THE SHINING 1980
Exploring the Haunted Psyche of The Shining: Whispers Through the Corridor, Echoes of the Overlook: Madness, Memory, and Menace.
Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 adaptation of Stephen King’s The Shining has endured as a high watermark of psychological horror, fueling decades of analysis and interpretation.
Stephen King disliked Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of The Shining 1980 because he felt the film stripped away the emotional heart of his story, particularly the arc and humanity of Jack Torrance, turning him into a one-note maniacal villain rather than a flawed, sympathetic man gradually undone by supernatural forces. King described Kubrick’s film as “a big, beautiful Cadillac with no engine inside it,” criticizing it for being visually impressive but emotionally “cold” and lacking the warmth, character depth, and tragedy present in his novel.
The film’s focus pivots not simply on the haunted Overlook Hotel or even the diabolical forces that seem to slither through its labyrinthine corridors, but on the aching, perilous intersection of creative ambition and familial breakdown, anchored by the performances of its central trio, the extraordinary artistry behind the camera, and an ever-palpable sense of ominous melancholy.
Kubrick, notoriously meticulous, co-wrote the screenplay with Diane Johnson, forging from King’s novel a cinematic maze with its own internal rules, riddles, and traps. The director’s unwavering control is immediately evident: from the ominous, soaring opening shots over the Colorado wilderness to the final, frozen tableau, every frame radiates calculation and intent. The Steadicam, then a fresh technological marvel, glides eerily backward and forward through the hotel’s eerie hallways, most memorably as young Danny Torrance pedals his Big Wheel tricycle (which came out in 1969) on echoing carpets and polished floors, a tour de force in immersive, subjective camera work.
Jack Nicholson’s performance as the iconically Faustian Jack Torrance, a soul unraveling in ice and fire, is both histrionic and nuanced. His Jack begins as a troubled but seemingly composed aspiring writer; gradually, his affect twists into the grotesque, his face all angled sneers and bulging, manic eyes. What’s initially played as frustration, “When I’m in here and you hear me typing… you’re breaking my concentration,” evolves into a terrifying threat: “Wendy? Darling. Light of my life. I’m not gonna hurt ya. You didn’t let me finish my sentence. I said, I’m not gonna hurt ya. I’m just going to bash your brains in!”
Jack is a tragic figure—once creative, now broken and consumed by his inner torment and the destructive forces unleashed within him. The film captures both his earthly potential and his catastrophic downfall, blending mythic grandeur with psychological ruin.
Shelley Duvall, as Wendy, delivers a performance fraught with vulnerability and rising terror, her nerves exposed and trembling as she transitions from apologetic peacemaker to desperate survivor. Danny Lloyd, in his only major film role, incarnates childhood innocence tainted by insidious visions, his “shining” a tragic curse, a connection to the hotel’s malevolent past, and the psychic violence swirling within his family.
Shelley Duvall was a singular, magnetic talent celebrated for her unconventional beauty and fearless performances in films like The Shining, 3 Women, and collaborations with Robert Altman. Known for her expressive vulnerability and ability to blend eccentricity with profound empathy, she left a lasting mark on both adult cinema and children’s television with her work on Faerie Tale Theatre, influencing generations with her originality and emotional depth. Duvall passed away peacefully in her sleep at her home in Texas on July 11, 2024, at age 75, due to complications from diabetes, a loss we widely mourned in the film world for her legacy as a true original and a gravitational force on screen.
The plot unfolds deceptively simple: Jack, Wendy, and Danny arrive at the snowbound Overlook Hotel at the onset of winter, tasked as caretakers of its grandeur and secrets. Early on, the hotel’s history is explained; the previous caretaker, Delbert Grady, murdered his wife and daughters before killing himself, a narrative omen that seeps into Jack’s own tenuous sobriety. As the family settles in, Danny’s psychic abilities manifest more vividly: he “shines” with visions of blood, murdered twins. “Come play with us, Danny. Forever… and ever… and ever.”
The sequence with the twin ghostly sisters in The Shining—two little girls — the otherworldly Gradys sisters portrayed by identical twins Lisa and Louise Burns in matching pale innocent blue dresses, splattered with crimson carnage, standing eerily side by side in a dim, aging hotel corridor, is one of cinema’s most iconic and chilling images of supernatural horror. Their pale, almost translucent faces are expressionless yet hauntingly vacant, framed by brown hair that clashes horrifically with the dark, oppressive atmosphere and the blood staining their hems. The film’s muted lighting renders the hallway cold and claustrophobic, with an almost sepia washed-out quality that evokes faded memories or nightmares trapped in time.
The girls’ stillness and synchronized presence create a disturbingly unnatural symmetry, which Kubrick’s camera lingers on with slow, creeping steadiness, adding to the palpable tension that oozes off the screen like the tidal wave of blood that spills out of the hotel’s elevator.
Their demand—“Come play with us, Danny. Forever… and ever… and ever.”—reverberates both like an innocent invitation and a sinister curse, sealing their status as tragic, malevolent spirits who embody the hotel’s cycle of violence. This line, simple but forbidding, captures the ghostly sisters’ eternal entrapment and their desire to ensnare Danny in their deadly fate.
