Mild mannered Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson, in his first major role since winning an Oscar for One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest) arrives at the plush Overlook Hotel in Colorado. He interviews with the general manager (Barry Nelson) for the position of caretaker, notified that his job duties will be to maintain the hotel when it closes down for six months during the winter.

Jack is warned about the possible effects of being isolated here, but says that his family will love it, and that he’ll have time to outline a novel. The manager mentions that in 1970, a tragedy occurred when the winter caretaker killed his wife and two daughters with an axe, before shooting himself. This doesn’t deter Jack, who proclaims that his wife - a fan of “ghost stories and horror films” - will be thrilled.

Back in Boulder, Jack’s passive wife Wendy (Shelley Duvall) watches cartoons with their 7-year-old son Danny (Danny Lloyd). Danny is hyper intuitive, though he has kept his extrasensory abilities secret from his parents. He attributes the visions he receives to “Tony,” a little boy in his mouth. Tony shows him a terrifying, bloody vision of what waits for him at the hotel, and Danny blacks out.

Arriving at the Overlook, Jack and Wendy are shown through the hallways, lounges, kitchen and boiler room that will soon be completely deserted. The hotel also features a 13 foot tall hedge maze outside, and the couple are advised not to enter it unless they have an hour to find their way out.

The hotel’s head cook, Dick Hallorann (Scatman Crothers) senses that Danny has the same ability he does. He tells Danny that his grandmother called it “shining,” the ability to see things that happened a long time ago, and that haven’t happened yet. Danny senses that there’s something bad in the Overlook Hotel, particularly in Room 237, and Hallorann orders him to stay out of there.

With the coming of snow, Jack grows more annoyed by Wendy, and more withdrawn. Danny knows something’s wrong. Moaning in his sleep, Jack is awakened from a terrible nightmare by Wendy, and tells her, “I dreamed that I killed you and Danny. But I didn’t just kill ya. I cut you up in little pieces.” Nightmare and reality soon become blurred for the Torrances.

Directed by Stanley Kubrick and adapted by Kubrick & Diane Johnson from the novel by Stephen King, The Shining usually figures its way into debates about which movie is the scariest of all time. King was never thrilled about it, feeling that Kubrick missed his book’s central theme about the damages of alcoholism. King also felt Jack Nicholson was miscast, preferring an everyman whose descent into madness would have been more of a shock to audiences.

While some of King’s dialogue and character nuances would have made the film better, Kubrick ignored the cliché passages of King’s ghost story - and horror films in general - such as an evil elevator shaft, explaining what the ghosts were, and vanquishing them in the end. Instead, Kubrick delivered an epic narrative on domestic abuse, generating a sense of gothic dread and visceral terror that few movies have ever been able to conjure.

The Shining has become influential mainly because Kubrick, as well as King, actually wrote about something that scared them. It’s not some anonymous monster, but the thought that as a child, your father could turn into the monster, while stranded with him in a location without escape, that is so effective at scaring the piss out of people.

The film is loaded with vivid moments, sometimes shocking, sometimes beautiful. Kubrick cuts from Nicholson peering into a model of the hedge maze and to an overhead shot of Duvall and Lloyd trapped inside the lifesize one. Duvall picks up Jack’s manuscript and realizes it’s the raving of a lunatic. Jack chops through the bathroom door with an axe, while Duvall is frozen in terror on the other side.

Jack Nicholson’s tour-de-force is now legendary, and this is may be the best known role of his career. He crescendos from odd, to creepy, to raving, axe wielding, one-liner busting insanity like no actor ever has. Yeah, you’re aware it’s a movie star’s performance. It isn’t as disturbing as if someone like Jon Voight had been cast, but it is supremely exciting.

Even Stephen King would have to admit this is the best film based on any of his horror novels. The exteriors of the Overlook Hotel were filmed at the Timberline Hotel in Mt. Hood National Forest, Oregon. The interiors and hedge maze were built in Elstree Studios in England and no longer exist, though King wrote much of his novel in the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, Colorado.