to try and uncover its deeper layers based on the 1974 novel written by Stephen King if you've never experienced the shining the story of it goes like this recovering alcoholic and struggling writer Jack Torrance is employed to be the winter caretaker of the snowbound of Hotel a job that will acquire him his wife Wendy and his son Danny to stay in the massive building completely alone for all of winter I think when you really look at it there's three fundamental parts to the shining story that make it so disturbing the first is the sense of isolation it elicits and the anxiety that grows from that the Torrance's are completely alone in the Overlook and while isolation in and of itself is unsettling where it becomes frightening is that were never more vulnerable than when we're alone and the shining plays directly into that fear in the first 20 minutes of the movie there's so many little subtle suggestions that something bad is going to happen we're told that the previous winter caretaker went insane and murdered his wife and daughters with max even casual conversations seem to lead back to Makar big ideas such as cannibalism and disturbed Native American burial grounds there's the constant idea of violence and murder and within that anticipation there's anxiety we know the tolerances will be alone completely vulnerable to the malicious force that's coming but perhaps even more disturbing is how that malicious force manifests as the week's go by jack grows more and more an hinged seeing people that aren't there and acting in bizarre unsettling ways until finally his madness escalates to the point that he makes the decision that he's going to murder his wife and child there's no pleasant way of putting this but at its core The Shining is a story about a man harming his family which is something so unnatural and awful but also something that occurs every day I think a lot of people tend to write Stephen King off as a pulpy horror writer and I think that's not unwarranted in some cases but he's at his best when he's exploring the everyday horror rooted in the human psyche and Jack Torrance's desire to harm his family is maybe the best example of this in his book the Stephen King companion King wrote about how his own experience as a parent informed the writing of Jack torence the protagonist is a man who has broken his son's arm who has a history of child beating who is beaten himself and as a young father with two children I was horrified by my occasional feelings of real antagonism towards my children won't you ever stop won't you ever go to bed there are times when I felt very angry toward my children and have even felt as though I could hurt them and so what the character of Jack Torrance is is this very dark fear taken to a horrifying extreme and I think this is what makes him such a genuinely unsettling character as when you think about it all he really is is a deranged man with a sharp weapon and horror cinema has no shortage of those but it's his connection to his victims his family the people he's meant to care for and protects that makes his gradual descent into madness and the resulting acts of violence so frightening and it's the mere suggestion of this that makes some of the film's more low-key moments so profoundly disturbing so if we stop there these two factors alone are well enough to create a terrifying story even separate from anything supernatural but of course there is a supernatural element to the shining the Overlook itself it's the hotel that seems to be slowly twisting Jack's mind and tormenting the family with visions of blood filled elevators and dismembered little girls but I think an important aspect to the Overlook is the unusual way it interacts with the Torrance's unlike a lot of the more typical haunted houses of horror cinema the Overlook never directly engages with the family it never performs any physical actions or harms a member of the Torrance's the only exception being the bruises Danny suffers from visiting room 237 and the door that opens by itself food cellar but even those happen off-screen and could be explained in other ways rather what the hotel does seem to be trying to do is directly attack the sanity of its occupants showing them things they don't want to see and quietly whispering to them in a variety of lurid ways and it seems to be doing this with a distant distinctly mockingly as it's not trying to murder the family it's trying to get them to murder each other and that is an infinitely more disturbing goal like the hotel is some massive unknowable alien creature taking delight in slowly crushing the life out of its inhabitants and I think this is a more effective way to think about the Overlook it's not really haunted as much as it is alive there's a malevolent consciousness to the hotel nearly a Lovecraftian quality to it as if the various entities that inhabit it aren't individual ghosts as much as they are tendrils of a much larger more unknowable being and that to me is infinitely more frightening you would think with such a strong premise that when combined with Stanley Kubrick's expertise in filmmaking you'd have an instant horror smash hit but unusually this wasn't actually the case as The Shining was not especially well received when it released in 1980 the film suffered a lukewarm opening weekend grossing significantly less than both the Ullman and alien and was even panned by several prominent film critics with Variety magazine writing in their review of the film Kubrick has teamed with the jumpy Jack Nicholson to destroy all that is so terrifying about Stephen King's bestseller the film was even nominated for two Golden Rose ease with Kubrick up for worst director and Shelley Duvall for worst actress but that was nothing compared to the film's biggest detractor Stephen King himself who loaded the film saying it carried none of the heart of the novel and that it destroyed the character of Jack and Wendy Torrance calling the film cold without heart and misogynistic but the quote that's always stood out to me the most is one king reportedly made of Kubrick after for seeing the movie in which he stated I think he set out to make a film that hurts people and I don't think at the time King had any idea just how right he was The Shining is not an easy movie to watch it has a slow creeping dread to it that's quite difficult to get a hold of something about it just feels wrong and to find an answer to why this is the case I think we have to look at the very particular way The Shining was created generally there's two rules of thumb when shooting horror cinema use of tight angled close-ups to