The Shining (BFI Film Classics), by Roger Luckhurst

5%
Kubrick’s relationship to the horror genre was soon grasped in a different way by more reflective critics. The director seemed to have a parodic or subversive approach, turning Gothic conventions on their head, locating the horror not in supernatural threats to the nuclear family but erupting from its domestic heart.

7%
This is in the nature of paranoid readings: The Shining does to its viewers what the hotel does to its visitors – it makes them shine on things glimpsed that were perhaps never there, or were there all along, hiding in plain sight.

43%
All ghosts are signs of broken story, demanding someone takes up their narrative, in whatever spirit, and bear witness to silent wrongs.

48%
Bored, he looms over the model of the maze, conjuring a tiny wife and child at its heart, a startling trick shot created by shooting the centre of the maze from a high overhead rostrum camera and then matting the shot into the maze model. He is already tempted to regard himself as the master of his domain, his overlook the apparent perspective of power, an early identification with the forces of the hotel.

49%
In the following scene, as Wendy and Danny frolic through the heavy snow, Jack stands immobile as a black monolith, his features utterly frozen, a man entirely hollowed out, catatonic. That high-pitched sound associated with the shining creeps into the soundtrack, and although we see nothing supernatural, I wonder if it isn’t the sound of Jack’s empty vessel being filled with the venom of the Overlook’s history.

62%
It is often said that Kubrick veers between two extreme styles of acting: a kind of numbed, blank mode typical of the astronauts in 2001 or Ryan O’Neal in Barry Lyndon, and the exaggerated, expressionist style of Peter Sellers as Dr Strangelove or Patrick Magee in A Clockwork Orange. The face-off between Philip Stone and Jack Nicholson brings these two clashing styles together. It is the stillness of Stone’s performance that amplifies the expressionist tones of Nicholson’s portrayal; it is the launch pad for Nicholson to lose his restraint, and explode.

67%
In retrospect, The Shining seems like a threshold in Nicholson’s career, a role that for many trapped him in self-parody. We have to watch The Shining back through the performances in the 1980s that fixed this stereotype: Daryl Van Horne in The Witches of Eastwick (1987) or The Joker in Tim Burton’s Batman (1989), in which he essentially plays the character ‘Jack Nicholson from The Shining’. It is not really Nicholson’s fault that The Shining is viewed through the lens of his subsequent performances, yet it is impossible not to watch the Kubrick film and see in the last act the form of a fixed persona taking shape.

77%
Most significantly, though, the wave of blood from the lift is finally attached to a person. The vision, the image Danny (and the audience of the teasing trailers, six months before the release) has seen from the very first, is witnessed by his mother, at the moment of her greatest extremity. It marks the sense that the power of the Overlook Hotel has reached its full force: that it can enfold anyone into its psychic world now.