The Shining Stanley Kubrick

Box office

The Shining opened on the same weekend as The Empire Strikes Back but was released on 10 screens and grossed $622,337 for the four-day weekend, the third highest-grossing opening weekend from fewer than 50 screens of all time, behind Star Wars (1977) and The Rose (1979).[66] It had a per-screen average gross of $62,234 compared to $50,919 for The Empire Strikes Back from 126 screens.[93]

Initial reviews

The film had mixed reviews at the time of its opening in the United States.[94] Janet Maslin of The New York Times lauded Nicholson's performance and praised the Overlook Hotel as an effective setting for horror, but wrote that "the supernatural story knows frustratingly little rhyme or reason ... Even the film's most startling horrific images seem overbearing and perhaps even irrelevant."[95] Variety was critical, stating "With everything to work with ... Kubrick has teamed with jumpy Jack Nicholson to destroy all that was so terrifying about Stephen King's bestseller."[96] A common initial criticism was the slow pacing, which was highly atypical of horror films of the time.[97] Neither Gene Siskel nor Roger Ebert reviewed the film on their television show Sneak Previews when it was first released,[98] but in his review for the Chicago Sun-Times, Ebert complained that it was hard to connect with any of the characters.[99] In his Chicago Tribune review, Siskel gave the film two stars out of four and called it "a crashing disappointment. The biggest surprise is that it contains virtually no thrills. Given Kubrick's world-class reputation, one's immediate reaction is that maybe he was after something other than thrills in the film. If so, it's hard to figure out what."[100] Kevin Thomas of the Los Angeles Times wrote "There are moments so visually stunning only a Kubrick could pull them off, yet the film is too grandiose to be the jolter that horror pictures are expected to be. Both those expecting significance from Kubrick and those merely looking for a good scare may be equally disappointed."[101] Pauline Kael of The New Yorker stated "Again and again, the movie leads us to expect something – almost promises it – and then disappoints us."[102] Gary Arnold of The Washington Post wrote "Stanley Kubrick's production of The Shining, a ponderous, lackluster distillation of Stephen King's best-selling novel, looms as the Big Letdown of the new film season. I can't recall a more elaborately ineffective scare movie."[103] Stanley Kauffmann of The New Republic described The Shining as 'laborious filmmaking' and 'a grab bag of spook stuff, with no rhyme or reason of its own' and that Nicholson's 'mouthy work here makes the late Bela Lugosi look conservative'.[104]

It was one of only two films of Kubrick's last eleven films, the other being Eyes Wide Shut, to receive no nominations from the BAFTAs. It was the only one of Kubrick's last nine films to receive no nominations from either the Oscars or Golden Globes. Instead, it was Kubrick's only film to be nominated at the Razzie Awards, including Worst Director and Worst Actress (Duvall),[105] in the first year that award was given.[106][107][108] These nominations, especially Duvall's, have provoked backlash and controversy for years,[109][110][111] with Razzies founder John J. B. Wilson defending his choice claiming he expected the adaptation to be more similar to the book,[112] and Duvall's nomination was retracted by the Razzie committee on March 31, 2022, stating that she did not deserve it due to the "extenuating circumstances" of Kubrick's treatment of her.[113] Vincent Misiano's review in Ares magazine concluded: "The Shining lays open to view all the devices of horror and suspense – endless eerie music, odd camera angles, a soundtrack of interminably pounding heart, hatchets and hunts. The result is shallow, self-conscious and dull. Read the book."[114]

Reappraisal

According to Rotten Tomatoes, 83% of 105 critics gave the film a positive review, with an average rating of 8.6/10. The site's critical consensus reads: "Though it deviates from Stephen King's novel, Stanley Kubrick's The Shining is a chilling, often baroque journey into madness — exemplified by an unforgettable turn from Jack Nicholson."[115] On Metacritic, it has a weighted average score of 66 out of 100 based on reviews from 26 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews".[116] Tim Cahill of Rolling Stone noted in an interview with Kubrick that by 1987 there was already a "critical re-evaluation of [The Shining] in process".[117]

