Ambiguity is also central to the uncanny-it's the feeling that we can’t understand what is real and what is false, what is natural and what is supernatural. Forever and ever”) to the second boy who lives inside of Danny, telling him secrets and the idea that Jack is a reincarnation of previous caretakers (“You've always been the caretaker. The Shining is filled with these elements, from the incredibly creepy twin girls that Danny keeps seeing (“Come and play with us, Danny. A central driver of the uncanny, for Freud, was doubling: twins, déjà vu, ghosts, mirrors. ![]() “The uncanny” as a psychological effect was famously delineated by Sigmund Freud, and is essentially the eerie feeling that something is both familiar and strange at the same time. But the key to The Shining’s terror is Kubrick’s full embrace of “the uncanny.” Part of this is the brilliant use of ominous sounds and off-kilter music as a soundtrack, an aspect that has been copied endlessly by horror movies since. When Danny rides a tricycle across a series of rugs or when Jack stares intensely into a model hedge maze. There are a few of those things, but the most terrifying moments of The Shining are when almost nothing happens. The Shining is not a horror movie that rests on the usual scares: giant monsters, jump scares, piles of corpses. While this is a familiar horror-movie setup, and of course is adapted from the popular Stephen King novel, Kubrick’s execution was completely unusual. Although his home life isn’t perfect, he doesn’t blink when the interviewer warns him that a previous caretaker “ran amok and.he killed his family with an axe.” His wife, Wendy (Shelley Duvall), and son, Danny (Danny Lloyd), join him for a few months of relaxation that turn into a few months of increasing terror as they get snowed in at the hotel-which is (surprise!) haunted-and are slowly driven mad. Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson), a struggling writer, applies for a caretaker position at a snowbound Colorado hotel. ![]() Certainly the body count pales in comparison to that of your average slasher flick. In a certain sense, not all that much happens in The Shining. With Halloween creeping up on us, what better film to place in your Netflix queue this month. And there’s still nothing as terrifying from start to finish. Almost 40 years after Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining was released, there’s still no other horror movie filled with so many iconic moments. “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.” Redrum.
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