Blog post 3, Group 3:"The Shining" Fear and Family Relationship, by Weini W.

The first thing that came up to my mind when I started thinking of writing about a movie which was made before I was born was " The Shining". The Shining is a masterpiece of a modern horror, labelled "the first epic horror" in the history of film. The Shining is a 1980 film produced and directed  by Stanley Kubrick based on the 1977 Stephen King's novel"The Shining". It's a film that affects fear and obsessed viewers long after the last of its ending. It is a movie showing the horror that can not be escaped. It is a movie without any hard answers and it left the audience wondering what exactly you just saw.
The story follows Jack Torrance (Jack Nicolson) as he goes on an interview for the job of a winter watcher of an isolated, old, huge and beautiful "Overlook" hotel in Colorado, planning to write a new novel. During the interview, the hotel manager told him that the previous watcher of hotel, Grady had lost his mind, massacred his family and committed a suicide with a shotgun. Ignoring this story, Jack brings his wife Wendy(Shelley Duvall) and his eight-year-old son Danny(Danny Lloyd). It turns out Danny has a mysterious power that shows him events from the past and future. Some of the visions comes from Tony - "a boy who lives in Danny's mouth".

When they arrive at the hotel, Danny meets Dick Halloran (Scatman Crothers), a chef, who has the same power and calls it "The Shining" and warn him about the hotel and the dark room 237. But Halloran leaves the hotel over the winter, so Danny remains without the only real friend.
As the days pass, Danny experiences the visions of previous guests and staff who dies in the hotel several years ago and ghosts starts haunting the family. Meanwhile, the huge blizzard hits the hotel and cuts the telephone wires, leaving family isolated from the rest of the world.
Jack, meanwhile, begins to go crazy, becoming more and more aggressive, to the point that Danny and Wendy become convinced that Jack could try the same thing as Grady _ to kill the family. He starts chasing them through hotel with axe, Wendy and Danny manage to escape outside, with help of Danny's vision, and Jack is left in blizzard storm to freeze to death.
The film has provoked considerations, interpretations, researches and documentaries, trying to reach the essence of the film itself. The film has acquired a huge cult of companion, and below its free content lies much darker foundation than the mystical situation in the hotel, which is a picture of deprression, alcoholism, domestic violence, uncertainty, which represents a much darker tone of the film than the simple mystical circumstances that are happening to the family at the hotel. The beauty of The Shining is within its multiple interpretations. You can watch it, you can understand it, and you can feel like having a closeness to it and again you still have a feeling there is something more into it. (Zboril,2013)
The film is tense, and tons created such sense that I felt stuck in my chair till the end of the movie in the uncertainty of what will happen next. Tensions are so great that at one point of the movie I desire to make something happen because tensions lead to the limits of unstoppable. The atmosphere of the film is so vigorous and real that there is no moment in which felt safe. I was constantly on hold that something will happen next.

To my point of view the movie was a work of art. The movie gave me the unique feeling of the tension, from the beginning to the end, and you cannot feel anything else than to sympathize with the Torrance family, especially Wendy and Danny. I didn't know what was the scarier in the movie, the supernatural activity that happened inside of the hotel or Jack's state of mind, and how he begins to sink into the state of his own madness. The final twist is something that left me speechless for few hours after I finished watching the movie.
The idea behind the movie was more threatening and darker. You can see one destructive family unit, the abuse and psychological disorder of the main character, Jack. (Balick, 2011).
"The shining" is not a story about ordinary and everyday loving father who slowly goes insane due to the circumstances around him. From the start of the movie we can see that Jack doesn't care about anybody except himself. As a viewer, I could not shake off the feeling that Jack character is being entirely psychopath. His behavior changes when he is surrounded by other people, as we saw in the interview, when he is charming and when he is with his family, where he is aggressive and abusive. On other hand Danny has all the characterstics of being an abused child. He is completely isolated and alone. He lives in a fantasy world with his imaginary friend Tony, and at the beginning of the movie, they discussed the incident where his father broke his arm. From the start of the film onward, Jack verbally insults both Danny and his wife, Wendy. This shows typically domestic violence situation, and it reflects of cultural atmosphere that we currently live and where victims are left to fight for themselves.
Stunning camera shots, where every scene is in place and each is absolutely necessary and important piece of art. Everything its to perfection, where scenes are served from time to time, which throw us deep into the film, Danny's and Jack's subconscious minds, or the evil that is in "Overlook". The incredibly real river of blood piercing the door of Danny's strange pronunciation of even more strange things, is quite vivid and it stays in your memory long after the film is over. Axe is just a cherry on cake and while the music simply cuts deep into the brain, you realize that you are in the movie, from which it is very difficult to get out of as it works as a maze.

References:

Zboril, J. (2013). The Shining: A Comparative Analysis of the Original Novel and its Adaptation (Unpublished master's thesis). Masaryk University Faculty of Arts. Retrieved March 26, 2018, from https://is.muni.cz/th/217034/ff_b/The_Shining.pdf.

Zboril, J. (2013). The Shining: A Comparative Analysis of the Original Novel and its Adaptation (Unpublished master's thesis). Masaryk University Faculty of Arts. Retrieved March 26, 2018, from https://is.muni.cz/th/217034/ff_b/The_Shining.pdf.