Historically, this scene has become a seminal moment in horror cinema, epitomizing the uncanny, where innocence is corrupted, and childhood becomes a source of terror rather than comfort. The visual contrast of the sweet, vintage dresses drenched in blood alongside the otherworldly stillness of the twins established a lasting template for ghostly apparitions in film and television. Their image haunts popular culture, influencing countless homages, parodies, and scholarly interpretations as a perfect distillation of childhood trauma, supernatural dread, and the uncanny valley where the familiar becomes alien and threatening.
For me, nothing is quite as chilling as dead or demonic children, and the Grady sisters are perhaps the quintessential poster children for that trope in cinema.
The scene’s power rests in its stark, minimalistic imagery combined with the chilling dialogue that distills deep psychological horror into a single, unforgettable moment, making the ghostly twins a lasting symbol of The Shining’s eerie brilliance and its exploration of trapped souls and doomed innocence.
One of the film’s other most memorable foreshadowing devices has to be the word ‘REDRUM’—spelled backward, it’s a simple yet shattering emblem, a haunting little emblem of the story’s creeping horror.
Alongside these, Jack’s creative frustration ripens into madness. His writing consists of the chilling mantra rhythmically drummed out on his typewriter: “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.”
The Overlook’s vast, gleaming spaces cocoon its occupants, isolating them while slowly inserting apparitions into their reality: the spectral bartender Lloyd, the elegant but sinister Grady, and scenes of decadent, ghostly celebration in the hotel’s Gold Room. For Jack, these experiences nudge him from brooding discontent into homicidal rage, as the ghosts flatter, provoke, and ultimately command him to “correct” his family. Danny, in terror, speaks through his imaginary friend Tony, who speaks through his little bent pointer finger, while Wendy struggles to hold her son and her increasingly violent husband together.
Scatman Crothers, who was an actor, musician, and voice artist, broke new ground for Black entertainers in film and television while leaving an indelible impression with his unique presence and expressive style. His character, Dick Hallorann, is intuitive, empathetic, and warm-hearted. He’s the protective head cook and fellow “shiner” who shares a telepathic bond with Danny, makes a desperate rescue mission, but is murdered by the now fully deranged Jack, who stalks Wendy and Danny through endless corridors, culminating in the iconic chase through the snowy hedge maze.
Cinematographer John Alcott’s lens transforms the hotel into a living organism; its symmetry, mirrored surfaces, and looming spaces echo the characters’ psychological fracturing. The set’s opulent art deco and Native American motifs become part of the film’s intellectual machinery, suggesting cycles of violence, repression, and the persistence of historical trauma.
Alcott was behind the camera for other iconic collaborations with Stanley Kubrick, such as 2001: A Space Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange, and especially Barry Lyndon, which actually landed him an Oscar. Beyond Kubrick, Alcott brought his signature style to all sorts of movies, including the teen slasher from the 1980’s Terror Train starring Jamie Lee Curtis, the gritty Fort Apache the Bronx, The Beastmaster, Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes 1984, and No Way Out 1987 (which, incidentally, was dedicated to him after he passed away).
The unnerving score, including Wendy Carlos’s electronic “Dies Irae,” serves as a requiem not just for the Torrance family but also for the hotel’s lingering ghosts and, symbolically, America’s buried sins. Kubrick’s approach is famously ambiguous, resisting definitive psychological or supernatural explanations. Essentially, The Shining is a metaphysical and narrative maze.
What haunts the film, what haunts Jack, in particular, is as much internal as external: addiction, suppressed fury, failures as a husband and father, and the lure of destructive cycles. Freud’s idea of the “uncanny” pervades the action, as the familiar—family, home, one’s own face in the mirror, is rendered deeply strange and hostile.
Yet, the performances serve as the film’s central conduit, lending its abstract ideas tangible force, deepening the narrative’s resonance while ensuring its philosophical complexities remain vivid and immediate. What all the cast brings to the role transforms the lofty concepts into lived experience, so the film’s themes never become detached or purely theoretical.
Jack’s descent is both tragic and grotesquely comic; Wendy’s fear is the lens through which we experience the escalating terror; Danny is the medium through which the supernatural operates, but also the symbol of innocence, survival, and the possibility of escape.
Dialogues such as “Heeere’s Johnny!” as Jack furiously axes through the bathroom door, or the Grady twins’ spectral invitation, echo in cultural memory, signifying horror not just as an affect but as an inheritance, psychic, familial, collective consciousness, and historical.
Kubrick’s The Shining finally refuses to resolve itself within any one reading, no matter how many times you revisit it. Is evil an external force, a supernatural inheritance, or a tragic flaw that eats away from within? Does Jack always belong to the hotel, as the inexplicable final photograph suggests? The Shining is not simply a ghost story, but a meditation on the nature of storytelling, madness, and memory.
“The movie is not about ghosts but about madness and the energies it sets loose in an isolated situation primed to magnify them.”
— Roger Ebert, The Shining review, originally published in 1980“Stanley Kubrick’s cold and frightening The Shining challenges us to decide: Who is the reliable observer? Whose idea of events can we trust? … The result is alternatively baffling and terrifying to the very end.”
— Roger Ebert, The Shining: An Odyssey of Madness, 2023
Like the Overlook’s tableaux, the film endures, a Gothic palace whose secrets are ever open, never fully revealed. The Shining’s resonance lies in its refusal to offer easy answers, freezing us, like Jack in the hedge maze, in the perpetual search for meaning inside its austere, gilded, haunted halls and snowy landscape.
