Stanley Kubrik’s adaptation of Stephen King’s novel starring Jack Nicholson and Shelly Duvall, originally blasted by critics, has come to be regarded as a masterpiece because of its overarching themes of abuse and domestic violence. The Shining is one of the most haunting films of all time because of how isolated it makes you feel. The film draws you in so that you as the audience believe that you are in Swindler, Colorado with the tormented Torrance family.     

THE OPENING

The opening sequence in The Shining is haunting, visionary and masterful. When I think of the opening scene, I immediately think of the soundtrack, written by Wendy Carlos and Rachel Elkind. This theme is composed of long haunting notes in different keys. The music is adapted from  “Dream of a Witches’ Sabbath” from Symphonie Fantastique by Hector Berlioz. The draining non-melody drags on and is paired with a shot of a yellow car slowly moving along a vacant highway. The highway runs through raw wilderness and there’s a sense of isolation. The helicopter shot is a precursor to the drone shots of our time. The theme and the shot really lure you into the movie. This mirrors the action on screen, as Jack Torrance willfully drives into the deathtrap of the Overlook Hotel, where he and his family will spend the winter alone. The whole sequence suggests that the Torrance family is the next in line to be tormented by the spirits that haunt the hotel. This is reflected when in Doctor Sleep (2019),when Danny returns to the Overlook. The movie recreates this iconic opening scene shot-for-shot, and the iconic theme song will haunt the movie and filmgoers even after the final credits roll.

JACK NICHOLSON’S PERFORMANCE 

Jack Nicholson has done everything. He’s been the president. He’s been the Joker. He’s been cooped up in an insane asylum. He’s been a private detective. And in his best role, he is possessed and tries to kill his family. In The Shining, Nicholson is terrifying as Jack Torrance. 

His performance in The Shining is one of the scariest performances ever. Jack Torrance is a recovering alcoholic with a history of domestic abuse. He’s also a writer with a short temper, who has been hired to act as the winter caretaker of the Overlook Hotel in Swindler, Colorado. Jack Nicholson plays the role masterfully that it makes me wonder what the actor was going through during the filming of this movie.

Look at this video of Jack Nicholson warming up for this role. What do you see? I see an actor who has taken method acting as far as it can go. Jack is jumping around with a real ax, shaking and muttering furiously about how he is going to kill anyone he comes across. It’s hard to understand his “words,” but it sounds like he might be saying “ax murder kill them” or “ax murder killer.” What’s shocking is that he is the same person in the movie and on the set. Jack Nicholson is Jack Torrance. When he says “come on Jack”, he seems to have channeled and given over to the spirits in the movie.

It is disturbing to see a human being go that far. Whenever you see him on screen, it makes you feel uncomfortable. There’s something about the look in his eyes. It always seems like he’s staring past your eyes and into the darkness in your soul. The expression on his face is truly evil, and it shows pleasure in wreaking havoc on his family. It’s almost as he’s looking into the darkness inside all of us. 

KUBRICK’S LABYRINTH  

The Overlook Hotel is iconic and Gothic. It is one of the most horrifying things in film history. I believe it was constructed to remind the viewer of the inescapable quality of pure evil. The Overlook feels like a never-ending maze. In the scene where Danny is scooting in the halls of the Overlook, he rides in a “circle” but he doesn’t end where he began. It’s as if the Overlook has abducted Danny. When he turns the final corner, he sees the ghosts of the Grady twins begging him, “Hello Danny. Come and play with us. Come and play with us, Danny. Forever… and ever… and ever.” But Danny has a very powerful version of the titular gift—“the shining”—which means that he has psychic abilities ranging from getting a good grade on a test he did not study for to clairvoyance and telepathy. Because of this, he is able to see and resist the spirits that haunt the Overlook Hotel. His father Jack Torrance is not that lucky. 

