Last Sunday LWLies was fortunate enough to attend a special anniversary screening of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. To coincide with the film’s 1980 UK release, a rapt audience at the Duke of York Picturehouse cinema in Brighton were treated to an original print of a rare US cut, with 20 minutes of material that didn’t feature on the European theatrical version.
30 years on, Kubrick’s intense psychological thriller has never looked better. The film’s excruciating pacing stands up as a masterclass in editing – asphyxiating the viewer through an unremitting, hypnotic sense of disequilibrium. It’s still a film of some ambiguity, regarded as a somewhat loose adaptation of Stephen King’s seminal novel, but the film’s iconographic inference of insanity and extreme claustrophobia, juxtaposed with the vastness of the Overlook Hotel, is a testament to a filmmaker of genuine subtlety and foresight.
The open-ended questions first posed to audiences three decades ago are as elusive as ever, as are the social interpretations that have long been supposed by commentators and film historians (references to the Holocaust and the treatment of Native Americans remain the most popular). As with many of his films Kubrick’s horror oeuvre was met with mixed criticism upon its original theatrical release.
Reverence has certainly matured over time, indeed The Shining has become a focus of countless pop culture pastiches, but aside from its narrative potency, the film’s atmospheric toning has become a template for modern horror cinema. As the confined, meandering hallways allow cabin fever to take hold; the hotel’s otherwise echoing expanse harbours an agoraphobic unease. The final pieces of Kubrick’s intricate puzzle come together just as you awake, in the centre of the maze, entombed by coniferous walls and facing the endless expanse of the snowbound Colorado ridge that lies beyond. It is a trapping, teasing film that wants you to look away, but never lets you.
Everything from the set designs, lighting and cinematography, to Wendy Carlos and Rachel Elkind’s searing score, works in unique disharmony – inflicting a disquieting chill on the audience all the while toying with your awareness of what’s to come. All this, of course, feeds in to a fraught family dynamic that hinges on three remarkable central performances. While Jack Nicholson’s haunted turn (evoking his unhinged inmate from five years prior in One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest) is rightly regarded as definitive, however, it is six-year-old Danny Lloyd as the Torrence’s psuedo-schizophrenic son whose benchmark in child acting remains to be surpassed.
If repeated small screen viewings can be said to dull appreciation of ‘classics’ like The Shining, it was fitting that this particular print was in immaculate condition – lying dormant all these years, Jack’s psychosis buried deep within its reels, waiting it out for its time to whirr back into life and unrest audiences all over again.
