The Shining (1980)

Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) becomes the caretaker of the Overlook Hotel up in the secluded mountains of Colorado. Jack, being a family man, takes his wife (Shelley Duvall) and son (Danny Lloyd) to the hotel to keep him company throughout the long and isolated nights. During their stay strange things occur when Jack's son Danny sees gruesome images powered by a force called "The Shining" and Jack is heavily affected by this. When Jack gets writer's block and cabin fever, the demons of the hotel start haunting him and Jack has a complete mental breakdown and the situation takes a sinister turn for the worse. Hilarity ensues.

Trivia: The Timberline Lodge on Mt. Hood in Oregon was used for the front exterior, but all the interiors as well as the back of the hotel were specially built at Elstree Studios in London, England. The management of the Timberline requested that Stanley Kubrick not use 217 for a room number (as specified in the book), fearing that nobody would want to stay in that room ever again. Kubrick changed the script to use the nonexistent room number 237. Stanley Kubrick demanded 127 takes from Shelley Duvall in one scene. In the scene where Danny Lloyd rides his bike through the hall and encounters the Grady daughters, he never actually sees them. The scene was accomplished by Stanley Kubrick directing Lloyd to turn the corner into an empty hall. Kubrick then directed Danny to stop, look scared, cover his eyes, and so on. At a different time Kubrick filmed the girls by themselves in the hall standing together. In post-production, he took the film from the two scenes and spliced them together to make it look like it was all happening at the same time - hence giving the illusion that Lloyd (who didn't realize until years later that he was in a horror movie) was actually seeing the two girls. Jack Nicholson ad-libbed the line "Here's Johnny!" in imitation of announcer Ed McMahon's famous introduction of Johnny Carson on U.S. network NBC-TV's long-running late night television program "The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson" (1962). Carson once used the clip of Nicholson as the introduction to one of his annual anniversary specials. Every time Jack talks to a "ghost", there's a mirror in the scene, except in the food locker scene. This is because in the food locker scene he only talks to Grady through the door. We never see Grady like we do in the other "ghost" scenes. For the scene in which Jack breaks down the bathroom door, the props department built a door that could be easily broken. However, Jack Nicholson worked as a volunteer fire marshal and tore it apart easily. The props department were then forced to build a stronger door.

The best English class I ever took was called the art of the cinema, and it consisted of watching movies and then writing reports on them. My major paper was comparing and contrasting Close Encounters of the Third Kind with Jaws. I loved it. So why am I telling you this? Because we watched The Shining in class. I think Kubrick did a great job with this in showing the isolation of the family and the hotel was downright intimidating. Nicholson was great as the demented caretaker.