10 Snowbound Horror Movies For Christmas

Few of us will ever get to spend Christmas with Jack Nicholson which is probably just as well: once he starts talking to ghosts and flashing his shark-like grin, it's not long before he's chasing his wife and son through empty hallways armed with an axe.

The Shining boasts some of the most famous sequences of any horror movie of the last forty years, but Stephen King has never reversed his opinion of it, maintaining that, “you can’t do anything except admire it as sculpture.” It may be beautiful to look at, King claims, but the movie has no emotional core. You know Nicholson is going to go crazy the moment you lay eyes on him, so the rest of the picture is a succession of scenes where the actor goes further and further over the top. At 142 minutes, the movie runs longer than 2001: A Space Odyssey so there are lots of those scenes.

By Stanley Kubrick’s request, The Shining was originally released in the UK (the filmmaker’s adopted home) at 119 minutes and it's a better movie for it, dispensing with most of the build up to Hallorann’s return to the Overlook. In the uncut version, the character spends so long returning to the hotel (only to be killed almost immediately) that when Nicholson appears it feels like the punchline to a bad joke.