Jack Torrance (Jack Nicolson) is hired to take care of the closed-for-winter Overlook Hotel in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado, where he hopes to get plenty of writing done. The hotel manager, Stuart Ullman (Barry Nelson), tells him that a previous caretaker named Charles Grady killed his wife, his two young daughters, and himself in the empty hotel ten years before.
In Boulder, Jack’s son Danny (Danny Lloyd) has a premonition and suffers a seizure. Jack’s wife Wendy (Shelley Duval) tells the doctor that Jack accidentally dislocated Danny’s shoulder in a drunken rage but has been sober ever since. The hotel’s head chef, Dick Halloran (Scatman Crothers), tells young Danny that they both have telepathic powers called the Shining. And then he leaves for the season, after warning the boy to avoid Room 237.
A month later, Danny has frightening visions, particularly of the Grady twins (Lisa and Louise Burns), who were murdered there. Jack’s mental health begins to deteriorate. He has crippling writer’s block, violent outbursts, and dreams about killing his family. Danny is lured to Room 237 and suffers physical trauma that his mother blames on his father. Jack sulks in the ballroom, where the ghost of a bartender named Lloyd (Joe Turkel) entices Jack to start drinking again.
Danny is attacked by a “crazy woman” in Room 237, where Jack finds a hideous female ghost, though he does not tell Wendy about it. He says Danny inflicted the wounds on himself. Danny enters a trance and telepathically reaches out to Halloran. Jack returns to the ballroom where ghostly figures abound, and the ghost of Delbert Grady (Philip Stone) tells him he should correct his wife and child.
Wendy finds the manuscript Jack has been working on is only “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” typed over and over again. Jack threatens Wendy’s life, and she knocks him out with a baseball bat and locks him in the pantry, but Jack has sabotaged the radio and the Snowcat so Wendy and Danny cannot leave. Danny writes the word “Redrum” in lipstick on the door. In the mirror, it says “murder”.
Jack gets free and goes after Wendy and Danny with an axe. Danny escapes through a window and Wendy fights off Jack with a knife. Halloran shows up in a Snowcat and Jack murders him with the axe. He then pursues Danny into the snow-covered hedge-maze. Wendy runs into the ghosts, Halloran’s bloody corpse, and a hallucination of blood pouring from the elevator. Jack gets lost in the hedge maze and when Danny and Wendy escape in Halloran’s Snowcat, Jack freezes to death. But we see Jack in an old photograph of a party in the hotel ages ago.
The film was directed by Stanley Kubrick in 1980, and it was co-written by novelist Diane Johnson, based on Stephen King’s 1977 novel. It was filmed at EMI Elstree Studios in England, using the newly invented Steadicam camera. It was released in several different cuts of different lengths to mixed reactions. It was nominated for a Razzie for worst director and worst actress, but now it is considered one of the greatest films of all time. It is in the U.S. National Film Registry in the Library of Congress. A sequel called Doctor Sleep based on another King novel was released in 2019.
The film has been subjected to endless analysis, including references to the slaughter of American Natives and the Holocaust, Hansel and Gretel, and the Three Little Pigs, and painted by the Group of Seven artists. Roger Ebert said it might have been a ghost story, but the ghosts were figures of the cast’s imagination, so it is really about madness. The entire hotel seems to change in size and layout.
The door that Jack chops through with an axe was a real door. Nicholson had been a firefighter and chopped through the fake door too quickly. As time passed, the film, which had been largely panned when it first appeared, became more and more respected. Stephen King had been suffering from alcoholism when he wrote the book, so it was a bit autobiographical. Naturally, King criticised Kubrick’s changes to his book, particularly concerning his characters, but admitted that the film was brilliant.
Jack Nicholson is creepy just smiling, and the music of Bartok is appropriately weird and threatening. The film seems a bit slow by today’s standards, but I think it works better than the movies that are nothing but jump-scares and blood. The memories and hallucinations do add up to an explanation of past events that is sufficient, in my opinion, to explain the psychic phenomena and haunting, at least to modern audiences who are used to this sort of thing now. In fact, it’s nice to have any explanation, which is often given short shrift these days. The fact is Stanley Kubrick is endlessly fascinating. He made one amazing movie in every possible genre—horror, science-fiction, apocalyptic, historical, mystery, war—as if he learned everything he could from one genre and had to move onto something new.