The Shining (1980)
Directed by Stanley Kubrick
Jack Torrance accepts a caretaker job at the Overlook Hotel, where he, along with his wife Wendy and their son Danny, must live isolated from the rest of the world for the winter. But they aren't prepared for the madness that lurks within.
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12 films that influenced The Shining
What critics say influenced The Shining
Resnais and his cinematographer Sacha Vierny (who would later become Peter Greenaway’s favorite collaborator) construct the film out of precise compositions and slow-moving tracking shots that move throughout the hotel, making its extended hallways and cavernous rooms seem pulsating and alive, a trick that Stanley Kubrick would later employ in The Shining (1980).
Or "The Shining" without snow.
The strong influence of Last Year at Marienbad on other films is obvious: compare The Shining and Mulholland Dr. to name but two.
No coincidence, then, that one of the films most indebted to Last Year at Marienbad, Stanley Kubrick's The Shining , borrows liberally at stylistic and thematic levels, engaging in similar-seeming Steadicam shots tracking ceaselessly along the Overlook's pattern-carpeted hallways, and putting forward the uncanny suggestion that its terrible events have all happened before and likely will happen again, forever and ever and ever.
For those who prefer their scary movies heavy on the atmosphere and the slow boil and light on the gory monsters and screaming teenagers - and I guess I fall mostly into that category, even though two of my three favorite American horror films * are the decidedly explicit Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Shining - one of the most reliable standards to bear has been 1963's The Haunting , adapted from Shirley Jackson's novel The Haunting of Hill House: read any positive review of the film, and nine times in ten they'll spend at least a little bit of energy praising its exemplary restraint.
It also bears some thematic similarities to Stanley Kubrick's version of The Shining.
The other less-important technique is the use of the camera itself, the framing and movement: Suspiria used Steadicam extensively, and along with The Shining from 1980 (I do not know for certain that Stanley Kubrick was inspired by, or had even seen, Argento's film, but I'd be totally stunned if that wasn't the case) provides ample evidence that what Steadicam does best is apply a layer of sinuous, predatory smoothness to generate almost insufferable amounts of suspense in a horror film.
For a film often overlooked in comparison to more mainstream works like The Exorcist , The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Shining , Suspiria really must be considered one of the major influences on the horror genre in modern times.
De balletschool uit Suspiria valt een beetje te vergelijken met het hotel uit The Shining.
William Friedkin, in "The Exorcist," gave a little girl a demonic voice that scared audiences silly by virtue of its foreignness.
The formula for horror is to seize upon some quite average, very nice people, as in The Exorcist, and torment them until their eyes bulge and the audience screams.
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It was reported that one of the films Kubrick showed to the cast and crew was Eraserhead, so this connection would seem to be more than coincidence.
Kubrick repaid Lynch’s effort when he showed “Eraserhead” to his crew in preparation for “ The Shining .”
Madness ensues but the fact that Kubrick screened David Lynch’s Eraserhead for his crew proves he wasn’t serving up stalk’n’slash gruel.
Before truly delving into the film, I feel it necessary to share that I have a strong, personal connection to Eraserhead in that I personally find it the most terrifying film ever made; even above my all-time favorite horror film The Shining.
This has a certain archness, it's true - like the thug who sings "Singin' in the Rain" while administering a beating in "A Clockwork Orange," or the computer that dies crooning "Daisy, Daisy" in "2001."
The film is less a haunted house picture than a diabolical "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" with the emphasis on afraid.
The device was fairly new yet when the film was shot, and this is its best possible coming-out: it is to Steadicam as The Wizard of Oz is to color and Avatar is to 3-D, the film that comes along early (but not first) in a technology's existence to say, "here's this new toy that's awesome to play with, and by the way, it will never be used this well again no matter how hard you try".
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And readers of King's novel are likely to feel justifiably contemptuous of two switches at the denouement: an ill-advised change of victims and the abandonment of an apocalyptic disaster in favor of a "kicker" weakly patterned after the Rosebud gimmick in "Citizen Kane."
There is nothing in The Shining which approaches the brutality of scenes in Alien, Halloween, or Night of the Living Dead.