It’s been 45 years since The Shining came out, we’ve had countless horror movies since with insanely high kill counts and absolutely shocking imagery, I should be numb to a story where — spoilers for a cinematic classic — only two people die, and one because the doofus couldn’t find his way out of a hedge maze. And yet this movie is frightening in a way that’s really hard to pin down…how did Stanley Kubrick manage to make shots of a hallway creepy? Well, by making those hallways feel not just scary, but more specifically, Uncanny.
These days, “Uncanny” is a concept used most often in discourse about robots and computer animation. The Uncanny Valley, I know you’ve heard of it, or at least you know the feeling it evokes — The abject horror of this kid from The Polar Express, good god, get him off the screen. The Uncanny — capital T, Capital U, speaks to the fear of something that isn’t fully unknown…it’s unfamiliar, while retaining the elements of familiarity, and that tension causes a deep sense of unease. Returning to the Valley, think of those robots that move in a way that’s slightly wrong, and suddenly, you feel unsafe, in danger, but you’re not even sure exactly why. And this isn’t confined to robots and animation, of course, lots of stuff can be described as Uncanny, including ghosts, doppelgängers and mirrors, and can even be used to describe a human face.
Breaking it down, there’s a throughline, here — we’re being confronted with human or humanoid bodies not quite lining up with what we’re expecting, pulling at fears of loss of identity, fears about mortality, fears of childhood nightmares suddenly becoming true…but let’s take one step further, over the threshold from uncanny bodies to uncanny places. For example, have you ever been in a dead mall before? There should be people there. It’s built for foot traffic and to allow noise to carry, but it’s empty, silent, falling apart. There’s nothing dangerous there, but it feels terrible to be there, it feels off.
Kubrick leaned all the way in on this feeling with The Shining, which is set in a hotel that’s closed for the season. The halls and sitting rooms are empty — too empty. It’s disquieting from the jump because this just isn’t what a hotel is supposed to look like, to feel like. But sure, lots of movies are set in creepy old houses, but The Overlook Hotel isn’t creepy, at least on its face. There aren’t cobwebs and creaky floorboards and disjointed architecture that distinguish the classic haunted house. Instead, Kubrick decided to make the Overlook as real as possible, by sending out photographers to capture hundreds of pictures of real hotel halls and rooms and elevators, then picking the ones he found most interesting or evocative to build his sets from, replicating them down to the inch. Literally, they photographed the spaces with rulers in frame to make sure they were fully to scale. The Red Bathroom where Jack meets Grady: that was a real bathroom, created one-to-one on a soundstage in England. The fact that all of these spaces are clean, mundane, and downright normal just makes the discomfort all the more pronounced, because they feel like spaces we are familiar with. But something is clearly wrong in this hotel, and we just can’t put our finger on what that wrongness is.
It’s been 45 years, but the vibes of The Overlook are still a phenomenon. So sure, the lady in the tub is pretty scary, as are the twins. But at least for us, the most memorable bits of this movie are the long shots tracking through the hallways, the echoing emptiness of the Colorado Lounge, the unshakeable feeling of wrongness that The Overlook Hotel brings by simply being normal, and not, all at once.
What do you think? Does The Shining still give you nightmares, or has it gotten dated, at least as an entry in the horror genre? Let us know in the comments!