limit the audience's view of scenes making them wonder what might be lying beyond the edge of frame as well as lots of quick cuts to keep things feeling frantic when the scares actually do happen and one thing that's so unusual about the shining is how it leans away from both these conventions nearly the entire film was shot with an extremely wide angle 18 millimeter lens which makes the spaces of the Overlook Hotel feel gigantic and overpowering in a lot of the shots the background completely engulfs the characters drowning them in large amounts of empty space and constantly visually reinforcing the idea that these characters are alone which ties back to the sense of isolation we talked about earlier but it also means that when something does appear it's far more shocking and frightening one of the reasons the hallway scene with the two little girls is so shocking is that were confronted with something that shouldn't be there at this point in the movie the film spent nearly 40 minutes visually assuring us that this hotel is empty except for the Torrance's only to then shatter that assurance and this is a fundamental fear The Shining plays upon viennese that comes with people appearing in places they shouldn't be but is also key in understanding the unease of how the shining scares us through subtle visual horror while the film does have its more traditional scares a lot of the unease of the movie comes from the very nuanced ways it shows us things in most horror we experience this scare at the moment of impact usually at the same point the character does but in the shining the characters will often notice something before the camera reveals it to the audience which creates these little moments of intense dread and suspense just check out this first scene in the play room and watch how long we hold on Danny's reaction before cutting to the scare The Shining doesn't try to surprise us rather it clearly tells us something bad is going to happen and then it shows us and I think the reason this approach works so well is that often what it does show us is something really genuinely horrifying and one of my personal favorite instances of this is the infamous typewriter scene where Wendy discovers what exactly Jack's been writing pages and pages and pages of the words all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy and it's a moment that so brilliantly visually conveys something so horrifying that the person Wendy loves and the only other adult in the hotel has gone truly irrevocably insane this same penchant for deeply unsettling visual horror carries through even to the portrayal of its actors if you look at the big film stars of the 70s and 80s many of them had a clean crisp polished look to them with an acting style that tended to be far more reserved than what you'd see today but by contrast Shelley Duvall and Jack Nicholson have an upsetting nearly disheveled quality to them and this was very much an intentional decision by Kubrick many of the close-ups were shot with the same eighteen millimeter lens that the wide shots were done in and when a wide-angle lens is used to shoot a close-up on a face it has this effect of a long gating the focal plane of the image making the facial features look distorted and strange and the film's use of this technique creates an uncomfortable nearly uncanny look to the actors and I think this is so interesting because so often horror movies will cast very conventionally good-looking actors in an effort to add to the voyeuristic or fantastical elements of horror cinema button consciously distorting the appearance of its actors The Shining takes away that element of fantasy and replaces it with a quality that feels uncanny and strange and this disquieting feeling is only enhanced by the performances of the there's an upsetting quality to the acting of both Nicholson and Duvall in this movie parts where Nicholson comes across as genuinely hateful and arranged and Duvall seems legitimately terrified and the reason for this can be found in an interview with Ray Lovejoy the editor of The Shining where he talked about how Kubrick would shoot dozens and dozens and dozens of takes of each individual shot some going well into the triple digits and later on when Lovejoy was going through take after take he'd watch the actors grow slowly more and hinged as they became exhausted and ran out of conventional ways to portray their actions until around 30 or 40 takes in they'd start acting in bizarre unbalanced ways speaking in unusual voices and contorting their faces into unsettling expressions and invariably these were the takes that would get used in the final cut for the movie and I think this is apparent in the film itself there's a genuinely unsettling aspect to the acting of the shining and I think this is why both Nicholson and Evolved were heavily criticized on the release of the movie being seen as unrealistic and cartoonish but also why their performances come across as so disturbing and so well remembered today so what this comes down to is every part of the Shining's visual direction is specifically designed to unnerve us and when combined with the film's soundtrack the unique haunting atmosphere that's so synonymous with the film is formed a lot of the tracks of the shining barely even resemble music as much as they do a cacophony of lurid sounds designed to seep into our subconscious and whisper to us that something is very wrong [Music] there's one instance of this towards the middle of the movie that I really love it's about an error in when the hotel really starts to take control of Jack and there's this deep thudding heartbeat mixed beautifully into the creepin background ambience and it really gives way to that feeling that the hotel is some massive living pulsing entity you mean just leave the hotel the sound of the shining is uncomfortable it's hard to listen to but this is emblematic of hair the film was made when Stephen King called The Shining a film to hurt people he was right as every piece of music every camera angle every subtle inflection of dialogue is engineered towards causing its audience emotional distress and as a results it creates a kind of horror completely alien to anything else in the genre and I think this is the reason why it garnered such a critical backlash when it was first released people just didn't know how to process it and I think even a slightly different take on the source material could have resulted in a dramatically different piece of media and thankfully for our purposes that piece of media exists Stephen King's The Shining is a three-part made for TV miniseries