In 2001, the film was ranked 29th on AFI's 100 Years...100 Thrills list[118] and Jack Torrance was named the 25th greatest villain on the AFI's 100 Years...100 Heroes and Villains list in 2003.[119] In 2005, the quote "Here's Johnny!" was ranked 68 on AFI's 100 Years...100 Movie Quotes list.[120] It had Channel 4's all-time scariest moment,[121] and Bravo TV named one of the film's scenes sixth on their list of the 100 Scariest Movie Moments. Film critics Kim Newman and Jonathan Romney both placed it in their top ten lists for the 2002 Sight & Sound poll. In 2005, Total Film ranked The Shining as the 5th-greatest horror film of all time.[122] In 2012, Sight & Sound directors' poll ranked it the 75th greatest film of all time.[123] Director Martin Scorsese placed it on his list of the 11 scariest horror films of all time.[124] Mathematicians at King's College London (KCL) used statistical modeling in a study commissioned by Sky Movies to conclude that The Shining was the "perfect scary movie" due to a proper balance of various ingredients including shock value, suspense, gore and size of the cast.[125] In 2010, The Guardian newspaper ranked it as the 5th "best horror film of all time".[126] It was voted the 62nd greatest American film ever made in a 2015 poll conducted by BBC.[127] In 2017, Empire magazine's readers' poll ranked the film at No. 35 on its list of "The 100 Greatest Movies", and in 2023 Empire also ranked it No. 1 on its list of "The 50 Best Horror Movies".[128][129] In 2021, The film was ranked at No. 2 by Time Out on their list of "The 100 best horror movies".[130] Critics, scholars, and crew members (such as Kubrick's producer Jan Harlan) have discussed the film's enormous influence on popular culture.[131][132][133] In 2006, Roger Ebert, who was initially critical of the work, inducted the film into his Great Movies series, saying "Stanley Kubrick's cold and frightening The Shining challenges us to decide: Who is the reliable observer? Whose idea of events can we trust? ... It is this elusive open-endedness that makes Kubrick's film so strangely disturbing."[68]

While Duvall's performance was originally nominated for a Razzie, Razzies co-founder Maureen Murphy stated in 2022 that she regretted giving Duvall the Worst Actress nomination.[134][135] On March 31, 2022, the Razzie committee officially rescinded Duvall's nomination, stating "We have since discovered that Duvall's performance was impacted by Stanley Kubrick's treatment of her throughout the production."[113] The retraction of the nomination was in response to public backlash The Razzies received after refusing to retract Bruce Willis's win for "Worst Bruce Willis Performance in a 2021 Movie", a one-off award for his roles in eight films released that calendar year.[136] Willis's family announced the star's retirement after being diagnosed with aphasia, a cognitive brain condition, on March 30, 2022.[137] The Razzie committee retracted both Willis's win and Duvall's nomination the following day.[113] On Duvall's performance, Vulture magazine wrote in 2019: "looking into Duvall's huge eyes from the front row of a theater, I found myself riveted by a very poignant form of fear. Not the fear of an actor out of her element, or the more mundane fear of a victim being chased around by an ax-wielding maniac. Rather, it was something far more disquieting, and familiar: the fear of a wife who's experienced her husband at his worst, and is terrified that she'll experience it again."[138] Media site Screen Rant described Duvall as "the heart of the film; she is out of her depth in dealing with her husband's looming insanity while trying to protect her young son, all while being fearful of the malevolence around her."[139]

Horror film critic Peter Bracke, reviewing the Blu-ray release in High-Def Digest, wrote:

Just as the ghostly apparitions of the film's fictional Overlook Hotel would play tricks on the mind of poor Jack Torrance, so too has the passage of time changed the perception of The Shining itself. Many of the same reviewers who lambasted the film for "not being scary" enough back in 1980 now rank it among the most effective horror films ever made, while audiences who hated the film back then now vividly recall being "terrified" by the experience. The Shining has somehow risen from the ashes of its own bad press to redefine itself not only as a seminal work of the genre, but perhaps the most stately, artful horror ever made.[97]

In 1999, Jonathan Romney discussed Kubrick's perfectionism and dispelled others' initial arguments that the film lacked complexity: "The final scene alone demonstrates what a rich source of perplexity The Shining offers ... look beyond the simplicity and the Overlook reveals itself as a palace of paradox". Romney further explains:

The dominating presence of the Overlook Hotel – designed by Roy Walker as a composite of American hotels visited in the course of research – is an extraordinary vindication of the value of mise en scène. It's a real, complex space that we don't just see but come to virtually inhabit. The confinement is palpable: horror cinema is an art of claustrophobia, making us loath to stay in the cinema but unable to leave. Yet it's combined with a sort of agoraphobia – we are as frightened of the hotel's cavernous vastness as of its corridors' enclosure ... The film sets up a complex dynamic between simple domesticity and magnificent grandeur, between the supernatural and the mundane in which the viewer is disoriented by the combination of spaciousness and confinement, and an uncertainty as to just what is real or not.[140]

Response by Stephen King

Stephen King has been quoted as saying that although Kubrick made a film with memorable imagery, it was poor as an adaptation[141] and that it is the only adaptation of his novels that he could "remember hating".[142] In his 1981 nonfiction book Danse Macabre, he noted that Kubrick was among those "filmmakers whose particular visions are so clear and fierce that ... fear of failure never becomes a factor in the equation," commenting that "even when a director such as Stanley Kubrick makes such a maddening, perverse, and disappointing film as The Shining, it somehow retains a brilliance that is inarguable; it is simply there," and listed Kubrick's film among those he considered to have "contributed something of value to the [horror] genre."[143] Before the 1980 film, King often said he gave little attention to the film adaptations of his work.[144]

