Its story nags at the house, like the wind in the Rockies. Things go less than easily at the splendid hotel. Though Jack is supposed to be there to write a novel, it’s Danny who half understands that the Overlook already has its story, a dormant fiction, full of dread, that may be awakened by careless caretakers. This odd acumen has taught the boy to be afraid. (The stylishness lets us know the hotel is haunted before ghosts gather.) Danny is needed there at the hotel because he shines, which means he can pick up on the secret foreboding in a place. Age six in the movie, he is an unusual boy: so intuitively smart or insightful - perhaps it’s proper to hold him out of school for a winter, riding his plastic tricycle and Steadicam down the endless corridors of the Overlook, going from carpet to wood and back to carpet again. Sean Penn Unpacks What Really Happened with Jack Nicholson and ‘Creepy Little Bully’ PutinĪnd Danny, their son, must go with them, too. Unless the point of their being at the Overlook is for Jack to despise her to a point of contemplating…

His wife Wendy will go with him - she seems to have nothing else to do in life except be with a man to whom she is patently unsuited. He will be caretaker for the off-season winter - time to write the novel he’s always promised himself, time to defeat the blank pages. Life seems perfect there - everything the idiot mastermind Jack Torrance ever wanted. So the Torrance family goes off to the Overlook Hotel in the bracing but desolate heights of Colorado. I’m starting with “The Shining” (1980), the Stanley Kubrick adaptation of Stephen King, because of its pioneering balance of horror and satire, and its lethal-dainty script by Diane Johnson. The book’s second chapter, “Red Rum,” focuses on Kubrick’s 1980 classic “ The Shining.” Our excerpt (slightly edited for length) is below.

In his latest book about Hollywood, “Murder and the Movies,” prolific film author David Thomson examines the ways master filmmakers like Stanley Kubrick lure audiences into their twisted murders and sinister plotting.

The shining 1997