Why the scariest part of The Shining isn’t what you think
It’s been 45 years since The shiny came out, we’ve had countless horror films since with incredibly high kill counts and absolutely shocking In terms of imagery, I should be desensitized to a story in which – spoilers for a cinema classic – only two people die, and one because the doofus couldn’t get out of a hedge maze. And yet this film is scary in a way that’s really hard to pin down…how did Stanley Kubrick manage to take photos of a corridor scary? Well, by making these hallways not just scary, but more specifically strange.
Nowadays, “Uncanny” is a concept most often used in discourse about robots and computer animation. The Uncanny Valley, I know you’ve heard of it, or at least you know the feeling it evokes — The abject horror of This kid from the Polar Express, Hell, get him off the screen. Strangeness – capital T, capital U, speaks of the fear of something that is not fully unknown… it is unfamiliar, yet retains elements of familiarity, and this tension causes a deep sense of unease. Back in the Valley, think about those robots moving in a slightly wrong way, and all of a sudden you feel unsafe, unsafe, but you don’t even know exactly why. And it’s not limited to robots and animation, of course, many things can be described as strange, including ghosts, doppelgangers and mirrors, and can even be used to describe a human face.
Breaking it down, there’s a throughline here: we’re faced with human or humanoid bodies that aren’t quite what we expect, attracting fears of loss of identity, fears of mortality, fears of childhood nightmares suddenly becoming reality… but let’s go further, crossing the threshold from strange bodies into strange. places. For example, have you ever been to a dead mall? There should be people there. It is built for foot traffic and to allow noise to travel, but it is empty, silent and crumbling. There’s nothing dangerous there, but it’s terrible to be there, it feels disabled.
Kubrick relied on this feeling to the end with The shinywhich takes place in a hotel closed for the season. The hallways and living rooms are empty — Also empty. This is concerning from the start, because this is just not what a hotel is supposed to look like, what it feels like. But sure, many movies take place in creepy old houses, but that’s not the case with the Overlook Hotel. scaryat least at first glance. There are not cobwebs, creaky floorboards and disjointed architecture that distinguish the classic haunted house. Instead, Kubrick decided to make the Overlook as real as possible, sending photographers to capture hundreds of photos of real hotel lobbies, rooms, and elevators, then choosing the ones he found most interesting or evocative to construct his sets, replicating them to the nearest inch. Literally, they photographed the spaces with framed rulers to make sure they were to scale. The Red Bathroom where Jack meets Grady: it was a real bathroom, created one-on-one on a soundstage in England. The fact that all these spaces are clean, unremarkable and downright normal This only makes the discomfort all the more pronounced, because they resemble spaces we know well. But something is clearly wrong with this hotel, and we just can’t put our finger on what’s wrong.
It’s been 45 years, but the vibe of The Overlook is still a phenomenon. So of course the lady in the bathtub is pretty scary, as are the twins. But at least for us, the most memorable moments of this film are the long shots traversing the hallways, the echoing emptiness of the Colorado Lounge, the unwavering sense of wrongness that The Overlook Hotel brings by simply being normal, and not, all at once.
What do you think? Do The shiny Still gives you nightmares, or has it become unfashionable, at least as an entry into the horror genre? Let us know in the comments!
