Live Life Team
I recently watched Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining” and couldn’t even finish it. This disappointed me because it’s become a personal Halloween tradition. But films are permanent and don’t change. It is people that change. And so why did it scare the junk out of me, Simple, I’m a dad now.
Jack Nicholson plays a father who takes his wife and son to Colorado to be caretakers of a large ski lodge for the winter. But the harsh isolation is too much for Nicholson who goes crazy and runs amuck, trying to kill his family with an axe.
Surprisingly, this isn’t what freaked me out. I didn’t even get to that part. At the beginning, his wife tells a doctor about an incident when her husband accidentally broke their son’s arm in a drunken rage. It is in the middle of the film that Nicholson tells his own chilling version, stating, “I never touched him. I love the little son of a **.”
As a viewer, I’ve always found the film grisly and entertaining. It builds to a crescendo slowly. Yet, this viewing was too painful – the set-up just too much. It’s not the fear of being murdered that frightened me (this is why slasher films are just gross rather than scary). Rather, it’s the fear that I become a monster and harm my family. Which I guess still makes it a master film by a genius filmmaker, even if I’ll never be able to watch it again.