The hotel has the power to control people like it manipulates the ghost of Charles Grady (and will come to manipulate the ghost of Jack Torrance in Dr. Sleep, 2019). I believe this detail of the hotel trying to abduct Danny is Kubrick telling the audience what will happen to Jack. The depiction of the Overlook is a reflection of Kubrick’s pure and simple genius. Everything in the movie—from the wardrobe to the props and paintings—is purposeful. All of these calculated decisions tangle together and make an inescapable labyrinth of thought. This is shown both figuratively and literally. Outside the Overlook Hotel, there is an enormous hedge maze that has been infinitely referenced in pop culture. Kubrick chose to replace the topiary animals of Stephen King’s original book because the CGI technology of that time was not great and it would look like a total joke. In one of horror’s most defining conclusions, Danny lures Jack into the hedge maze, loses him in the bushes, and uses his shining to navigate out of the torment. In the end, Jack gets trapped in a horrifying situation of his own contriving. He is literally frozen in time.  

 The interior set of the Overlook and the hedge maze makes the audience feel that they too are lost in the horrifying snowy grounds.        

THE DEVIL IS IN THE DETAILS

Kubrick was notorious for his direction style and the way he treated his actors on set. He would use any means to get the performance he wanted. The most famous example of this was the way he “tormented” Shelly Duval in order to extract the feeling of pure fear and horror. In the book The Complete Kubrick, Duval says “Stanley pushed me and prodded me further than I’ve ever been pushed before.” The famous scene in which Wendy is trying to fend off Jack with a baseball bat on stairs reportedly required 127 takes, which left Duval exhausted and mentally unstable. But by tormenting Duval, Kubrick managed to capture one of the most emotionally distraught scenes in cinema history. 

Perhaps the most unsettling image in the whole film occurs towards the end as Wendy is navigating the labyrinth. She runs up the stairs, looks into a room, and sees something indescribable: a creature in a bear suit and mask, performing a sexual act with a man in a tuxedo. Wendy and the creature make eye contact, the shot zooms in on the beast’s face, and the audience cannot imagine who or what could be behind his impenetrable mask. Because Kubrick offers no explanation, the audience is left to fill in the blank. It is like a terrifying Mad Libs. It gives you the feeling that you are imagining the whole thing.

Things that are omitted are unsettling, and Kubrick built his whole career on not explaining things to the audience. He keeps secrets from the viewer. I think that we will never solve the puzzles in his films, most especially in The Shining. The day we do figure out what Kubrick meant in this film is the day we attain his unattainable mastery. And this will never happen because Kubrick’s genius was decades ahead of his time. When you compare The Shining to other films from the 1980’s it pushes the limitations and transcends the status quo of the era. The Shining is so good that it sets the tone for decades to come

VERDICT

Overall The Shining is my favorite horror movie and is horrifying on all the right levels. It is suspenseful, psychological, intense, and intelligent. Even if the ghosts in The Shining are not real, Wendy and Danny are still haunted by Jack Torrance’s alcoholism and violent tendencies. This relates to Wendy and Danny’s feelings of dread, isolation, and intimate contact with their tormentor. The film captures the feeling of unease, the feeling of not knowing if you’ll ever escape. And all of this is closed with a shot of a  photograph of Jack in the gold room with the caption Overlook Hotel July 4th Ball dated 1921, this reflects that after Jack’s death in the hedge maze he is immortalized as another spirit of the Overlook Hotel. Jack’s open arms in this image is as if he is welcoming you into the horrors that have taken place that cursed winter. This image will be burned into the heads of viewers forever. It has been dissected and analysed hundreds of times, but my view of this shot is that it is Kubrick showing the audience that the answer to why Jack is exploited by the ghosts of the overlook was right under our noses the whole time. The last piece of the puzzle Kubrick created hidden in plain sight.

I WILL GIVE THE SHINING 10/10! “a masterpiece of modern horror.”    

