Shining, The

The Shining Movie Poster 1980

The Shining (1980), another Stephen King adaptation by Stanley Kubrick, starred Jack Nicholson as Jack Torrance and Shelley Duvall as Wendy Torrance.  Initially, the movie did not do very well, but began picking up steam before leaving theaters.  It received mixed reviews at the time, but was still a box office success overall.  Interestingly enough, as the years have gone by, the movie has been perceived more favorably.  To illustrate, Roger Ebert did not like the movie much back in 1980, but in later years, he gave it a very good review.  It is said that Stephen King did not like the movie either, but critics have liked his made-for-TV version less than Kubrick's movie.

In this movie, Jack Torrance (Nicholson) is an author who takes a job as winter caretaker at a remote Colorado resort called the Overlook Hotel.  Bringing his wife and son along, his plan is to use the solitude to get some writing done. As it turned out, the hotel was built on an old Native American burial site, and the previous caretaker had gone nuts and killed his family.  Jack is told that the hotel has a "shine" to it, which is essentially described as a sort of telepathy.  Jack and his family are warned to stay away from room 237.  Curiosity gets the best of them, and before long they began interacting with no-so-friendly ghosts in the hotel as Jack becomes increasingly more violent.  In the end, Jack tries to kill his family, but they escape and he ends up freezing to death outside.  To demonstrate that Jack himself began to haunt the resort after the incident, a hanging photograph dated 1921 shows him smiling with a group of party guests.