The Shining: The Subtle Ways that Stanley Kubrick Unsettles the Audience

Avid film-goers will be shocked to hear that I had not seen ‘The Shining’ until just a few days ago, and that only happened because it was Stanley Kubrick that was behind the camera. Of all the genres in cinema, horror is the only one that I could not get into. Nevertheless, I am willing to make an exception for the occasional masterpiece; films that are so good that they must be watched (if only for the pleasure of analysing the film and eventually writing about it in an article like this one).

The Shining belongs to that small subset of horror films that I not only watched but also enjoyed immensely (other films would include Psycho and Get Out). Upon finishing the film, my first question was this: “what was it about this film that I loved more than others of its kind?”

The short, one-word answer to that question? Subtlety.

Stanley Kubrick knows how to mess with your head. In a category of films that mostly relies on shocks and cheap scares to elicit a scream for the audience, Stanley Kubrick exercises his craft to the best of his abilities in order to leave us truly and deeply unsettled. He does this by taking us inside the mind of the monster and its victims.

In this case the monster is Jack Torrance (played by Jack Nicholson), an ambitious writer who accepts a job as the caretaker of The Overlook Hotel during its off-season. The hotel is in a remote location in the mountains — where the winters are cold and…