The Shining Is the Horror Film People Quote at You Before You've Even Seen It

There is a specific kind of film that becomes furniture in people's heads long before they've actually watched it. You know the axe through the door. You know the twins standing at the end of the hallway holding hands. You know someone saying "Here's Johnny" in a voice that isn't quite their own. The Shining did that to itself decades before I was born, and I spent a good chunk of my life nodding along to references to a film I hadn't seen, which is a very specific flavour of fraud.

For anyone in the same boat: The Shining is a 1980 film directed by Stanley Kubrick, based on the Stephen King novel, about a writer called Jack Torrance who takes a winter caretaking job at an isolated hotel with his wife and young son. The hotel is snowed in for months. The hotel is also, it turns out, not keen on being alone with them. That's the whole premise, and Kubrick stretches it out for over two hours without ever really rushing.

Watching it properly, finally

I put it on the way I put most things on, badly timed and a bit too late in the evening, with a coffee that had already gone cold by the second scene. I mention this because The Shining does not reward that kind of distracted viewing. It is slow in a way modern horror rarely dares to be. Long corridors. Long silences. A carpet pattern that I now think about more than is healthy. If you go in expecting constant scares you will spend the first hour wondering what all the fuss is about, and then somewhere around the hour mark you will notice your shoulders are up around your ears and you're not sure when that happened.

That's the trick of it. Nothing about the Overlook Hotel is obviously wrong at first. It's grand, it's empty, it's a bit cold looking, but so is my flat in January. Kubrick lets the wrongness build so gradually that by the time Jack is having conversations with a bartender who quite possibly isn't there, you've already accepted the hotel's logic without noticing you did it.

The bit everyone quotes, and the bit nobody mentions

Jack Nicholson gets all the famous lines, fair enough, his performance tips from mildly irritable to fully unspooled so gradually you can't point to the exact scene where he crosses over. But the performance I kept thinking about afterwards was Shelley Duvall's. She plays fear the way an actual frightened person behaves: badly, gracelessly, often too late. It's not glamorous acting and I think that's exactly why it's stuck with me. Most horror films let their scared characters look composed while screaming. Duvall looks like someone who has genuinely stopped trusting her own husband, in real time, with nowhere to go.

I won't pretend I've worked out what the ending means. There are entire documentaries devoted to the photograph at the end, the maze, the numbers on doors that don't add up, and I am not going to sit here and act like I've cracked it after one viewing on a Tuesday. What I will say is that a film that still has people arguing about a single photograph forty-odd years later has clearly done something right, even if that something is mostly "left everyone slightly unsettled and unwilling to admit they don't fully understand it."

Would I recommend a night in with it

Yes, with conditions. Watch it properly, not with one eye on your phone, because the slowness is the point and rushing it will just leave you bored rather than unsettled. Have the lights low but not off, because there's a difference between atmospheric and reckless. And maybe don't watch it during a cold snap if your own heating is being temperamental, because I did and I have never been so aware of how quiet an empty flat can get.

If you want it properly, the way it's meant to be seen rather than half remembered from other people's references, The Shining Blu-ray steelbook is the one to get. It's the sort of film that deserves better than a shaky stream at 1am, which is, admittedly, exactly how most of us end up watching horror films anyway.

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