Essay.

The Shining, a Horror Story Developed in a Frightening Environment.

Horror movies are supposed to provoke fear in their watchers, but it is interesting how the directors achieve this task. Indeed, terror films need a set of elements that together and well applied produce a context of dread in the story.  The Shining, by Stanley Kubrik, is a great terror movie because of its atmosphere made up by the isolation, desperation, and madness components showed there.

In The Shining there is the isolation feeling. At the beginning of the movie, a car, driven by Jack Torrance is going over a narrow and lonely highway demonstrating that there is not much traffic of cars driving in the same direction Jack does. Also, different landscapes showing that it has been a long travel, supported by the statement made by Jack that it took 3 hours driving from Denver in order to arrive to the hotel he will work in. In addition, after the hotel is abandoned by the crew for the winter season, nobody remains there, so Jack’s family remained isolated from everyone since that moment and on. Furthermore, Wendy could not make a call because the storm not only destroyed all the lines but made it difficult to arrive to the hotel because of the blockade of the highways. In addition, Jack damaged the Snowcat, which represented the only one vehicle that could take the family out of the zone and the radio that could be used by the family to communicate with the police.

Desperation is exhibited in the film in a contagious way. Danny feels desperate because he saw two twin girls talking him and with injuries more than once. Also, weird things happened to him such as the arrival of a ball with no apparent reason after the twin sisters told him that he would stay with them to play for ever. Along with the disturbing incidents, Danny’s fear is showed which made me feel part of his fear. In addition, room #237 was opened and after that, Danny appeared in front of his parents with his neck hurt while nobody should be in the hotel but the boy and his parents. Furthermore, Wendy is worried because Danny told her a woman injured him and she cannot imagine what is going on there so she asks Jack to go and investigate what was happening on that room, and the answer she receives from Jack is that nothing is in that bedroom.

Madness is an incidental component that was not exhibited at the beginning. After some days, Jack truly becomes mad, seen by the change of behavior with his family; above all, with Wendy because of his yells to her, weird talks with Danny, the scared smile he shows, terror nightmares suffered, and the new habits acquired such as the anorexia and insomnia. In addition, his appearance changed from a well-looking guy to a vagabond pattern. Also, Jack tended to punch everything near to him and perform strange movements looking like he is full of anger.

Finally, it is interesting how Stanley Kubrik used different items to create a fearful atmosphere in order to achieve a great horror movie. Focusing on how directors arrange their possibilities to produce a dread story enriches the watcher because he becomes observant and enjoys more if he pays attention to those details.

Diego Trejo Bejarano

Jack's Ostracism in The Shining 

I'm hiding out where you can't see

Behind the wall, in the back room

And I'm crawling slowly through the dark

And feeling for a punch line

- Daniel Johnston

Whether a psychological thriller or an explicit horror film, The Shining depicts the disturbing disintegration of a family located in an isolated hotel, where the unstable aspiring writer Jack Torrance has been hired as the off-season caretaker. Resenting the harsh conditions of the hotel, and his evident inability to work, Jack, under the spell of some mysterious supernatural force, begins to behave erratically towards his wife, Wendy, and his little son, Danny, who has a natural psychic gift. The machinery of the plot is lubricated by three main motifs: isolation, desperation and madness. From the early start of the film this mototrized thematic engine heads towards an inevitable collision: Jack's lunacy and his failed attempt to kill Wendy and Danny.

Before the first encounter between Jack and the managers of The Overlook Hotel there are a couple of scenes, in the surrounding area and inside the building, that emphasize the isolated configuration of the natural and artificial landscape; a sort of prolepsis that foretells the evolution and impact of time and place in Jack's mind and its repercussion on the outside. Stuart Ullman, one of the managers, tells Jack that the job is not very demanding, but, with subtlety and discretion, says that the cruel winter can lead to a feeling of loneliness and solitude. Apparently, this is exactly what Jack wants, because he has "a new writing project." Mr. Ullman also mentions the tragedy of Charles Grady, the previous caretaker, who, after suffering a mental breakdown, killed his family with an axe and then committed suicide. It seems that a condition called "cabin fever" was responsible for Grady's insanity. "The old timers called it a case of cabin fever, a kind of claustrophobic reaction when people are secluded together for long periods of time." Jack even fools around with an eerie smile telling Stuart Ullman that this is not going to happen to him. According to Jack, Wendy will be fascinated because she is "a confirmed ghost story and horror film addict." This grotesquely humoristic remark is an ironic wink of what will happen later with him, his family, and the hotel as a haunted background for Jack's psychotic outburst.

