The Shining: more than just a horror film

Jack Nicholson loses the plot in The Shining (Thriller Movies, 10.15pm tonight), a movie that is as playful as it is scary.

Jack Nicholson changes into a terrifying maniac in The Shining.

Pick of the day: The Shining, Thriller Movies, 10.15pm.

This is the movie that was lambasted by critics back in 1980 for “not being scary”, now ranked by the same pundits as among the most effective horror films made.

Based on the 1977 novel by Stephen King, it’s no simple exercise in terror but an eerie, ominous and persuasive thriller and a mystery in which every shot carries layers of meaning. There is something splendidly diabolical in Stanley Kubrick’s direction that’s as intellectually playful as it is straight-out scary.

Recovering alcoholic Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) takes a caretaker job at the Overlook Hotel in an effort to rebuild his life after his volatile temper lost him his teaching job.

The hotel manager (Barry Nelson) warns Jack he and his family will be snowbound through most of winter and of the potential for cabin fever. He tells of a season when the caretaker, Charles Grady, went crazy and brutally killed his wife, his two girls, aged eight and 10, and himself.

Given his desperation and the opportunity to pursue his true passion, writing, Torrance acknowledges the warning but accepts the job. But in the hotel there are dozens of empty rooms, ghosts, knives all over the kitchen, lifts full of blood and a maze on the front lawn.

Soon Torrance has the famous axe in his hand and is hacking into a bathroom door trying to kill his wife (Shelley Duvall). Nicholson’s gradual transformation from a man trying to repair his fragile family life into a terrifying maniac is one of cinema’s great performances. (According to Duvall the scene with the axe and the door took three days to film and the use of 60 doors.)

The film revolutionised Hollywood as Kubrick exploited the new Steadicam, a device attached to the operator’s body that enables the capture of travelling shots without having to mount the camera on wheels. The filming is wizardly, with the camera constantly gliding through space with no apparent means of control.