Sean Penn Unpacks What Really Happened with Jack Nicholson and ‘Creepy Little Bully’ PutinĪnd Danny, their son, must go with them, too. Unless the point of their being at the Overlook is for Jack to despise her to a point of contemplating… His wife Wendy will go with him - she seems to have nothing else to do in life except be with a man to whom she is patently unsuited. He will be caretaker for the off-season winter - time to write the novel he’s always promised himself, time to defeat the blank pages. Life seems perfect there - everything the idiot mastermind Jack Torrance ever wanted. So the Torrance family goes off to the Overlook Hotel in the bracing but desolate heights of Colorado. I’m starting with “The Shining” (1980), the Stanley Kubrick adaptation of Stephen King, because of its pioneering balance of horror and satire, and its lethal-dainty script by Diane Johnson. The book’s second chapter, “Red Rum,” focuses on Kubrick’s 1980 classic “ The Shining.” Our excerpt (slightly edited for length) is below.

In all, I would recommend this movie to a mature fourteen-year-old.In his latest book about Hollywood, “Murder and the Movies,” prolific film author David Thomson examines the ways master filmmakers like Stanley Kubrick lure audiences into their twisted murders and sinister plotting.

Although there are brief sequences of violence (a vision of two twins bloody corpses, a man falling down the stairs, and a stabbing that all last mere seconds) and nudity (a ghost is seen in room 237 appears as a young nude woman who climbs out of her tub, however this lasts seconds and no mature sex takes place) this is not an explicit slasher picture, but a glimpse into the psychosis of a madman and a hotel.įrequent language is used, but in my opinion, language is the least of your worries. In my opinion, the film portrays the struggles of mental health and drug abuse, and this is just about the only bold mature topic that parents need to worry about. The Shining is a psychological horror film about an aspiring writer and recovering alcoholic who accepts a position as the off-season caretaker of the isolated historic Overlook Hotel in the Colorado Rockies, with his wife, Wendy Torrance (Duvall), and young son, Danny Torrance (Lloyd).

The shining book