One month later after they have relocated, Jack begings to show the first signs of ostracism. He sleeps heavily until 11:30 in the morning when Wendy wakes him up and leaves his breakfast in their room. She suggests a little walk outside, "it is a gorgeous day", but Jack refuses because he wants to write. This is the first scene where Jack neglects the company of his family and the interaction with the exterior in order to be by himself "working." While eating his breakfast in bed, Jack tells Wendy: "I fell in love with it right away. When I came up here for my interview, it was as though I had been here before. I mean, we all have moments of déjà vu, but this was ridiculous. It was almost as though I knew what was going to be around every corner." Pretty soon afterwards, there is a direct frontal shot at the type writer with a blank page in it; behind, the sound of a ball being thrown at the wall announces Jack's stress as his incompetence to work properly. These first signs of alienation are masterfully exemplified when Wndy and Danny are outside having a walk on the maze. This scene slowly vanishes and melts with a shot at Jack inside the hotel roaming around with his ball. He comes across a tiny model of the labyrinth, which he looks closely as if he were watching his family from the sky. The panoramic view of the tiny model becomes again a shot of the real scale maze, where Wendy and Danny are happily drifting.

A couple of days later we see the natural consequences of Jack's much desired loneliness. When Wendy disturbs his work asking him about his day, Jack, intolerant and mad, hurriedly hides the sheet of paper in which he had been writing, and, with a very angry and irrational tone, tells her that every time she comes to his working space he gets distracted; he hits his head with his hand and rips the previous sheet of paper. He then proceeds to explain the "new rule" in an insulting way: when he is there, typing or not, she is not allowed to get in because it means he is working. "Why don't you start right now and get the fuck out of here." This is the first time he behaves openly aggresive towards Wendy. There is a desperate tone in Jack's attitude. He is not progressing in his "new writing project" as he had expected and probably sees his family as an obstacle. The isolation only accentuates his desperation. Wendy leaves hurt, perplexed, and a little bit scared. This tense separation from his family only increases when two days later Wendy and Danny are playing in the snow and Jack is again alone inside the hotel, looking at them from a window with a manic face.

The weird and unpleasant prelude of Jack's mental breakdown occurs when Danny goes to their room for a small plastic truck and finds his dad sitting alone in the bed staring at the wall with a tired and pale face. Jack awkwardly hugs Danny and both have an odd conversation. "How is it doing, Doc? Having a good time?" "Dad, do you feel bad?" "No, just a little bit tired." "Then why don't you go to sleep?" "I can't, I have too much to do." "Dad, do you like this hotel?" "Yeah, I do. I love it. Don't you?" "I guess so." "Good, I want you to like it here. I wish we could stay here forever and ever and ever." "Dad?" "What?" "You would never hurt mommy and me, would you?" "What do you mean? Did your mother ever say that to you, that I would hurt you?" "No, dad." "You're sure?" "Yes, dad." "I love you more than anything else in the world. I'd never do anything to hurt you, never. You know that, don't you?" "Yes, dad." The tense string music echoes Jack's psychological instability, which is taking him near a dead end road: madness.

