April 2024: The Shining

I Ain't Afraid of No Ghosts

When I was younger, I had a reputation amongst my friends and family for being a scaredy-cat.

As a young child, my parents had to be very careful about what they would let me watch. They have often lamented that they had to deal with a fresh bout of nightmares every time I saw a new Disney movie. In particular, the Wicked Witch from Snow White and the Seven Dwarves (1937) and, unexpectedly, the fight at the end of The Lion King (1994), plagued my dreams for weeks. I wasn't any braver as a teenager, and by the time I was graduating university I was able to count on one hand the number of horror films I had managed to sit through. The number of those films that I had seen willingly was even less.

Coronavirus changed all of that. During the pandemic I found myself seeking out more and more frightening fiction, and I've come out of the other side with a voracious appetite for the macabre.

The same friends who knew me to be terrified of horror movies were fairly shocked to learn that I managed to acquire a taste for them. I've often joked to them that it was an attempt to make myself feel something - that the adrenaline rush of a scary movie helped lift the monotony of quarantine, if only for a little while. And while I do think that's true for why I became a horror fan, I've always wondered if I was alone in suddenly fixating on the genre.

The author Joe Hill writes in an essay for The New York Times:

"The imagination is our final advantage as a species, a place to safely (and happily) explore experiences that are far from safe and far from happy."

This idea, that the imagination and the stories we create with it are tools that allow us to practise negative emotions, really helped me to understand how I made the leap from lifelong coward to card-carrying horror fanatic. The pandemic was a terrifying experience for me. I was living in the south of England at the time, physically separated from my entire support system at home in the north of Ireland. I hadn't been living in England for very long, certainly not long enough to put down roots and forge friendships strong enough to support me through what felt like the end of the world. As such, I spent just under 9 months locked down in my 2 bedroom flat, very much alone.

And with no-one nearby to turn to, I guess I found myself turning to horror. It wasn't something that I did consciously, and a lot of the time I turned to cozier, more comforting stories (Animal Crossing in particular was a very appreciated balm for my mounting anxiety). But I continued to circle back to horror, maybe thinking that if I kept submerging myself in worlds scarier than the one I was living in, it would be easier to cope. Reflecting on the pandemic now in late 2024, it appears in my mind like some sort of shapeless, eldritch spectre. And perhaps the me of 2020 thought that filling my head with monsters would drown out the dread that the phantom of Covid left hanging over my life. As Stephen King perfectly sums it up in Danse Macabre: "we make up horrors to cope with the real ones."

And speaking of Stephen King, that brings me to The Shining.

Such a Lovely Place

The Shining tells the story of Jack Torrance - an aspiring writer and a recovering alcoholic - his wife Wendy, and their five-year-old son Danny. After losing his job as an English teacher thanks to a violent outburst, Jack is forced to take a job as the off-season caretaker of The Overlook Hotel, a glamorous destination for the rich and famous, situated in the Colorado Rockies.

Jack hopes that the solitude of winter in The Overlook with his family will give him the chance to repair the damage he's done to their relationships, and help him overcome his writer's block. However, as the hotel staff leave for the season, and the Colorado snow cuts the Torrances off from the rest of civilisation, it becomes clear that all is not as it seems.

Danny possesses a psychic ability, dubbed a "shining" by hotel chef Dick Halloran, and he begins to understand that there's a malevolent presence lurking beneath the gilded glamour of The Overlook. As the winter worsens so too do those supernatural forces, preying on Jack's insecurities and anger. What follows is a harrowing battle for survival, as the Torrances confront both the hotel's evil and the darkness within themselves.

It's Alive!

The Shining is perhaps the most famous example of the hotel twist on the classic haunted house. The only other serious contender is Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960), which features the Bates Motel (or maybe Hotel California by The Eagles). But in Psycho, the location is a desolate backdrop that emphasises the creepiness of Norman Bates, the man who runs the motel. In The Shining, The Overlook Hotel is as much of a character as the Torrance family, and is an active, malicious force. It covets Danny's "shining", and its main objective throughout the novel is to to kill him so it can absorb his power.

