The Shining

The Shining was a 1980 horror film with a screenplay by Stanley Kubrick based off of the novel written by Stephen King. Roger Ebert nominated this movie at number 55 out 250 on his greatest movie list. This movie took place in Colorado, most of it on top of a mountain in the “Overlook” hotel. Jack Torrance, a previous alcoholic, his wife Wendy and four year old son, Danny were the main characters in this film. They were being paid to be caretakers of the hotel for the winter, no occupants, just his family. But little did they know the horrors they were about to face living in an isolated, snowed in hotel.

Over 20 years ago this movie was believed to be “The greatest and scariest horror films ever made” according to a few reviews as well as Wikipedia. I read that were done back in the day. The reception of this movie has changed over the past twenty years. People have become jaded to these kinds of horror films. Although in the 1980’s there were not many films of this genre being viewed or even made. These days new horror films are coming out roughly every month.

A similar movie I saw recently was the movie 1408. A movie that took place in a hotel that ironically had a haunted room as well. By comparing these two films I realized how different horror movies have changed over the years. The Shining was not nearly as scary as 1408. Horror movies recently have more suspense, more sudden scares that make you jump out of your seat and many are gorier.

A scene that is memorable from this film would have to be when Wendy was looking through his papers that were supposed to be his book and all they said were, “all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” I came to realize that this probably means that if you work all the time, and don’t have time off, you start to go insane and get bored. .

This movie had diverse reviews. Over the first weekend, this film made $622,337. Even though not everybody that went to see this movie really enjoyed it, most of the population that did see it I think really liked it. This movie did very well in the box office and still did when it came out on video.

According to the “Rotten Tomatoes” website, a few reviews I read thought it was boring and not scary while others believed it was the greatest horror movie made. Overall this movie did do very well. On a scale of one to five I never saw it under a four, giving it a letter grade never saw it under a B, even on a percentage scale, not under 83%.

The movie was nominated for quite a few awards but Scatman Crothers won the Saturn award for best supporting actor. They were also nominated for best director and best music, but did not win those awards.

If a movie critic were to review this film in this day rather than twenty years ago it would probably not have such a great review because of how peoples view of horror movies have changed. During the 1980’s when this movie was released it did very well, movie critics and the everyday moviegoers considered this one of the greatest horror films ever made. This film left you with unexplained events and ideas that keep you thinking what would happen next even when the film was done rolling.

www.wikipedia.com
www.imdb.com
www.rottentomatoes.com