After Danny gets into room 237, Wendy, busy in the laundry room, hears Jack's violently tormented scream and goes hastily to his working place. Jack, anguished and confused, confesses that he had a nightmare where he killed Wendy and Danny with an axe. "Oh God! I must be losing my mind!" Danny suddendly arrives in an almost catatonic state (dizzy, mute, injured, and sucking his thumb), and while an alarmed Wendy inspects him and hugs him, Jack looks at them with an extremely demented face, disturbed and insane. "You did this to him, didn't you!? You son of a bitch! How could you! How could you!" Jack babbles nonsense and remains with the same nasty face. After Wendy goes with Danny, Jack roams around by himself doing insane movements with his arms, head and torso. He finally goes into the ballroom where, after a cryptic apparition, he has a drink and a peculiar conversation with Lloyd, a ghostly barman. Out of nowhere, Wendy gets in the salon and hysterically informs Jack about room 237, where a woman supposedly tried to strangle Danny. More dazed than lucid, Jack goes to ckeck the room and finds a gorgeous naked young girl; embracing and kissing her he notices that she is actually an old repulsive woman. Completely deranged, terrified, confused and nauseated Jack slowly goes away while the scary laughter of the woman echoes everywhere. The tense music falls to pieces; a sort of destruction that mirrors Jack's state of mind. He goes back to Wendy and acts as if he were in his senses, even suggesting that Danny hurt himself on purpose. At Wendy's suggestion to leave the hotel, Jack finally explodes and brutally screams at her: "I have let you fuck my life so far, but I'm not going to let you fuck this up!" He leaves and Wendy cries in an anguished desperation. Jack drifts through the empty corridors and finally returns to the ballroom where a party is being held. After having a couple of free drinks, he clashes with Charles / Delbert Grady, the previous caretaker now disguised as a butler. When Mr. Grady takes jack to the bathroom to clean his spotted jacket, they have a bizarre conversation about the past, present and future of both in connection with the hotel and their families. Jack is finally convinced that he has always been the caretaker and that the situation with his family has to be dealt with precision and accuracy. While Wendy is truggling to figure out a way to leave the hotel, Jack, completely out of his mind, messes around with the phone, the radio and the snowplow, leaving the hotel without any internal or external communication devices.

The breaking point of the film is when Wendy finally reads what Jack has been writing all along: "all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy." This sentence explains, paradoxically, all the things that Jack has experienced while staying in The Overlook Hotel that have lead to his lunatic state of mind. The scene has all the process of isolation, desperation and madness, expertly developed through the tense music, the alarming contrast between Jack and Wendy and the direct shots at the nonsense typed on the sheets of paper. From then on is a tormented struggle between Wendy's frail determination to escape with his son and Jack's 'work', which has changed from writing and taking care of the hotel to taking care of his family.

Jack's ostracism from his family and the surroundings of the hotel led him, slowly but firmly, to a mental stage where there was no return. His self-indicted loneliness was meant to help him writing the new project, but after rejecting every single opportunity to spend time with his family, inside or outside, he began to grow desperate because he was unable to start his work. Whether he was actually mad or was he possessed by some evil spirit, I can only say that his ongoing solitude and desperation put him in a frail state of mind where madness was only a few steps away.  

     

HORROR MOVIE: THE SHINING

By Lilia Paz Espinosa

In horror movies there are always ghosts as a one of the principal elements to get the attention of the audience who is interested in this kind of movies. There are many elements which contribute to make a perfect environment to create the suspense in the audience. In The Shining film as in other  horror movies combine the ghosts, possesion and what they produce in the spectator to create an attractive movie to watch.

The ghost simbolyzes dead people who sometimes appear in a flash of light in front of the main characters or in dreams to suggest that they want to transmit that something is wrong in the place. In those cases the ghosts are peaceful and produce expectation in the way that they appear. For example,  in The Shining movie the child saw the two girls who were killed by their father before in the hotel and he could see how they were murdered and how he and his mother will be killed. There is another movie called In The Amityville Horror in which a Little boy could see one little girl who is a ghost who lived in the house and she was murdered in the house too. In both cases the special effects and the music can produce the expectation in the audience, because sometimes is more louder with special effects to create creepy sounds.

