Why is the shining so good

We are in the realm of Freud's " The Uncanny" and Bettelheim's Uses of Enchantment , two texts Kubrick and collaborator Diane Johnson consulted while writing the script. The Shining is, in a way, a fairy tale, though a fairy tale as the Brother Grimm would have written it, not as it would have been adapted by Disney. Kubrick also does a great deal of visual signposting not surprising, as he was one of the most purely cinematic of the big Hollywood directors.

From the framing of shots that feature knives over Danny's head , to the way Jack's isolation is communicated visually: after the beginning of the film, it's rare to see Jack with either Wendy or Danny, "and on those rare occasions," says Jack's Movies Reviews, "if they are in the same frame, one is the foreground Building on the first reason, the film's use of Dramatic Irony , or, the sort of irony where "the audience knows something that the characters don't," is exemplary, and this variety of the ironic has been used to savage effect for thousands of years, from the climax of Oedipus Rex to ; Macbeth and on and on.

It is a way of unifying the story and the audience, and "creating horror through inevitability. We, in the audience, know that the protagonists are going to be cut off from the outside world, and that Jack is going to go insane, but, because the film follows the logic more of a dream than real life, the characters do not respond to this information in the way they would in a psychologically realistic work.

After what Jack video Jack refers to as an "information overload in the first thirty minutes of the movie," the section where we are led around the hotel at a brisk pace, learning the layout kind of , the film abruptly switches gears and goes into a long section where we withdraw and observe the family going about their daily lives in the hotel. Nothing happens, per se, but, as mentioned before, Jack does begin to distance himself from the family, quietly losing his grip, and all while the Steadicam "seems to glide around," having "a mind of its own," almost like the consciousness of the hotel.

Nothing really "happens" until about forty-five minutes into the film, and it's much longer than that before Jack really begins to go haywire. In the hotel, at the mercy of its powerful evil, he is quickly ready to fulfil his dark role.

The descent of chaos that Jack succumbs to is visually uncomfortable. The littlest Torrance provides a strong emotional core to the story. At the age of five, Danny Lloyd played this difficult character well — especially since the actor had not been told he was filming a horror movie.

The scenes of little Danny riding his tricycle through the vast empty hallways of the hotel have become synonymous with tension-building, as the audience waits for the next jump scare. Equally praise-worthy is Shelley Duvall as the wife of Jack Torrance, a role she plays with genuine fear and anxiety.

The scene entered The Guinness Book of Records as the most takes ever for a scene with spoken dialogue and her shaking hands and red, puffy, eyes are the result of genuine crying. What does the ending mean? What does the man in the dog costume represent? Was Jack Torrance always destined to lose his mind or did isolation drive him to it?

When Jack finally meets Grady while at a ghostly ballroom party taking place at the hotel, Grady is now a server and s a drink on Jack.

Come and play with us. Come and play with us Danny, forever and ever and ever. Kubrick presented a premise that someone could relive their sins over and over trapped in some godforsaken hotel.

At the end of the film, the camera does a slow track down the hallway until the camera arrives at a close-up of a framed photograph hanging on the wall showing a ballroom party from the s, and in the crowd smiling is Jack Torrance. Author Bio: R. I know taste is a personal thing but to call this the best horror movie of all time is silly.

I find catch phrases annoying, too. Great article. True horror is reality. Requiem for A Dream is far more horrifying because it can and does happen. Not agreed that the book is better than the movie. I went back and reread the book of The Shining a few years back, and it has aged badly. Did you read the last two Dark Tower books? I would say that ending your magnum opus as messily as that definitely constitutes the work of a hack.

The carnage never ends. The Shining at will we ever fully understand what it all means? Danny Lloyd in The Shining. I've never seen … The Shining.