The novel, written while King was suffering from alcoholism, contains an autobiographical element. King expressed disappointment that some themes, such as the disintegration of family and the dangers of alcoholism, are less present in the film. King also viewed the casting of Nicholson as a mistake, arguing it would result in a rapid realization among audiences that Jack would go insane, due to Nicholson's famous role as Randle McMurphy in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975). King had suggested that a more "everyman" actor such as Jon Voight, Christopher Reeve, or Michael Moriarty play the role, so that Jack's descent into madness would be more unnerving.[144] In the novel, the story takes the child's point of view, while in the film the father is the main character; in fact, one of the most notable differences lies in Jack Torrance's psychological profile. According to the novel, the character represented an ordinary and balanced man who little by little loses control; furthermore, the written narration reflected personal traits of the author himself at that time (marked by insomnia and alcoholism), in addition to abuse. There is some allusion to these episodes in the American version of the film.

In an interview with the BBC, King criticized Duvall's character, stating that she is "basically just there to scream and be stupid, and that's not the woman that I wrote about."[145] King's Wendy is a strong and independent woman on a professional and emotional level; to Kubrick, on the other hand, it did not seem consistent that such a woman had long endured the personality of Jack Torrance.[45]

King once suggested that he disliked the film's downplaying of the supernatural; King had envisioned Jack as a victim of the genuinely external forces haunting the hotel, whereas King felt Kubrick had viewed the haunting and its resulting malignancy as coming from within Jack himself.[146] In October 2013, journalist Laura Miller wrote that the discrepancy between the two was almost the complete opposite:[147]

King is, essentially, a novelist of morality. The decisions his characters make – whether it's to confront a pack of vampires or to break 10 years of sobriety – are what matter to him. But in Kubrick's The Shining, the characters are largely in the grip of forces beyond their control. It's a film in which domestic violence occurs, while King's novel is about domestic violence as a choice certain men make when they refuse to abandon a delusional, defensive entitlement. As King sees it, Kubrick treats his characters like "insects" because the director doesn't really consider them capable of shaping their own fates. Everything they do is subordinate to an overweening, irresistible force, which is Kubrick's highly developed aesthetic; they are its slaves. In King's The Shining, the monster is Jack. In Kubrick's, the monster is Kubrick.

King later criticized the film and Kubrick as a director:

Parts of the film are chilling, charged with a relentlessly claustrophobic terror, but others fall flat. Not that religion has to be involved in horror, but a visceral skeptic such as Kubrick just couldn't grasp the sheer inhuman evil of The Overlook Hotel. So he looked, instead, for evil in the characters and made the film into a domestic tragedy with only vaguely supernatural overtones. That was the basic flaw: because he couldn't believe, he couldn't make the film believable to others. What's basically wrong with Kubrick's version of The Shining is that it's a film by a man who thinks too much and feels too little; and that's why, for all its virtuoso effects, it never gets you by the throat and hangs on the way real horror should.[148]

King was disappointed by Kubrick's decision not to film at The Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, Colorado, which inspired the story (a decision Kubrick made since the hotel lacked sufficient snow and electricity). He supervised the 1997 television adaptation, also titled The Shining, filmed at The Stanley Hotel.

The animosity of King toward Kubrick's adaptation has dulled over time. During an interview segment on the Bravo channel, King stated that the first time he watched Kubrick's adaptation, he found it to be "dreadfully unsettling". Nonetheless, writing in the afterword of Doctor Sleep, King professed continued dissatisfaction with the Kubrick film. He said of it, "of course there was Stanley Kubrick's movie which many seem to remember – for reasons I have never quite understood – as one of the scariest films they have ever seen. If you have seen the movie but not read the novel, you should note that Doctor Sleep follows the latter which is, in my opinion, the True History of the Torrance Family."[149]

Mike Flanagan, director of the film adaptation of Doctor Sleep, would reconcile the differences between novel and film versions of The Shining there. Doctor Sleep is a direct adaptation of its novel counterpart, which itself is a sequel to the novel version of The Shining, but is also a continuation of Kubrick's film; in explaining the latter, Flanagan expressed, "The Shining is so ubiquitous and has burned itself into the collective imagination of people who love cinema in a way that so few movies have. There's no other language to tell that story in. If you say 'Overlook Hotel', I see something. It lives right up in my brain because of Stanley Kubrick. You can't pretend that isn't the case".[150] King initially rejected Flanagan's pitch of bringing back the Overlook as seen in Kubrick's film, but changed his mind after Flanagan pitched a scene within the hotel near the end of the film that served as his reason to bring back the Overlook.[151] Upon reading the script, King was so satisfied with the result that he said, "Everything that I ever disliked about the Kubrick version of The Shining is redeemed for me here."[152]

Awards and nominations

American Film Institute recognition

• 2001: AFI's 100 Years...100 Thrills – #29[156]
• 2003: AFI's 100 Years...100 Heroes & Villains:
  • Jack Torrance – #25 Villain[157]
• 2005: AFI's 100 Years...100 Movie Quotes:
  • "Here's Johnny!" – #68[158]