Many films use the factor of possesion of the main character who tries to kill other people, sometimes as a revenge or reproduce the same event again and again. For instance, In The Shining movie the main character seems to have been possessed by an evil ghost or demon who lives in the hotel and triesto repeat the same event that happened before with his family. Similarly, In the movie which is called Some One Behind You the main character is possessed by a dead person who tries to kill the people who kill her and her mother in revenge. But at the end of those movies suggest that the characters who were possessed by someone, were actually an reencarnation of their past lives, these end in the horror movies produce more expectations.

The directors of this kind of films use the ghosts and other elements to produce anxiety, fear and confusion in the spectators. For example, in The Shining Jack had a  conversation with other character who suggests they were dead because he was alone in the hotel with her family, or the scene with the young woman who becomes an old woman, the spectator can think that it was produced by his broken mind. Also in the movie called February 29 suggest the main character was in danger because one killer appears only in February 29 to kill and she had a confrontation with him and feels that this person followed her but at the end of the movie apparently she is mentally disturbed and only created this scenes in her mind. Those kind of films causes in the audience many feelings until at the end, it is one goal that is produced by the directors.

The sucess of horror movies is because the films create the perfect environment to coexist the ghosts and apparent possession to produce many feelings in the audience who like this kind of movies, and represent the supernatural and mysticism that the people can not be able to see in the real life, so enjoy the suspence that it was created by the story that suggests many interpretations of the role of the ghosts as a killers, possesors or was created by other side of reality. 

The Shining: Jack’s Demons

Jack Torrance was an alcoholic man with anger issues that was mainly affected by the ghosts of the hotel. Jack is a very violent person; we can infer that when he was a child, his father mistreated him, producing a mental disturbance on him. When Jack gets drunk, he lets his past take control of him, making him repeat the same pattern as his dad. In one of his binge he broke Danny’s arm. The violence and the drinking problem are characteristics that Jack and Mr. Grady, the former caretaker had in common, making Jack more vulnerable to this ghost.

It is well known that isolation and the lack of sunlight can cause serious effects on people. During his tenure on the hotel, Jack never left the premises. For example, when Wendy asked him to go out with her and Danny so they could walk around and take some fresh air, Jack refused to go, he remained in the hotel writing his book.

Jack applied for the job on the Overlook Hotel after he was fired from his previous occupation, this situation made him feel depressed, that is why he wanted to feel useful and decided to write a book. Scenes later, Wendy saw Jack’s writing and she finds out that he has been typing the same phrase trough all the pages, "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy". This action upsets Jack and made him try to punish her. It is in this scene, where we can see that Jack’s madness started heighten, because he thought that Wendy was criticizing him and his writing.

When wandering in the Gold room, Jack meets Mr. Delbert Grady, who introduce himself as a waiter. Grady allegedly spilled a glass of water over Jack, and offered to wipe it off in the bathroom; this with the intention of speaking with him in private. While being there, Jack noticed that Grady was actually the caretaker who killed his own family. Grady told him that he must educate properly his son and wife because they are causing trouble around the hotel. Like Jack, Delbert also had drinking problems and they seemed to have the same psychological issues, that is why the evil spirit of the hotel chose him. 

His mental illness added to all the stress caused by the hotel spirits, and the depression he was going through, made Jack more vulnerable to the presence of the hotel. And by this, Jack became a menace to Wendy and Danny, because in his mind and according to what Grady told him, the right thing to do was to punish them. The spirits of the Overlook Hotel seemed to have a particular interest in Jack; therefore, this could mean that the ghosts looked for the most vulnerable person in the hotel to take control of him and complete a cycle of murder.

The Shining

Movies of the cause feelings like happiness, sadness, anxiety, etcetera, but, does the director really know how to do that? Of course he does, using some elements combined, the director can provoke different sensations and the way is through our senses. For instance, Stanly Kubrick in his film The Shining creates a stressful environment, in which the spectator is more sensitive to be surprised with three specific elements: music, colors, and point of view. The first, music, appeals to our ear. And the last two, catch our eye in different ways.

