The Shining: Score, Symmetry, and Insanity

Stanley Kubric's The Shining, is a memorable horror film, filled with iconic references, and contain scenes that are iconic in itself. What really sets the mood to this film is its score. It is filled with disturbing and off-putting sounds, and there is one particularly jarring tone that plays whenever something supernatural, creepy, or foreboding happens. It serves as a build up at times in the movie, setting the viewer up to expect something, and sometimes the payoff is purposefully anticlimactic. Sometimes the sounds are unexpected, popping in as the characters are simply doing mundane, ordinary tasks such as writing or walking down the halls, and serve as a kind of jump scare, without even having any scary images included.

A lot of the camera shots, although standard, also serve well to show off the grandeur of the Overlook Hotel, and at times, it almost seems to be too large of a hotel, to the point where it seems to be overwhelming the characters. The shots are used to scale how large the rooms are in comparison to the three people inside them. Symmetry also seems to be a staple of the camera shots in The Shining. In many of the shots showing off the hotel, there is symmetry involved. Characters are in the middle of the shots, and the view is balanced out equally on both sides. This only serves to reinforce the unnaturalness found in the hotel by using such surreal shots that are so neatly symmetric, that they off-put the insanity of the plot.

The only thing I found really strange about the movie was Jack's progression into insanity. And by that, I mean that there was little progression at all. The transition into his madness wasn't that gradual, or that subtle. It was more or less a few shots of him yelling, screaming, and being generally angry, and then staring off into space with some creepy background music, and bam, we just have to assume that he's crazy now. There was no real reason given as to why he was targeted by the ghosts, and there was no indication that he was more susceptible to being insane than any other person. It doesn't help that we know little about this man, other than that he is an ex-alcoholic, and a writer who is down on his luck. It also doesn't help that even at the very start of the movie, he didn't seem like an amicable, stable-looking person to begin with. The changes to Jack's mentality could've been done a little better, rather than just suddenly making him crazy all of a sudden. I guess the excuse for that could be that he was driven insane by the solitude of being stuck in the hotel with only two other people, but that argument isn't very solid, seeing as both Wendy and Danny exhibited absolutely no signs of the same discomfort despite being in the same situation as Jack.