The goals of The Overlook are one of the only definitive things about it. Outside of the knowledge that it wants to kill Danny, the reader has few other concrete facts about the hotel and what has led to it becoming so dangerous. In the basement, Jack discovers a scrapbook of news articles dedicated to the history of The Overlook, along with various other receipts and papers. While these papers do reveal some of the more gruesome thing that have gone on inside the hotel walls, like the massacre in the Presidential Suite, they don't explain why these things happened. It's possible that evil has shrouded the hotel since the day it was built, and that presence is what led to all the death on its grounds. Or perhaps it became haunted as a result of all of the bloodshed, and every death since its construction in the early 1900s has compounded the supernatural forces that possess it.

There is never a concrete answer to this question, but even if the answer had been written in the scrapbook, it couldn't be trusted. Jack, as a writer, is gripped by the story potential he sees in these materials, and they give him another reason to want to stay in The Overlook, even as Wendy and Danny begin to express their reservations. It's no coincidence that the papers are discovered by Jack; they are hotel's way of drawing him in. Any grand truths that would be written in them could simply be additional hooks to keep him interested.

The scrapbook is The Overlook's version of Lovecraft's Necronomicon - a tome of eldritch lore that contained such earth-shattering revelations about humanity that it would often drive readers mad. The scrapbook doesn't immediately plunge Jack into insanity, of course, but it's a tool used by The Overlook to continue to push him along that path. Furthermore, there's an almost Lovecraftian sense of dread that hangs around the hotel in general. In the autumn daylight, it's easier for the Torrance family to dismiss the strange goings on as tricks of the light, or imaginings brought on by sleep deprivation. But as the winter closes in and isolates them from civilisation, it gets harder and harder for them to refute what they're experiencing. It's then that The Overlook reveals its true nature, but the scariest thing is that, even with its mask off, there is so much about it that is unknowable. The only thing that Wendy and Danny ever know for sure about its evil is that it wants to consume them. There is no means of negotiation, and in the winter snow, no means of escape. That's where the terror comes from: being at the mercy of this unthinking, unfeeling monster.

The true genius of The Shining, however, is that the eldritch malevolence of The Overlook Hotel isn't the most frightening enemy that Wendy and Danny must defeat. That honour goes to Jack.

You Can't Kill the Boogeyman

The Shining is as successful as a psychological horror as it is as a supernatural one, if not more so, and the way that King dives into the mind of Jack Torrance makes for one of the most compelling reading experiences that I've ever had. His point of view is a minefield on contradictions. He's fully aware that he needs the caretaker job at The Overlook to keep his family afloat, but he chafes at the manual labour and the authority the hotel manager has over him, and sees more value in his personal writings instead. He knows that he's made mistakes and hurt his family, but convinces himself that the people he's lashed out at incited his rage, and he couldn't be blamed for his response. He is self aware, but only to a point, and after that point, everything is someone else's fault.

Ultimately Jack winds up an antagonistic character in The Shining, manipulated into unspeakable acts by the evil of The Overlook. But what makes Jack so interesting as an antagonist is that he's not simply an evil person. The Stephen King novel that precedes The Shining, 'Salem's Lot, does feature an antagonist who is simply evil, in the vampire Kurt Barlow. He preys on the titular town because he is nothing more than a predator, and delights in being "the father of serpents" and a "great creature of the night". Unlike Barlow, Jack Torrance is not capital E Evil. He doesn't morph into, as King puts it, "The Overlook's Boogeyman", because he was always a monster. He wasn't plotting the murder of his wife and son when he agreed to be the hotel's off-season caretaker. However, there is a darkness within him, and it's that darkness that allows the hotel to manipulate him into doing its bidding.

This is something that even Dick Halloran notices when he tests Jack to see if he has powers like Danny's. Although Dick doesn't believe that Jack shines, he comments on "something - something - that he was hiding. Or something he was holding in so deeply submerged in himself that it was impossible to get to." It's possible that, even within hours of first arriving at The Overlook, the hotel's dark presence has already begun to worm its way into Jack's mind. But it's more likely that Dick is picking up on something that's already there within Jack, and that it's something that Jack works hard to represses or outright ignore.

The hotel is simply throwing fuel onto an already burning fire. Jack was already fighting with his dark side. The Overlook is merely ensure that he loses.

King goes to great lengths to illustrate the events in Jack's life that have cultivated this darkness within him, including several flashbacks to formative experiences. The earliest of these in Jack's timeline is his experience growing up with his father, Mark Anthony Torrance. Mark is another very contradictory character, another for whom the pieces of his life don't seem like they should fit together. Mark was a father of four and worked as a nurse at the Berlin Community Hospital, and as a small child, Jack loved him "uncritically and strongly". Mark was also a physically abusive drunk, who terrorised his family and was hated by his other three children.

