Day 8: The Shining

Day 8 of Calloween Movie Month

Content warnings: blood, domestic abuse, child death, unreality, alcohol abuse, cheating, racism

Recommended?: Yes

Spoilers and discussion of mentioned topics below. You have been warned.

Don't drink ghost booze kids, it'll fuck with your brain.



The Shining follows a struggling writer and recovering alcoholic Jack Torrance as he's given the job of caring for the Outlook Hotel on it's off-season. He brings his wife, Wendy, and his son, Danny along with him, and they must escape him as the possible supernatural presence in the hotel drives him to violence and instability.

This movie had already been talked to death before I was born, and it probably will be after I die. And for good reason, it's an expertly crafted horror film. So I'm not under the impression that I'll be the first person to have this interpretation, but I hope to at least explain it as well as I can here.

The Shining was unsettling and at times terrifying, but the thing that scared me wasn't the creepy ghost twins, or the hallways full of blood, or the guy on cello going to town every few minutes, but the human relationships at it's center.

The scenes that made my blood run cold and my heart threaten to claw its way out of my chest were the ones in which Jack Torrance abuses his family, even before he goes into crazy axe murderer mode.

His abuse is so intensive that it makes me wonder if the Outlook is even haunted at all. Who's to say these aren't just manifestations of Wendy and Danny's maladaptive ways of coping with Jack's abuse?

There was already a president for alcoholism and physical abuse towards Danny and, given Wendy's reserved and sheepish nature, probably one for verbally berating her as well. These are already deep rooted before he even gets the job offer.

But the Outlook hotel provides something that enables Jack to further torment his family: solitude.

They are isolated with no means of escape, at least not easy ones. And their ability to contact help is restricted and limited by the distance and the weather and the fragility of technology as well as the ease with which it can be tampered.

He's already short with the both of them when they get there, and the longer they stay and the more Wendy worries about the health of her son, the worse he gets.

The scenes in which Wendy wonders if it's Jack or someone else that hurt her son sat like a boulder in my stomach. The initial acknowledgement of Jack's previous abuse and short temper followed by her desperately claiming it must have been something else that hurt him while Jack tells her she's overreacting and that he probably just did it to himself feel so accurate to the ways abuse survivors talk about how they'd try to excuse their abusers actions to continue viewing them in a positive light. Even if they know what's happening is wrong.

Isolation plays a big part in the fear factor of the film. The front doors can barely be opened with all the heavy snow, there's doors that lead to nowhere and doors that lead to rooms they didn't lead to before. There's no escape, no locks that will hold Jack back forever, nowhere to run. This is foreshadowed by Wendy and Danny playing in the hedge maze and Jack looking over the diagram of it. He knows he has the power here, and he knows what he's going to do with it.

I've seen people say Jack is a normal man that became a monster, and maybe that's true for the original novel, I haven't read it. But it's hard to make that argument for the movie's interpretation of the character.

The ghost bar is something that exists in Jack's own mind. A place where he's the most important person in the world, where everyone treats him like a king, where he can justify his own behavior with no judgement or consequence to admitting what he's done. He says his 5 months of sobriety have done irreparable harm, that he would never hurt a hair on Danny's head, that his wife is ridiculous for suggesting such a thing. He even suggests to himself, through Grady's ghost, that him "correcting" his wife and son is just his duty as a father. When he tries to justify himself the same way outside of the bar, it just works against him. When he tries to tell Wendy he's not going to hurt her, but that he'll just bash her brains in. When he tells her they can't leave to get their son help because he has a job to do and a responsibility to uphold his promises. When he tries to get Wendy to unlock the door he's trapped behind with pathetic attempts to guilt trip her for her actions done in self defense.

The way Jack behaves at the peak of his instability reminds me a lot of a belligerent  drunkard. He stumbles and limps around, slurring his words and saying whatever pops into his head, getting violent with an ease he didn't prior. Spitting and sputtering profanities at his victims. Read any story of a person talking about their experience with alcoholic parents and it will most likely mirror a lot of his erratic behaviors.

I think he even brought them there specifically to hurt them. After all, one of the most famous scenes in the movie is Wendy seeing his writing and seeing he hasn't done anything but hurriedly type out the same nursery rhyme line over and over again. "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy."

Jack came here to play. He came here to hunt them down like livestock. But their willingness to protect each other and their survival instincts make his efforts futile, and he dies as he lives. Frozen in a fit of violence and anger he could never truly get out of because he never tried. He just sat there and let it take him.

At the core of the film and the evil of the Outlook hotel is an abusive man who lets the worst of him come out the second he gets an ounce of power. Jack was always a monster, and the ghosts left behind in the hotel were only that of the people Wendy and Danny could have been if not for what they faced inside of it.