By Levi Jacobson

Scream 4 is a relief after the anti-climactic Scream 3, which disappointed fans of the Scream franchise and fans of movies in general. Scream 4 was the best resurrection of a franchise that fell from grace until Halloween 2018 blew everyone out of the water, critics and audiences alike. This movie is shot like Scream 1. It’s a welcome return to gothic Woodsboro, and the shots mimic iconic scenes and imagery from the first two movies of the franchise. The film returns to its roots in the movie-within-a-movie cold opening, which feels as lucid and dreamy as Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), the film that solidified Wes Craven’s career.

This recursive opening sequence is mind-boggling. It begins with a phone ringing and two teenage girls sitting on the couch and deconstructing the tropes of the torture porn genre, a term that refers to the movies that followed the 2004 psychological horror movie Saw, which was characterized by flashbacks inside of flashbacks, which made it truly unique. Later iterations and sequels focused more on making every death bloodier and gorier than the last. This birthed a new sub-genre of horror that was very popular at the time Scream 4 was made and released. So, as the film opens, we believe that we are watching a scene from Scream 4, in which two girls decide to watch Saw IV. Meanwhile one of the girls is texting with her “hot Facebook stalker,” and they start receiving threatening messages and phone calls, which signals that this film is going to carry us from the analog to the digital world of horror. By the four-minute mark, both girls are butchered, and it is revealed that we are watching Stab 6.  

The next scene opens with two more girls, played by Anna Paquin and Kristin Bell, discussing the sad state of contemporary horror and how all the films are the same.

Paquin: A bunch of articulate teens deconstruct horror movies until Ghostface kills them off one-by-one. It’s been done to death, the whole self-aware, post-modern, meta-shit. Stick a fork in me.

Bell: I like the Stab movies … There’s something about a guy with a knife who just snaps.

Paquin: “It’s so predictable, You can see everything coming. There’s no surprise.”

Half-way through her next sentence, Kristin Bell’s character stabs her twice in the gut and asks, “Was that surprising? … Now sit down and watch the fucking movie.” At this point, it is revealed that this is actually the opening scene of Stab 7, and two girls in Woodsboro are watching it on video.

These girls are discussing the science, art, and repercussions of the movie-within-a-movie scenario. At this point, we are back in Woodsboro, and Scream 4  has truly commenced. The killer attacks in their tried-and-true method. The killer calls and threatens, “Think of me as your director. You are in my movie now.” This establishes the twist of Scream 4: the killers are recording and uploading their kills to the internet. Moreover, the first two “real” kills are homages to and recreations of classic deaths from the first two films (Cici being thrown through a window in Scream 2 and Tatum being killed by a garage door in Scream 1). By the eleven-minute mark, there have been five kills, which is almost as many as in the whole of the first film.    

This movie calls back to the original in many ways. It also wraps up the franchise in a deserving way. Jill Roberts and Charlie Walker are trying to reboot the Woodsboro massacre, and this is the best way for the creators to comment on their old work. It also gives the writers the opportunity to comment on how unnecessary reboots are. The clever quips that defined both Scream 1 and 2 are back and they are better than ever! This is the well-deserved finale for the Scream franchise. It ditches 90’s logic and brings us into the digital age.

Scream 4 is about corruption in social media and being famous for the sake of being famous. It’s also about the state of the horror genre, but this time it’s different. It’s targeted at reboots. Sidney Prescott is touring her book about how it feels to be the Final Girl, and she finds herself back in Woodsboro, the place where it all started. Here Gale Weathers and Dewey are happily married. Dewey has become sheriff, and Gale is failing to cope with writer’s block and her envy of Sidney’s success. Sidney is staying with her cousin, Jill Roberts, whose friends constitute a relatable teenage cast, the next generation of killers and victims. There is another Ghostface murderer copycat on the loose. In the third act, it is revealed that Jill Roberts and Charlie Walker are on this killing spree to get the same fame and attention that Sidney and Randy received. They are recording and posting their kills to the internet and framing Jill’s boyfriend Travis by linking their posts to his account. Then Jill turns on Charlie and makes it seem like Charlie and Travis were the killers (mimicking Stu and Billy from Scream 1). Her goal is to become Sidney, to be the Final Girl in the eyes of the world. She tricks the media for a little while, but Sidney, Gale, and Dewey track her down and kill her. The movie ends with many news reporters calling Jill “a hero” for killing Ghostface.