First of all, hearing. Throughout the movie, the music keeps its tempo and volume, but suddenly, as the tension gets higher, both the volume and frequency also increase, these sudden and loud sounds are related directly with bad news, an explosion or a child's scream, to mention some, and every human that hear them activates a biological alarm that affects the brain and incites to response in a stressful way.

Second, seeing could be considered as a fraught element in the movie because the spectator recognizes brilliant colors throughout, and the theory of color says that striking colors are used to warn about danger. In the movie there are a lot of examples, for instance red in the furniture or in the recurrent Dany's dream in which blood pours out from the walls. These striking colors have a higher impact due to the fact that the high contrast with the pale colors in the rest of the hotel and even outside because of the snowy season.

Lastly, the point of view, when the camera focuses on the character's face creates uncertainty and this makes the brain works to interpret the situation, so, this interpretation will be influenced by the information perceived by hearing and seeing. In this way the spectator's feeling will be reinforced no matter what it is about. In The Shining most of the scenes use this resource mainly with Dany's face, for example when he is alone and near room 237 and if we add the audience is expecting something wrong, because of the sounds and the high contrast colors, the terror increases.

In conclusion, the feeling that a beholder experiences when he or she is watching a movie is nothing more than a human response generated by the blend of sensations perceived in that moment and The Shining is an excellent illustration of this because gathers the necessary sort of elements to achieve its goal, to catch the attention and to make the audience suffer throughout the film.

When The ‘Caretaker’ Is Not Taking Care. By Beatriz Cruz López

When The ‘Caretaker’ Is Not Taking Care.

By Beatriz Cruz López

One of Kubrick’s best achievements is that, although The Shining is a horror movie with ghosts and abnormal situations, the most dangerous character is a human being. That is, at the end Jack Torrance’s family is not in danger because of unknown and supernatural forces, but because of him and his violent behaviour.

Ghosts contribute to create an atmosphere of fear and danger, but they do not cause relevant injuries to Danny, Wendy or Jack. Ghosts only play with their minds, showing to the three characters terrifying or glamorous scenes. Ghosts can cause physical damage, as they do to Danny; they also can move things, as the latch of the door of the larder room. But they only have this power in certain areas. It seems to be that ghosts are confined to the places where they used to be in life: room 237, the bar and the kitchen, the corridor, etc. Out of this areas, it is safe to be in the hotel. That is why the cook warns Danny not to enter room 237.

Jack’s behaviour has not changed because of the isolated atmosphere or the lack of food and rest; this only reveals his deeper and dark wishes. He is actually a violent father and husband. He does not ask his wife opinion on important decisions, like getting a job in a strange place, and treats her badly. And he had injured his son before, as Wendy reminds him. Plus, he is an alcoholic and seems to have withdrawal symptoms. Ghosts only make this situation worse by making Wendy believe Jack tried to hang Danny, and by making Jack decide to punish his family. I think in other circumstances Jack would damage his family as well but in a less spectacular way.

Jack is, thus, the real menace. He threatens Wendy he will kill her, but she can beat him and keep him in the larder room. Then, he tries to kill his family and when he fails, he hunted his son with an axe in order to kill him. And, finally, he killed the cook. Jack is responsible for all this. Ghosts do not help him, except when the bartender frees him. But, in this case, Jack has to convince the ghost to open the door by saying he will be able to kill his own family. In contrast, Wendy only damages Jack when necessary but her goal is not kill him but stop him.

Jack is the father and he is supposed to look after his family, to take care of them. This idea is reinforced by the fact he gets the job of ‘caretaker’. He has the added responsibility to keep the hotel in good conditions. But it is Wendy who takes care of the hotel and the family and who tries desperately to save Danny. The role of the father is betrayed by Jack. He does not care of his family and does not move them away from ghosts. On the contrary, he wants them to die and, moreover, he wants to be the one who kills them. This story is shocking because it makes the spectators think they could be in a similar risk. What if the people we trust are similar to Jack? This kind of danger is more real; it goes beyond a simple ghost story.