released in 1997 the goal of which was presumably to create an adaptation that fell more in line with the original book which i think is a fair objective Kubrick's version of The Shining dramatically altered major parts of the book story and the novel itself is a fantastic piece of horror writing and for what it's worth the 1997 version is actually successful in this regard it's a far more faithful adaptation but it's also a far weaker piece of horror if we were to boil down the key differences between the two versions it would come down to two factors atmosphere and ambiguity the 1997 version was shot in the Stanley Hotel the actual hotel Stephen King stayed at that originally inspired the story of The Shining and while I'm sure that means a lot to King personally it's all cramped spaces just don't elicit that same sense of isolation and emptiness that's so palpable in the original film it looks more comforting and cozy than anything else and likewise with the actors well Nicholson and Duvall were both styled to look unnerving the new casts well [Music] you get my point and you know make these aren't the most important aspects of the miniseries to focus on but atmosphere is created through detail and nuance and the total lack of either in the more granular aspects of the miniseries production leads to an adaptation that feels flat without depth or subtlety and a lack of subtlety leads us directly into our second factor the ambiguity ambiguity is what drives a lot of the horror in Kubrick's The Shining the concept of ghosts and the supernatural is used so carefully and in such a particular way that it leaves room for you to question if the hotel is actually haunted at all or is the family just going collectively insane but the 1997 version does not leave the same room for interpretation possibly the best examples of this is how both versions interpret these sections of the book featuring the man in the wolf mask in the 1980s version he appears towards the end of the film just as the tension is reaching its climax and this happens it's a bafflingly out of place shock to the system given no context or even a hint of explanation it just appears and then it's gone now check out this same scare interpreted by the 1997 version [Laughter] and for the record this is much closer to how it is in the book but what really strikes me about this interpretation is how hard it's trying to establish the Wolfman as a direct physical threat Danny and the results is that it's so harmful it's nearly kind of comical whereas in the 1980s version the threat is so hidden and so ambiguous that our brains go into panic just trying to identify it the miniseries is more committed to the act of violence as opposed to the threat of violence Jack's even successful in harming both Danny and Wendy at various points in the miniseries which is unlike Kubrick's version in which Jack never actually inflicts violence on either member of his family but it's the threat of that violence and how clearly it's conveyed that the 1980s film actually ends up feeling like a far more violent version despite there being only two instances of it on screen and by contrast the way the 97 version communicates its horror just feels clumsy and excessive they're spooky furniture that moves by itself the actors wear silly ghost makeup and there's some really truly unfortunate Hedge monster CG and it ends up feeling so much more safe neutered and dated than the film that came 17 years before it if the 1980s version of The Shining was made to hurt people then this version just feels made-for-tv but I think it also highlights what makes the original so special that ambiguous intangible atmosphere that's the results of every tiny part of the movie working on such a granular level which creates this amazing feeling but there's something more to the story of The Shining something sinister and unknowable lying just out of reach and personally I think it's people trying to understand this feeling this intangible second layer that's resulted in a lot of the bizarre theories that surround the shining and I'm not here to debate the validity of these conclusions because what's more interesting to me is the sheer facts that they exist at all the fact that they're still to this day people trying to break down this movie I think the effectiveness of a piece of horror can be measured in how long the experience stays with the viewer after the credits have rolled and The Shining is unparalleled in this regard it's a film that haunts people a movie that through its meticulous construction creates a tiny makar big world that's so easy to get lost in and I think this is why people like myself and so many others are equally terrified and captivated by this movie its ability to creep into our subconscious and manipulate us on the subtlest possible level creating a kind of horror that stays with you trapping us in its dark corridors and never letting us go [Music] friends thank you for joining me today I really hope you enjoyed the first of our horror themed videos for October also a small announcement if you're in Dublin on the 11th of November I'm gonna be attending Jake on who are kind enough to invite me as a special guest so if you're around do come by and say hi I want to give a huge shout out to my patrons for this video who has ever make this channel possible and if you'd like to be one of them you can do so over at patreon.com slash super eyepatch wolf this week I'd like to personally thank scowl Adam Barker he's omniscient Axl burger bagel net Ian Bettencourt lm-2 photo wongwan in Melvin digit 777 Brian M Walsh Amanda Howell and urban madman as ever you can find me over on the let's fight a boss video game podcast or on Twitter at I Pat you off friends take care of yourselves and I'll see you next time [Music]

Channel: Super Eyepatch Wolf

Views: 1,533,457

Rating: 4.9385338 out of 5

Keywords: The Shining, Horror Movies, Stanely Kubric, Conspiracy Theroies, Steven King, Heres Johnny, Scary movie, Room 237, Conspiracy theroy, twins, heres johnny, all work and no play makes jack a dull boy

Id: TmYcoozFYnU

Length: 24min 31sec (1471 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 14 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/maricc]

The Shinning is my favourite horror movie for sure

[u/enfanta]

"The fil-lum..."

[u/Ptoss]

Dude said everything about why I love this movie and why its so hard to watch yet fucking amazing at the same time.

[u/MisterRipster]

terrific

[u/[deleted]]

There’s something so annoying about titles that announce they’re gonna tell you why something is good at what it does.