Dick Hallorann: “Some places are like people: some shine and some don’t.”

“Stanley Kubrick’s version of The Shining is a lot tougher for me to evaluate, because I’m still profoundly ambivalent about the whole thing. I’d admired Kubrick for a long time and had great expectations for the project, but I was deeply disappointed in the end result. 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. I’d like to remake The Shining someday, maybe even direct it if anybody will give me enough rope to hang myself with …” — Stephen King

Stephen King may not like it, but The Shining is the best adaptation of one of his books by a wide margin. I’m watching it right now out of the corner of my eye, cut to ribbons on television with a million commercials, and even with all of that interference, it stills stands up as an absolutely brilliant and deeply frightening piece of work. Kubrick’s attention to detail, coupled with his meticulous camerawork – tracking shots that seem to go on forever – to say nothing of Jack Nicholson’s performance, the deserted hotel itself, and Scatman Crothers in his finest role, combine to make a film that’s one of the director’s most intriguing, innovative, and satisfying works.