10 Stephen King Movies To Watch Before It
3. The Shining
Few of us will ever be trapped in a haunted hotel with Jack Nicholson during a snowstorm, which is probably just as well: when Nicholson goes off the wall, talking to ghosts and flashing his shark-like grin, it leads to him 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. The movie 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.
By Stanley Kubrick’s request, The Shining was originally released in the UK (the filmmaker’s adopted home) at 119 minutes, which dispenses 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 with an axe it feels like the punchline to a bad joke.