When Stanley Kubrick turned his perfectionist gaze to horror with his adaptation of Stephen King’s The Shining, he created one of the genres best movies that still has an impact to this day.
Where other haunted house movies feature a creaky old shack or cobwebbed mansion, The Shining is set in the remote Overlook Hotel situated in the Rocky Mountains. School teacher turned novelist Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) and his family play caretaker during the winter season, yet it doesn’t take long for the evil spirits within to make themselves known, as they feed off of Jack’s increasingly frail state and drive him to murderous insanity.
With The Shining, Kubrick created a horror movie that is psychologically shocking in its atmosphere and violence, a film where rivers of blood run down hallways and spooky children appear at the end of corridors with nasty intentions. It is a film that creeps and crawls under the skin and leaves a lasting impact after the credit’s roll. It is of no wonder then that the film has taken a life of its own, inspiring a number of conspiracy theories and whacky interpretations decades after the films release.
Featuring a brilliantly madcap performance by Jack Nicholson at his ferocious, eyebrow raising best, The Shining is a film that both emboldened and elevated the horror genre to a higher plateau, while continuing to establish the legend that was Stanley Kubrick in cinema history.