Jack dreams of the incident where his father beat his mother with a cane so badly that he put her into hospital. It occurred during dinner on a Sunday evening, after a three-day drinking bender for Mark. Jack recalls that it seemed to him that his father had flown into a rage unprovoked, and set upon his mother so suddenly that he was able to hit her seven times before his older brothers were able to pull him off. During the attack, Mark yells at Mrs Torrance to "come on and take [her] medicine".

In spite of this abuse, or perhaps even because of it, Jack doesn't seem to have it within him to hate his father. Although he concedes that before the cane incident "it had not seemed strange that his own love should go hand-in-hand with his fear", when he dreams of Mark's headstone, he thinks that he would have included a more personal epitaph, something that referenced his happy memories of his father from early in his childhood.

The cycle of abuse continues unbroken in Jack's relationships with his own wife and son. As an adult, Jack has, like his father before him, become an alcoholic. He is also prone to violent outbursts - usually verbal, but sometimes physical, including one drunken incident where he breaks Danny's arm after his son accidentally spilt beer on a manuscript he had been working on. This attack comes back to Jack a lot throughout the book. He does feel genuinely guilty for his actions, and berates himself for them in his inner monologue, calling himself a "dirty liar" and a "fucking drunken waste". Unlike his father, who seemed to torment his family until the moment he dropped dead, Jack knows when he has gone too far and he tries to be a better person for Wendy and Danny. But the darkness is still there within him. And it's because of this darkness that The Overlook is able to get a foothold in his mind in the first place.

The hotel uses the dream of Jack's father beating his mother to manipulate him. It makes Jack believe that his father is speaking to him through the CB radio, telling him to kill Wendy and Danny because all artists must suffer for their art. As a result, Jack destroys the radio in his sleep, ensuring that no-one will be able to contact the outside world to call for help. It is in this action that the line from the horrors that Jack suffered during his childhood, and the horrors that he is committing in the present, becomes clear. Mark has had a profound influence on Jack, and that influence causes Jack to commit acts of violence that hurt his family. It happened when he drunkenly broke Danny's arm, and it happens again when he destroys the radio. Yes, the hotel is also actively twisting his mind, but it's simply throwing fuel onto an already burning fire. Jack was already fighting with his dark side. The Overlook is merely ensuring that he loses.

And How Do We Begin to Covet, Clarice?

This technique of using flashbacks to add context to Jack's behaviour is used again in what is, for my money, the single most compelling insight into his psyche, and the moment of The Shining that stuck with me long after I had finished it. It is the scene in which Jack is stung by a wasp while removing a nest hidden in the roof of The Overlook, and it serves as a powerful summary of everything about Jack that has led him to this point in his life.

The premise of the scene is innocent enough, but it's the direction that Jack's thoughts take as a result of the wasp sting that make this chapter so interesting. Initially, he refuses to accept that he had gotten careless when repairing the roof and that if he'd been paying more attention he could have avoided being stung. Instead he makes the excuse that he was preoccupied with thinking about The Little School, the play that he's been working on. Already this shines a light on Jack's pride: he refuses to accept responsibility even for something as unimportant as a wasp sting, and he considers his own writings to be much more important than the manual labour he's actually being paid to do.

But the real meat of this chapter comes as Jack's musings lead him to remember his time teaching at Stovington Prep School, and it's revealed that Jack lost his job because he assaulted a seventeen-year-old student called George Hatfield.

The parallels between the characters in The Little School and Jack and George are obvious, and even Jack himself admits them. The play centers around a man called Denker, "a gifted student who had failed into becoming the brutal and brutalizing headmaster of a turn-of-the-century New England prep school", and the teenage Gary Benson, "the student [Denker] sees as a younger version of himself." Jack, like Denker, also views himself as a gifted, creative intellectual, and he reminisces on how George Hatfield, a star soccer and baseball player, reminds him of himself and his own days as a star football player in college. However, although Jack does say that he had begun to use George as inspiration for his characters, he denies he ever held hatred for the boy the way that Denker does for Gary, insisting that "if he had, he would have known it. He was quite sure of that."

