by Maureen McCabe
Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, based on Stephen King’s novel of the same name, came out in 1980 and probably seems pretty tame by today’s standards. But to me, it remains a quite frightening memory, and is still the only movie I can remember shrieking at in the theater. From the opening strains of the soundtrack, one of the most ominous ever recorded, to the last “say what” clip of an old photograph, the movie rackets up the tension and the fear in a carefully calibrated way that might be more aptly described as traumatizing rather than terrifying, although it manages to do both at once quite handily. Jack Nicholson’s portrayal of a writer battling alcoholism, writer’s block and his own latent propensity for violence is justly legendary. His character’s descent into madness is so vividly rendered that long before he picks up that axe, the viewer of The Shining is primed to expect the worst, which is lurking in every endless corridor and its protagonist’s dark heart.