Even though the audience knows Jill is the killer, the media doesn’t care. They buy her story without any evidence and praise her as a hero. This shows how the media can be played like a fiddle and how they care more about getting the story than reporting the facts. As Jill is wheeled into the hospital, bloody and on a stretcher, she is attacked by a mob of reporters. This shows how the media is desperate and heartless, but Jill basks in this invasion of privacy. The reporters ask, “How does it feel to be a hero?” And it seems like she has gotten what she has always wanted.     

In one of the last shots, we see Jill and Sidney lying together on the hospital floor. It’s a mirror shot. Jill is dead; Sidney is alive. They have the same hair, same skin tone, same expression. We see how Jill wanted to become Sidney and died because of that desire. Sidney wanted to protect Jill from the killer and ended up killing her, thus blurring the lines between hero and villain. As the camera pans over Jill’s lifeless face we here a reporter say, “Jill Roberts… an American hero right out of the movies.”  

This is a meta end to an iconic and truly meta franchise. This is also the last statement of the last film Wes Craven directed before his death in 2015. This is a perfect ending to a series that unpacks the complicated relationship between violence, movies, and the media.

© Levi Jacobson

with editorial support by Christine Gardiner

By Levi Jacobson

Kevin Williamson wanted to make a gritty finale to the Scream series, but his plans were derailed. In a 2009 interview, Matthew Lillard, who played killer Stu Macher in Scream 1, explained that Williamson had written a script in which his character was designed to the mastermind and manipulator behind the events in Scream 3. This provided great potential because it could really wrap up the trilogy and provide motivation for the killings in the third film. This plan never came to fruition because of the Columbine shooting of 1999 which happened three weeks before Scream 3 was scheduled to go into production. Executives rejected Williamson’s plan to have two killers (Stu macher and unnamed pawn) because of the two teenage shooters who planned and executed the mass killings. Kevin Williamson pulled out of the movie because the executives didn’t want him to make the movie he wanted to make, and Ehren Kruger wrote the new script.

Kevin Williamson is a great writer, and he could have found a way to make Scream 3 work; Ehren Kruger’s claim to fame, however, is that he wrote the three worst Transformer movies and is responsible for the character Roman Bridger, who is the lamest Ghostface (rivaled only by Billy’s mom). Roman is a faulty villain because his motivations make no sense. We first encounter him as the director of Stab 3, the Hollywood blockbuster in production, where most of the film is set. As a character, he is a forgettable and annoying Hollywood stereotype. All he cares about is getting his movie made. When the cast starts to be murdered off, and his film is canceled, he is seen screaming and complaining to basically everyone and seems totally ineffectual. He does not appear for most of the rest of the film until we see him in a coffin with a knife through his chest. There is no time to suspect him. You almost forget about him until he takes off his mask and is revealed as the killer.

By this point, the audience doesn’t care. The screenplay is so heavily retconned that no viewer actually cares. According to the screenplay, Roman Bridgers is Sidney’s half-brother, Maureen Prescott’s son who was fathered a scandalous Hollywood party given up for adoption. He was denied by Maureen, and this is supposed to explain why he wants revenge on Sidney and Hollywood. In the only good line of the movie, he says, “I’m a director, Sid. I direct.”

It seems like everything in the screenplay was built around the killer even though the killer doesn’t make sense. Scream 1 is about suspense. Scream 2 is about deconstructing the genre. Scream 3 is about convenience, flawed story-telling and violence for the sake of violence. In Scream 1, it makes sense that “everybody is a suspect.” In Scream 3, they stick to this motto, but only for the “shock” value.