In addition to his duties as an English teacher at Stovington, Jack also led the debate team. George was a member of the team, and was surprisingly good - Jack remarks that George was always well prepared, he was rarely surprised by his opponents' arguments, and he didn't let the thought of whether or not he was "wrong" get in the way of mounting a strong debate. However, George had a stutter, one that had never been an issue in class, and curiously only manifested when he was debating. Jack cut George from the team due to this impediment, although George was adamant that he didn't have a stutter, and that Jack was cutting him for personal reasons. He even accused Jack of giving him less time for his arguments, which Jack vehemently denied. As he remembers how George stuttered through his alloted time, he thinks that "if he had set the timer ahead, it would have been just to... to put George out of his misery. But he hadn't set the timer ahead. He was quite sure ot it."

Already we see Jack's defense unravel, exposing that even though he didn't set the timer ahead, he was thinking about it, not wanting to have to listen to George stutter. But the hesitation in providing the reason hints further at Jack's resentment of George. He's unable to admit that he was jealous of the handsome, charismatic boy, who had his "whole future [laid] ahead of him", who drew the attention of girls and was talented at sports. As Jack continues to reminisce, he recalls finding George slashing the tyres of his car in retaliation for being cut from the debate team, and assaulting the boy in a blind rage. Guiltily, he concedes even further, swearing that "he had set the timer ahead no more than a minute. And not out of hate but out of pity."

Jack's unwillingness to accept any responsibility for his actions is further evidence of the ever present darkness lurking inside him.

This flashback firmly establishes Jack as an unreliable narrator. At the beginning, he was "quite sure" that he hadn't sabotaged George by setting the timer ahead, but by the end, he's swearing the opposite. If he continued to be pressed, what else is there that Jack is "quite sure" about that would turn out to be untrue? How can he be "quite sure" that he didn't hate George, but pity him? And how much else of what Jack has said thus far should be questioned once it's revealed how easily he can reframe things in his favour, even within his own mind? Did George truly have a stutter, or was it simply an excuse Jack created to justify kicking him off the debate team? When Jack and his alcoholic friend Al Shockley were drunk driving, had the bike that they ran over in the middle of the road really been abandoned? Or has Jack just convinced himself that there was no rider?

Jack's unwillingness to accept any responsibility for his actions is further evidence of the ever present darkness lurking inside him. He has a unique talent for spinning events in order to position himself as either innocent, justified, or a victim. While Jack was indeed the victim of abuse when he was a small child, he hasn't put the work in to overcome that abuse, and doesn't even seem to acknowledge that there is work to be done to break free of the influence his father had on him. He doesn't note the significance of repeating his father's words, "come here and take your medicine", to George when he assaults him. From Jack's perspective, "he had not done things; things had been done to him."

What makes Jack so fascinating as a character is that although The Overlook warps him into the worst possible version of himself, that version wasn't too far from the surface to begin with. If there were no supernatural forces at play, what might have happened in the bowels of the hotel during that winter? Perhaps the family would have reconciled the way that Jack originally imagined they would. But with no-one else around to blame for his own personal failings - no abusive father, no alcohol, no George Hatfield - if something had gone wrong, perhaps he would have blamed Wendy and Danny. He may have even taken out his frustrations on them the way he did on George; he may have tried to get them to come and take their medicine.

It's undeniable that it was the influence of The Overlook that drove Jack to try and kill his family. But its power is limited - it cannot create darkness within a person, it can only amplify what is already there. As Danny himself realises when he is older, "this inhuman place makes human monsters." So the question is, did Jack need the eldritch influence of the hotel to become a monster? Or did it merely speed up the process?

In My Restless Dreams, I See That Hotel

I began writing this piece in mid-November 2024, just a few days after finishing Bloober Team's remake of the classic psychological horror game Silent Hill 2. Like The Shining, it's a story about an ordinary man and his experiences trapped in a supernatural location - in this case, James Sunderland in the titular, monster-infested town of Silent Hill. But it's also a very human story, and spends just as much time delving into James' psyche as it does throwing scary enemies at the player. The final act of the game, set in the eerie Lakeview Hotel, feels like a direct homage to The Shining, exploring similar themes of guilt, isolation, and the monsters lurking within us that we are reluctant to face.

We keep reproducing stories like The Shining because they guide us through our own experiences of fear and loneliness.

