The Shining

Kubrick’s hell hotel is one of the great nightmarescapes in horror—the Overlook, where plenty of history and things and people in disgusting bear suits are themselves overlooked, until of course it becomes too late. As a novelist, Stephen King—on whose book the film was based—never quite drops into the sort of unprocessable insanity Kubrick deploys here in snapshot moments: the blood flood from the elevator; the evil twins with their evil eyes; the friendly bear-suit buddies. It’s what writer and world-famous chronicler-of-the-forbidden Charles Fort called “high strangeness”—the horror not of the unknown but of the unknowable—and its part of why history and initial critic King both have come to accept the film as a classic.
Wed., Oct. 21, 8 p.m., 2009