The Shining (Stanley Kubrick, 1981): USA

Reviewed by Robin Eriksson. Viewed at Santa Barbara Film Festival 2013.

rqrqrJack Nicholson, Shelley Duvall and Danny Lloyd are three main actors in the movie “The Shining” Just the three increases the intimidation factor of the film to new heights. Jack is the man and the protagonist in the movie has just got a job as a caretaker in a large hotel located very isolated mountainside. Wendy is married to Jack. Danny is Wendy’s and Jack’s son who sometimes get images in his head and can see the terrible things that happened, and bad things that will happen in the future. But it is once they come to the house, quite isolated from the outside world, as it starts to happen.

A typical horror elements are typewriter scene. Jack looking for work in the big house, among other things, to write in his book and get peace and quiet. He is a writer and writes a lot throughout the day, Wendy can not see what he writes and Jack becomes always very aggressive when she comes into the room while he works. Wendy walks into the room to look for Jack.
He’s not there so she walks slowly towards the typewriter as he wrote constantly on for several weeks. She takes up a paper in which he the whole paper written with small text row after row “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” she’ll check next to the typewriter and get to see a stack of paper, she’ll check on the first paper, is the same thing, continue to browse and all she can see here “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” line out and line-in, paper after paper, and Wendy is getting more and more excited. Jack comes in, he speaks with a quiet voice that constantly gets louder and louder, angrier and angrier he becomes. He’s very intimidating and Wendy tries to get away from her husband, but he walks slowly toward her while he was yelling at her.

She becomes more and more squeezed by Jack and beat frantically at him with a baseball bat until he is approaching so much that he gets a slap in his head and falls unconscious to the ground.
But there are many more horror elements in this film.

As i already said, it is Jack who is the monster in the film. I thought there would be someone in room 237 which was the monster. Jack does not look like the type to get a mental case and become paranoid, he’s just a regular writer who applied for the job to get peace and quiet so that he could write in his book. But it turns out to be something totally different.

I will not write anything about the new effects in the film, because i don’t have any particular skills on those kind of things.

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Published:
02.11.13 / 8pm
Category:
Films, Santa Barbara Film Festival 2013