The Shining

A recovering drinker takes a job as the winter caretaker of a grand, empty mountain hotel, moving his wife and young son in for a season with no one else around for miles. He hopes the peace and quiet will do him good. Reader, it does not.

The boy has a gift he can't quite explain, a way of sensing things in the hotel that shouldn't be there, and it isn't long before the building starts pressing back on all three of them. This isn't a film that jumps out at you. It works slower, through empty corridors, patterned carpets and a silence that never quite settles, until the dread is just part of the air you're breathing.

It's one for a long, properly dark evening, watched with someone who won't talk over the quiet bits, because the quiet bits are the whole point. Stanley Kubrick built something that unsettles you gradually rather than all at once, and once you've seen that hotel, empty corridors never look quite the same again.