The Shining Blu Ray – Jack Nicholson, Shelley Duvall

Stanley Kubrick directs this chilling adaptation of the Stephen King shocker. Seeking solitude in order to write a novel, Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) takes a job as an off-season caretaker at the remote Overlook Hotel in Colorado. Eager to get started, Jack disregards warnings that the isolation drove a former caretaker mad, and moves into the massive resort with his wife Wendy (Shelley Duvall) and son Danny (Danny Lloyd). But Danny has a supernatural gift which makes him aware of an evil lurking in the hotel, and sure enough, as winter storms cut the hotel off from civilisation, Jack gradually becomes murderously insane.

Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining is less an adaptation of Stephen King’s best-selling horror novel than a complete re-imagining of it from the inside out. In King’s book, the Overlook Hotel is a haunted place that takes possession of its off-season caretaker and provokes him to murderous rage against his wife and young son. Kubrick’s film is an existential Road Runner cartoon (his steadicam scurrying through the hotel’s labyrinthine hallways), in which the cavernously empty spaces inside the Overlook Hotel mirror the emptiness in the soul of the blocked writer settled in for a long winter’s hibernation. As many have pointed out, King’s protagonist goes mad, but Kubrick’s Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) is Looney Tunes from the moment we meet him–all arching eyebrows and mischievous grin. (Both Nicholson and Shelley Duvall reach new levels of hysteria in their performances, driven to extremes by the director’s fanatical demand s for take after take after take.) The Shining is terrifying–but not in the way fans of the novel might expect. When it was redone as a TV mini-series (reportedly because of King’s dissatisfaction with the Kubrick film), the famous topiary-animal attack (which was deemed impossible to film in 1980) was there–but the deeper horror was lost. Kubrick’s The Shining gets under your skin and chills your bones; it stays with you, inhabits you, haunts you. And there’s no place to hide… –Jim Emerson, Amazon.com