The third movie in a trilogy is almost always the worst, and even Randy agrees. Jamie Kennedy appears in a posthumous video in which he explains the rules for surviving trilogy:

If you find yourself dealing with an unexpected back-story, and a preponderance of exposition, then the sequel rules do not apply. Because you are not dealing with a sequel. You are dealing with the concluding chapter of a trilogy. That’s right. It’s a rarity in the horror field, but it does exist, and it is a force to be reckoned with. Because true trilogies are all about going back to the beginning and discovering something that wasn’t true from the get-go…. So if it is a trilogy you are dealing with, here are some super trilogy rules.

1. You’ve got a killer who’s gonna be superhuman. Stabbing him won’t work. Shooting him won’t work. Basically, in the third one, you’ve gotta cryogenically freeze his head, decapitate him, or blow him up.
2. Anyone, including the main character, can die. This means you, Sid. I’m sorry. It’s the final chapter. It could be fucking Reservoir Dogs by the time this thing is through.
3. The past will come back to bite you in the ass. Whatever you think you know about the past, forget it. The past is not at rest! Any sins you think were committed in the past are about to break out and destroy you.”

These rules do and do not apply to the movie. Sidney’s mom comes back as an inexplicable ghost, but no main characters die, and the way “the past comes back” is pathetic. Calling yourself out does not make bad writing acceptable.   

This film is full of flaws. My favorite flaws are:

Top 10 Flaws

10. The murder of Patrick Warburton. This is a casting mistake; you don’t cast Patrick Warburton and kill him off after one scene.

9.  The killer’s idiotic calling card: old photos of Sidney’s mom, Maureen Prescott.

8. The set of Stab 3, which has props and locations from Scream 1, which would clearly have been covered in Stab 1.

7. The Ghostface red herrings

6. The elaborate Hollywood pervert-nightmare-house with two-way mirrors and hidden passages that only serves the purpose of a forced backstory.

5. Long, tiresome chase scenes that make no sense.  

4. The “jokes” that are misplaced and fall short.

3. Nonsensical retconning that diminishes characters like Billy and Stu.

2. Sidney’s “Ghost Mom.” In a horror-franchise founded in realism, the supernatural element doesn’t sit right with anyone.

1. The obnoxious, nonsensical voice changer that allows the killer to copy and mimic anyone’s voice after hearing it once. This technology does not even exist in 2019, let alone the year 2000. This is grim.

Scream 3 is a two-hour film in which there are only two good cameos (Jaime Kenney and Carrie Fisher), one good shot (when Ghostface steps out from a rack of Ghostface costumes), and one good line “I’m a director, Sid. I direct.” That is not enough for the “closing” chapter for a “trilogy”.

Overall, Scream 3 is off-brand. This movie is a joke and a cash-grab. The producers should have shut it down, but greed and money consume Hollywood. It’s pathetic. And it is ironic that they set out to lampoon and critique the very greed and corruption they ended up displaying.

© Levi Jacobson

with editorial support by Christine Gardiner

by Levi Jacobson

In the midst the hype of Scream 1, writer Kevin Williamson cranked out the script to a sequel that opens with the premiere of a movie based on Sydney’s torment and the Woodsboro massacre. Scream 2 builds upon and expands the execution of meta-commentary that defines the first film. The last line in Scream 1 shows Sydney’s strength and implies that she can control the perception her story, but in Scream 2, Gale Weathers and Hollywood have portrayed Sydney–both in a best-selling tell-all and in a campy clichéd slasher film–as a fragile girl, a damsel in distress who needs to be saved.     

The Cold Open

At first glance, it looks like a normal cold open, but the first scene of Scream 2 expands on the intertextuality of the first film. Scream 2 opens at a movie theater premiere of the fictional movie STAB. Attempting to put language to this scene is exhausting because the layers of intertextuality are so deep. On the surface, it seems like it’s pretty simple: a young couple is standing in line for a premiere of a movie called STAB that is based on the events portrayed in Scream 1. But before you can say “meta-texuality,” the scene complicates everything as the couple argues playfully about how cliche horror movies tend to be:  

Phil Stevens: We got these tickets for free.

Maureen Evans: It’s some dumb-ass white movie about some dumb-ass white girls getting their white asses cut the fuck up, okay?

