Yesterday I had a chance to watch the Shining on a big screen and I noticed a couple of interesting things about it. First of all, it had been a few years since I first saw it, and I have watched a lot of horror between then and now, but it struck me how disturbing the movie was. It cannot compete with the gore of recent French horror (like Martyrs, for example, highly recommended!) or with the sheer physical terror of Japanese horror, but when it comes to creating an atmosphere of something profoundly wrong going on, few comes even close to this movie. The only movie I can really compare it to, is Don’t Look Now, and the two movies share quite a few features, like a prominent use of red and childlike characters with psychic abilities. But their main common denominator is the sense that both films manage to give the viewer an almost gut-level impression of the paranormal events, without showing too much. Kubrick occasionally shows a little too much (I could do without the scene in Room 237), so ultimately Don’t Look Now is a slightly better movie, but that doesn’t make the Shining bad. In fact, when you take into account the beautiful set decorations and arguably the best horror score ever, it should be counted among the finest horror movies. And I didn’t even mention Jack Nicholson!
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