The Shining

Hi,

This is part of my ongoing Fright Fest 2026 coverage. You can find all my previous reviews here and the full list of upcoming films here. If you're new to the newsletter, welcome and here's a bit more about this ongoing series:

Beetlejuice

It's great except when Michael Keaton is on screen.

This Week In LincolnTynan Stewart

Thanks for reading. I've got a lot of cool stuff coming soon, including additional coverage of the local music scene. If you're currently a free subscriber, please consider supporting the newsletter financially to help me keep writing and reporting. I've also got a new Good Life? column publishing this weekend, which is exclusive for paid subscribers.

You can also support me on Patreon (and receive a complimentary subscription to the newsletter by doing so) or leave a one-time tip. To be clear, I don't want you to feel obligated to pay if doing so would cause you financial hardship: So if that describes you — but you still want to support the newsletter — please share it with a friend! Or more than one friend. Maybe all your friends just to be safe.

As always, you can reach me with questions or feedback at tynanstewart@proton.me or by just replying to this email.

Okay let's talk about the obscure, largely forgotten horror flick The Shining. Have you heard of this one?

• I'm joking of course. The Shining is probably the best-known film showing at the festival this year, and The Ross was packed last night for what seemed like a sold-out screening in their big theater. That was cool to see.
• What wasn't cool to see: I counted at least four people who pulled out their phones and started texting — including during the film's climatic chase sequence! Unforgivable behavior. I hope no one reading the newsletter needs this PSA but please for the love of god keep your phone in your pocket at the movies.
• This was my first time seeing The Shining, but as with The Blair Witch Project, I'd already absorbed many of the images and plot points secondhand through parodies, references and memes. I'm not saying it completely ruined the experience; I actually don't mind spoilers as much as a lot of folks. But it's always a weird experience to finally watch something that has already been so thoroughly digested and worked over by the internet and pop culture. It's like I already had a ghostly, distorted version of the film in my head.
• Speaking of ghosts: I'm really interested in the question of whether the figures haunting the Overlook Hotel are ghosts or simply hallucinatory visions. Maybe I was primed by my viewing of The Haunting, which hinges on a very similar ambiguity. (It's also my second Fright Fest film in a row that features a haunted building/location so complex and interesting that it arguably functions as a character in the story.) I'm inclined to think the murdered Grady sisters, at least, aren't "real" ghosts because Danny begins seeing images of them before the family ever arrives at the hotel.
• But of course what are hallucinations if not ghosts of the mind?

• I want to give a special shout-out to the carpets of the Overlook Hotel. If I had them in my house, I too would probably lose my mind.
• The film is really interested in reversals, mirrors, doubles, and doppelgangers. There are the obvious examples, like the Grady sisters who look as though they could be twins, and Jack's double who is hiding in the photograph from 1921 that serves as the film's final shot. But there's also Danny's enigmatic backwards spelling of "murder" as "redrum," which itself has some of the letters reversed. I'm not entirely sure how to interpret all these threads. But at the very least they suggest that insanity and psychological instability can be understood as a kind of othering of the self: Over the course of the film, Jack becomes a distorted mirror-image of himself. He is recognizable, yet also not — both present and absent — and that friction is what makes his entire character arc so unnerving.
• Stephen King rather famously doesn't like this adaptation of his novel because of Jack Nicholson's performance and his character's lack of any redeeming qualities. Given how Jack Torrance is portrayed — as a horrible pathetic man who resents his family even before the hotel drives him mad — it sure seems like King's dislike is, at heart, a personal grievance. Jack is certainly not a 1-to-1 analogue for King. He's more like a distorted mirror image of him: A writer, but a failed one; an alcoholic who doesn't manage to stay sober. But Kubrick's decision to make Jack a wholly unsympathetic, ugly little goblin from the beginning (rather than a somewhat normal guy driven insane by his circumstances) probably pissed him off.
• Speaking as a writer who isn't Stephen King, I actually really like this depiction of what it means to be a failed author. Wendy (Shelley Duvall's character) tries to comfort Jack early in the film with trite (though obviously well-meaning) advice about how he just needs to get back into the habit of writing every day. I used to teach English and I have in fact made this suggestion to many students who want to write. But The Shining takes this feel-good nugget of conventional wisdom and transforms it into something wretched. The third act reveal of what Jack has been writing — the endless repetition of the same scrap of doggerel — is an aspiring writer's ultimate nightmare: That they'll write and write and practice and practice and in the end still churn out nothing but juvenile nonsense. This is utterly terrifying in a way that has nothing to do with jump scares and I love it.
• Fright level: 4/10
• Enjoyment level: 9/10

Up Next