A Masterpiece of Madness: Why The Shining Remains the Ultimate Horror Experience

Rating: ★★★★★

In the vast, blood-soaked pantheon of horror cinema, there are scary movies, and then there is The Shining. To merely call Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 adaptation of the Stephen King novel a "horror movie" feels like a disservice. It is a towering monolith of cinema—a psychological opera of isolation, domestic disintegration, and supernatural dread that has not lost a single ounce of its potency in over four decades and it's back in cinemas for its 45th anniversary. It is a film that doesn't just frighten you; it infects you. It lingers in the mind long after the credits have rolled.

There is a reason why The Shining is dissected in film schools, obsessed over by conspiracy theorists in documentaries like Room 237, and referenced constantly in pop culture. It is a perfect storm of technical precision, unhinged performances, and atmospheric oppression. Watching it today, one is struck not by how much it has aged, but by how terrifyingly modern it remains. It is the gold standard against which all psychological horror is measured.

At the helm of this descent into madness is Stanley Kubrick, a director infamous for his perfectionism, and The Shining is perhaps the ultimate testament to his rigorous, almost clinical style. Kubrick approaches the horror genre not with the frenetic energy of a slasher film, but with the cold, detached observation of a scientist watching bacteria multiply in a drop of water.

From the opening aerial shots, sweeping over the pristine, indifferent beauty of Glacier National Park to the ominous sound of Berlioz’s Dies Irae, Kubrick establishes a sense of scale that makes the human characters feel insignificant. He tells us immediately: nature is vast, cold, and uncaring, and the Torrance family is driving straight into its maw.

Kubrick’s use of the Steadicam—then a relatively new technology—is nothing short of revolutionary. The camera glides through the corridors of the Overlook Hotel with a ghostly fluidity. We are not just watching the characters; we are stalking them. The famous tracking shots following young Danny Torrance on his tricycle, the camera hovering just above the floor, create a hypnotic rhythm. The sound design here is crucial—the alternating roar of the wheels on the wooden floor and the muffled silence as they hit the carpet—creates a heartbeat of tension that tightens the chest. It's a sequence and style that sticks.

Kubrick doesn't rely on jump scares (though he executes them perfectly when necessary); he relies on the terror of the inevitable. He shows us the horror that is coming, and forces us to wait for it.

One of the most unsettling aspects of The Shining—and one that contributes heavily to the subconscious feeling of "wrongness" that pervades the film—is the internal layout of the Overlook Hotel itself. The Overlook is not merely a setting; it is the film’s antagonist. It is a brooding, malevolent entity that breathes and shifts. Production designer Roy Walker, under Kubrick’s direction, created a set that is purposefully impossible. Dedicated fans and architects have analyzed the floor plan of the Overlook and found that it makes no physical sense. Doors lead to nowhere; windows exist on walls where there should be solid rock; hallways intersect in ways that defy Euclidean geometry. Take, for instance, the Ullman’s office scene. Behind the manager's desk lies a window with a view of the outside, yet based on the walk through the lobby to get there, that office is situated in the center of the building. There should be no window there. These spatial anomalies are likely intentional. They bypass our logical brain and strike directly at our primitive instincts, creating a state of low-level disorientation. We feel lost in the Overlook. I've had the good fortune to visit the actual hotel in Oregon, well, the outside as used in the film.

A great director and a great set are nothing without the human element, and the performances in The Shining are legendary, though often polarized. Jack Nicholson’s portrayal of Jack Torrance is a tour de force of manic energy. Critics sometimes argue that Nicholson looks crazy from the first scene, undermining the arc of his descent. I disagree. Nicholson plays Jack as a man barely holding it together from the start. He is a dry alcoholic, a failed writer, and a man simmering with resentment and rage before he even sets foot in the hotel. The Overlook doesn't create his madness; it unearths it. It strips away the veneer of social niceties and reveals the monster beneath.

Nicholson’s physicality is terrifying. The way he hurls a tennis ball against the wall with increasing aggression, the way his eyebrows arch in mock sympathy, the way he limps through the snow with an axe—it is a performance of grotesque exaggeration that fits perfectly with the operatic tone of the film. His "Here’s Johnny!" moment is iconic, but his quieter moments—talking to the ghost of Grady in the bathroom, or the chilling "I’m not gonna hurt ya, I’m just gonna bash your brains in" scene—are where the true menace lies.

However, the unsung hero of this film, and the performance that actually makes the horror work, is Shelley Duvall as Wendy Torrance. For years, her performance was unfairly maligned as shrill or weak. History has vindicated her. Wendy is the audience surrogate; she is the only rational person in a world gone mad. Duvall’s performance is harrowing. She conveys a visceral, exhausting terror that is painful to watch. The scene on the staircase, where she backs away from Jack while swinging a baseball bat, is a masterclass in reactive acting. Her voice cracks, her hands tremble, her eyes are wide with the disbelief that the man she loves is trying to kill her. Kubrick notoriously pushed Duvall to her breaking point to get this performance, and while the ethics of his methods are debatable, the result is undeniable. Without Duvall’s raw, trembling vulnerability, Nicholson’s monster would have no counterweight. She provides the emotional stakes that ground the supernatural chaos.

And we cannot forget Danny Lloyd as Danny. To get such a natural, unforced performance from a child actor is rare. His invention of "Tony," the "little boy who lives in his mouth," is deeply unsettling. The way he channels the psychic energy of the hotel—the "shining"—is done with a quiet intensity that belies his age.

Visuals account for only half of the terror in The Shining. The other half belongs to the soundscape, specifically the electronic score by Wendy Carlos and Rachel Elkind, intertwined with the avant-garde compositions of Krzysztof Penderecki and György Ligeti.

Wendy Carlos, a pioneer of electronic music, crafted a score that sounds like the music of a funeral procession on another planet. The main title theme, a reimagining of the Dies Irae (Day of Wrath) plainchant, played on a Moog synthesizer, sets a tone of majestic doom. It is heavy, distorted, and synthetic, creating a feeling of unease before a single word is spoken. It signals that this is not a traditional gothic horror; it is something colder, something alien.

Crucially, the music often plays against the scene. In the opening drive, the scenery is beautiful, but the music is funereal. In the climax, the music becomes a cacophony of chaotic noise that mirrors the panic of the chase. The sound design blurs the line between score and sound effect—is that a heartbeat, or a drum? Is that the wind, or a voice? This sonic ambiguity keeps the viewer in a state of constant physiological arousal.

The Shining is a 5-star film not because it answers all our questions, but because it dares to leave them unanswered. Is the hotel haunted? Is Jack crazy? Is it all a hallucination? The film offers evidence for all possibilities and commits to none. It suggests that the true horror is not the ghost in the bathtub or the blood in the elevator, but the violence that can erupt within the nuclear family. It is a film about the failure of the father, the vulnerability of the child, and the isolation of the soul.

Kubrick took a pulp horror novel and transmuted it into high art. He created images—the twin girls, the blood elevator, the frozen grimace of Jack Torrance—that are burned into the collective consciousness of humanity. It is a film that demands to be seen on the biggest screen possible, with the volume turned up, in the dark and I'm delighted that it's back in cinemas.

It is a perfect film. It is a terrible, beautiful, perfect nightmare. If you have never seen it, you are missing a cornerstone of cinema. If you have seen it, watch it again; the Overlook always has a new room waiting for you.