The Shining

Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 psychological horror film follows Jack Torrance, a frustrated writer who accepts a winter caretaker job at the isolated Overlook Hotel. Jack arrives with his wife Wendy and their young son Danny, whose psychic sensitivity reveals disturbing traces of the hotel’s past. As snow cuts the family off from the outside world, Jack’s isolation, resentment and the hotel’s supernatural influence begin to merge. Wendy struggles to protect Danny while Jack becomes increasingly unstable, turning the vast building into a maze of memory, violence and dread. Kubrick builds tension through symmetrical spaces, long tracking shots, an unsettling soundscape and repeated images rather than conventional explanations. Jack Nicholson, Shelley Duvall, Danny Lloyd and Scatman Crothers lead the cast.

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Key facts

• Stanley Kubrick directed and produced the film; Kubrick and Diane Johnson wrote the screenplay.
• Jack Nicholson, Shelley Duvall, Danny Lloyd and Scatman Crothers lead the cast.
• The film opened in the United States on May 23, 1980.
• The Library of Congress added The Shining to the U.S. National Film Registry in 2018.

Official source: Movies Anywhere.