For its forty-fifth anniversary this year, Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 film The Shining received a re-release in IMAX theaters this past weekend. The film is nothing short of a magnum opus of terror, a startling work that so effectively encapsulates a suffocating sense of dread that it remains prescient to this day. And yet, perhaps one of the most shocking things about The Shining remains its unique ability to completely and totally subvert whatever expectations and audience may have of it.
Coming off the back of the commercial failure of his 1975 period-piece epic Barry Lyndon, Stanley Kubrick needed a win. For years prior to that, the widely renowned filmmaker had been in an imperial phase; no matter how ambitious and lunacy-filled his cinematic swings got, audiences were there to meet him. Films like Lolita, Dr. Strangelove, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and A Clockwork Orange were far from conventional works, and yet Kubrick’s keen marketing eye and meticulous sensibilities helped turn them into zeitgeist-capturing works throughout the ‘60s and ‘70s. So, feeling stung after audiences failed to show the same enthusiasm toward Barry Lyndon, Kubrick sought out a new project that could provide him with a commercial and critical success, putting him back on top. It was during this period that he came across Stephen King’s freshly-released 1977 novel, The Shining.
In The Shining, Kubrick saw a workable template through which he could deliver a horror film rooted in interpersonal dynamics and themes that had driven the sum total of his work up until this point. He hired author Diane Johnson to co-write the screenplay with him, setting about adapting King’s novel into a commercially viable film. And yet, despite all of these core motivating factors, the resulting film is so much stranger and more opaque than audiences could have ever anticipated. Kubrick had delivered a lengthy film that left audiences to marinate in the discomfort and crescendoing unease of the Overlook Hotel; one that felt full of quiet rage, resentment, and nihilism. Infamously, the film was so off-putting that even Stephen King himself denounced it publicly.
This is all made even more interesting by considering the market into which The Shining was released. For frame of reference, some of the other big horror titles that hit cinemas in 1980 included the likes of Friday the 13th, Terror Train, and Prom Night; all of which came in at a runtime nearly half of what The Shining was sporting and featured a distinctly different kind of pace and tone. Kubrick’s horror film moves at a deliberate, exacting pace, forming visual and sonic rhythms that have a near-hypnotic effect on the viewer, inviting them to sink deeper into the film’s all-consuming terror. But this is a decidedly different approach than what audiences were accustomed to form mainstream horror films of the time, and fascinatingly, that remains true to this day.
Upon release, Kubrick helped to guide the marketing of The Shining to pitch it as an event horror film, but one that felt akin to other successful genre films, in an effort to solidify its commercial prospects. This mantra has endured to this very day, with even the IMAX re-release posters simplifying the film down to a few key horror-entrenched elements: Jack Nicholson, the axe, “Here’s Johnny,” etc. But like so many of the greatest horror films of all time, those genre elements are utilized as a Trojan Horse of sorts, concealing the real meat of the film.
Even in the theater I saw The Shining in this past weekend, I could feel audience members chafing against the film’s sensibilities. There were clearly people in attendance who had never seen the film before and simply knew it from generalities and pop-cultural osmosis, and they were shocked to find not a straightforward horror film starring Jack Nicholson and Shelley Duvall, but instead this monumental and dictative work.
While there are obviously some audience members, both back in 1980 and especially in the modern day, who are going to simply refuse to go on the experiential journey that The Shining actually is, and will instead begrudge it for what it isn’t, I find Kubrick’s approach here to be invigorating. Rather than an easy watch, The Shining swallows you whole. You don’t leave The Shining with clear answers, and that makes it all the richer an experience as a result. It’s a film that pulls the rug out from under audiences, turning their own modest expectations in on themselves and instead delivering something genuinely upsetting and invasive. The result has stood the test of time, and been rightfully praised as one of the greatest horror films of all time.