Scream 2 immediately ceases simply to make fun of the genre and its campiness; it is now calling into question its own creation, construction, and cliched forms. By making fun of a movie based on the “real events” of the first film, the creators poke fun at themselves and slap the hand that feeds them by calling out the noticeable flaws of the first film. The characters discuss how the genre plays out the same way every time, but then the scene expands into a big spectacle and chain of events that shatter the expectations of the characters in the scene and the broader audience.

Once the couple enters the theatre, the young man excuses himself to go the bathroom, where he is stabbed in ear. Then the killer takes his clothes and sits next to Maureen, blending in with the audience, which is full of people wearing Ghostface masks and robes. Maureen assumes Phil is just playing a prank, until she sees blood on his jacket. It is when she realizes that she is sitting next to the killer that an incredibly meta-horror sequence unfolds. The killer chases Maureen in the same way the killer on the screen chases Casey Becker, culminating with one murder laid-over another in an incredibly meta shot that mimics and mirrors a shot from Scream 1.

As you can see, the layered commentary of the first scene lays the foundations for and raises our expectations for the rest of the film. The motto of the second movie is “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” and Wes Craven and Kevin Williamson continued to reuse and recycle the most powerful elements of the first film: the cold open that kills off known celebrities, the two killers working in tandem, and the double-cross. And by opening with an interesting and thought-provoking way to link the second film with its predecessor, this scene shows the audience that the sequel is going be both nothing and exactly like the first film.

“Sequels Suck”

Scream 2 knows that as a sequel it is bound to be inferior to the original film and plays into this expectation. Its commitment to self-reflexivity and self-critique is sustained throughout the film and especially highlighted in an early classroom scene. This scene dramatizes a film class in which a group of students (including Randy, Cece, Mickey and a bunch of randoms and extras) discuss the nature of sequels. The students discuss the murders that took place at the premiere of Stab. This evolves into a discussion of violence, social responsibility, the relationship between life and art, and a real-life sequel.

Teacher: Some people say what happened in that theater is a direct result of the movie itself.

Cece:  that is so Moral Majority you can’t blame violence on entertainment.

Guy: Hello? The murderer was wearing a Ghost Mask. It’s exactly like the movie and directly responsible.

Cece: Movies are not responsible for our actions

Mickey (the killer): This is a classic case of life imitating art imitating life

Girl: … I had biology with that girl. this is reality

Mickey (the killer): … the killer obviously patterned himself after two serial killers who have been immortalized on film.

Teacher: Are you suggesting that someone is trying to make a real-life sequel?

Randy: … Who would want to do that.? Sequels suck! ….The whole horror genre was destroyed by sequels.

This dialogue is important because it captures the debate as to whether or not media violence is responsible for our actions. The dialogue suggests that only crazy people–like Mickey–are inspired to violent acts by violent depictions in media. Mickey’s motivation is to go to trial and expose the cause and effect relationship between movies and violence. The film does an excellent job of investigating and problematizing this relationship without coming to clear resolution. It’s fascinating to see this debate play out, especially since the killer himself is explaining his motives, which are so clearly horrific. Mickey demonstrates his mental instability through his veiled justification of his actions. And it is interesting to see the other characters react to his justifications when they don’t even recognize that they are talking to a killer.

This scene blows my mind. After watching this movie once and revisiting this scene, the viewer realizes that the whole totality of the film is revealed in this one scene. Within the first twenty minutes, the writing basically reveals one of the murderers and his motivation. It is an incredible feat of meta-commentary. Moreover, the scene plays with the idea that sequels do suck, and Scream 2 is clearly inferior to the first film. But the writer’s commitment to meta-commentary (explored deeply in the play-within-play structure) and the deconstruction of the horror genre elevates a mediocre sequel to a great genre piece/critique.

Scream 2 isn’t as good as the first, but it does a lot of things well, particularly the way it questions the relationship between media and violence.

© Levi Jacobson with editorial support by Christine Gardiner