Word: kubrick
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...SHINING Directed by Stanley Kubrick Screenplay by Stanley Kubrick and Diane Johnson...
...determined to find a super natural explanation for the strange goings-on in the old, grand, snowbound hotel in the Rockies, it is just barely possible to do so. But Stanley Kubrick really does not care. His adaptation of The Shining, Stephen King's pulpy haunted-house novel, keeps forcing reasonable - or non-occult - interpretations on the behavior, variously bonkers and bloody, that his camera records with its customary elegance. Whether his stylistic mastery and rigorous intelligence will carry this film to commercial success with the bedrock audience for horror - a young crowd that likes its metaphysics murky...
From the start Kubrick hints at reversals to come. There is something false in Nicholson's bonhomie as he applies for the job. Shortly thereafter a history of drifting and alcoholism is casually alluded to. This man may not be the usual horror-story victim of the inexplicable. Quite the opposite; one begins to wonder if he might not turn out to be the source of the story's evil instead of its plaything. Then, too, his son's gifts for precognition and telepathy, also quickly established, do not seem to be evidence of demonic possession...
Once the Torrances are settled in, Kubrick refuses to characterize the hotel as a conventionally haunted house. Its corridors are brightly lit, nothing goes bump in the night. Even the strange visions, when they begin to appear, are not necessarily to be seen as spooky apparitions, but as the hallucinations of a mind - Nicholson's - allowing itself to be drawn toward the violent conclusion the child has foreseen...
This is a movie of false clues and red herrings. It is a measure of Kubrick's artistry that he states his only supernatural theme, that of reincarnation, so lightly that it could be missed entirely. One has to connect the enigmatic scene involving a nude woman in Room 237 with the film's last image, of a photograph taken in 1921, in order to apprehend it. That, too, could be a false clue, since everything Nicholson does can be attributed to psychosis, to a weakened mind placed under intolerable pressure by isolation...