Stanley Kubrick's horror classic has stood the test of time – it is terrifying because it takes us into the most awful place: our own heads As much of a fixture on the filmic calendar as prematurely manic Oscar speculation, once Halloween approaches many minds turn to movies of a sinister bent. Cue warm tributes to Brazil's Nietzschean bogeyman Coffin Joe, or Facet Features' annual 31-day celebration of the likes of Wendigo and The Tingler. But for me, as much as I try and broaden my horizons, every time I come to write or even think about the subject I come creeping back to the same film. Because in my small corner of the world, Halloween, horror movies, even cinema, full stop, are all about The Shining. And it's strange, because I saw it young and was predictably awestruck, yet for years afterwards it never seemed to have any great hold on me. But recently Kubrick's monstrous tour de force has loomed ever more insistently over my whole relationship with film. Its memory is, I've found, unshakable, as if the same dreadful currents the story located in the walls of the Overlook hotel somehow bled into the film itself and then, in turn, my private headspace.God knows, its physical presence was powerful enough: the sheer grim spectacle of the snowbound Overlook or the fleeting bear-suit fellatio – so much rendered so appallingly dreamlike by its lack of explanation. All great horror films (all great films, period) share the ability to push your buttons, but The Shining was a symphony drummed out on the softest and most vulnerable points of the psyche. In the murderous Jack Torrance, we're presented with cinema's greatest portrait of predestiny: helplessness before fate however awful, the Fourth of July group photo waiting for us all. The true horror isn't that Jack wants to kill his wife and child, but that he sees it as his duty.
There is, I realise, nothing very original about being under the spell of The Shining, staple of Family Guy pastiches and old Channel 4 100 Moments shows that it is. And yet, however overfamiliar its set pieces might be, there are times when even the most wilfully contrary of us have to fall in line with mainstream opinion. Because no matter how often we see Jack Nicholson gurning his way through the bathroom door, the pure cold magnificence of The Shining still leaves us freaked out to our cores – no amount of comic parody able to house-train this most profoundly disturbing of movies.
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