I’m having a Jack Torrance-like crisis trying to write this little piece about The Shining, one of Stephen King’s best novels — one of Kubrick’s worst movies, if you ask King. But I’m of the pro-Kubrick school of thought. I like the long hallways, the way the director plays with the shot, the close-ups of Jack Nicholson’s mad face…Is this film speak? Honestly, even that seems too big of a venture since you’d probably need a big, smart book the size of King’s Danse Macabre (this book is like that film major in college who wouldn’t stop talking about horror films that inspired him) to really get down and dirty about the redrum, whatever the fuck Tony is, and that final, haunting shot of the group picture hanging on the hellish walls of the Overlook Hotel. Nah, we’re going to talk about writing woes. For the next…er…I was told I had 600-800 words to examine how scary The Shining was…So let’s say 500 words…All work and no play, etc. The evils of the writing process are what scared me about The Shining. Jack Torrance sits down at his typewriter, diligently typing nothing, bouncing a ball off the walls of an empty atrium as the writer bounces through time, his thoughts echoing back at him. King’s long, fantastic canon of writerly pains is perhaps at its strongest in Jack’s story (although Mort in Secret Window and Thad Beaumont in The Dark Half — a film inspired by King’s own pseudonym woes — are a close second). And Kubrick captures all this with a master’s eye: At the forefront of the film is King’s own struggle with addiction — something he’s been very open about — as Jack tries to distract himself from the job at hand with a drink he hopes will allow him to relax. He’s broken a sweat, after all. Writing is all about digging up the past, and Jack does a whole lot of that throughout the film, doesn’t he? Hell, the film becomes ABOUT the past by the time Kubrick is through — Jack’s violent, alcoholic past and weakness. But when you’re trying to create something that comes solely out of you, there’s no way to avoid the writer’s abusive relationship with his work. But, as I sit down to describe this ghost story to you and examine what it is that makes such a colossal film scary, what I end up with is one giant hedge maze, a final thought frozen in the night.