As a recent adopter of horror fiction, I've been playing catch up for the past few years to absorb the works that I've missed out on. And one of the most interesting things about that has been tracing the threads of influence that often bind these stories together. Joss Whedon's The Cabin in the Woods (2012) is a homage to the horror movie in general, and to Sam Raimi's The Evil Dead (1981) in particular; Whedon even recreates the famous shot of the cabin's cellar door suddenly bursting open in his film. Vecna, the villain from the fourth season of Stranger Things (2022), is heavily inspired by Freddy Krueger from A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), killing teenagers by trapping them in trances, much like Freddy's dream-based murders. Robert Englund, the actor who plays Freddy Krueger, even makes a cameo in that season of the show, a deliberate display of fealty to the Nightmare franchise and its influence on Vecna. Then there is Mike Flanagan, who has directly adapted the works of several titans of horror literature, including Shirley Jackson (The Haunting of Hill House, 2018), Edgar Allan Poe (The Fall of the House of Usher, 2023), and Stephen King (Doctor Sleep, 2019, and Gerald's Game, 2017).

From my outsider's perspective, it seems to me that creators of horror fiction are more likely to "show their working" than creators from other genres might be. References seem to be more deliberate and clear, and the greatest works of the genre are treated with a real sense of reverence. When these references are done well, they don't feel derivative - they stand on their own, and serve to enhance the stories that they're a part of. The ghosts in Flanagan's Hill House series, for example, are often tucked away in the periphery, in a way that feels like a nod to John Carpenter's Halloween (1978). Carpenter famously included Michael Myers in the background of shots to unnerve the audience, and Flanagan uses the same technique, hiding his ghosts in plain sight to scare any viewer brave enough to study the frame for them. But more than building upon the work of the past, often references like this feel like a knowing wink to the audience. They're almost like an inside joke between the creator and the fans, and they create something unique within horror: a feeling of community.

What fascinates me about this is that the stories that develop this communal feeling are stories of fear and pain. The Shining is one of the most celebrated, influential works in the entire horror genre, and it's about a recovering alcoholic trying to murder his family, about isolation and abuse. But the darkness of its themes aren't intimidating to readers; rather, they seem to be what people are drawn to. This story is one that has been recreated either in whole or in part countless times. There's Stanley Kubrick's legendary movie adaptation The Shining (1980), which in turn went on to inspire many other filmmakers, including Tim Burton, Mike Flanagan, and Steven Spielberg. Even the normally family-friendly The Simpsons has tipped its hat to both King and Kubrick, in the form of a full parody spoof of The Shining - called The Shinning - in its 1994 Halloween special.

In his essay for The New York Times, Joe Hill dubs the horror genre "a lamp that can guide you through your own eventual nighttime journeys". Maybe that's why we keep reproducing stories like The Shining: they guide us through our own experiences of fear and loneliness. And maybe the community spirit that fans and creators of the genre foster is an attempt to comfort each other; to let us know that we're not alone in the darkness we deal with.

So even though it took me over 20 years to overcome my fears, I've realised that I'm certainly not alone in my newfound love of horror. And with stories as intense, compelling, and human as The Shining, it's not hard to see why so many people are as captivated by the genre as I am.

Sources

This isn't a serious attempt at an analytical essay or a research paper by any means. I write these pieces primarily for my own enjoyment, and as a way to landmark my progress as I continue to rekindle my love for reading. That said, human fascination with horror, and the ways in which horror can help us deal with negative or intense emotions, are topics that I find genuinely interesting.

I definitely over-researched the area for this essay. All I wanted was a snappy quote for the opening paragraphs, but I very quickly fell down the rabbit hole and lost an entire afternoon digging through a wealth of papers, articles, and videos. Given that I've already done the reading, I thought I'd include some of the sources that I came across that I found most engaging. Since I was only looking for a line or two for my introduction, I didn't use most of them, and anything that I did use should be cited appropriately. But if the topic does interest you, then you might get a kick out of the following:

• Peering Into the Darkness - Joe Hill [The New York Times]
• I Can't Stop Watching Contagion - Dan Olsen as Folding Ideas [YouTube]
• How horror movies can help people overcome real-world trauma - Nicole Johnson [National Geographic]
• Pandemic practice: Horror fans and morbidly curious individuals are more psychologically resilient during the COVID-19 pandemic - Coltan Scrivner, John A Johnson, Jens Kjeldgaard-Christiansen, Mathias Clasen [PubMed Central]
• Why Horror Seduces - Mathias Clasen [Goodreads] [Google Books]