1980 Week: The Shining

          Perhaps even more interesting than The Shining itself is the enormous culture of debate, scholarship, and theorizing that has emerged around the film. At the most extreme edge of this peripheral realm is the insane 2012 documentary Room 237, during which various fans explain their bizarre readings of the movie while director Rodney Ascher employs clips from The Shining, as well as other archival material, as “evidence” supporting the readings. In the most memorable sequence, a Kubrick obsessive says The Shining contains Kubrick’s admission that he helped NASA fake the 1969 moon landing.

          Drifting back to Earth, another fascinating byproduct of The Shining is the conflict between Kubrick and Stephen King that even Kubrick’s death could not conclude. King, who wrote the popular horror novel upon which the film is based, famously denounced Kubrick’s movie because of liberties the director took with King’s storyline. For context, it’s important to note remarks that Kubrick made during his lifetime to the effect that only bad novels merit cinematic adaptation, because they can be improved upon. Hell hath no fury like an author scorned, or, for that matter, an auteur.

          Why is The Shining the object of so much fascination? Devotees of the movie would attribute its longevity to pure cinematic power—beyond mere scares, the film contains provocative allegories and unnerving ambiguities. The Shining also contains one of Jack Nicholson’s most iconic performances, complete with the famous moment when he hacks through a doorway with an axe, then pokes his head through the resulting hole and hisses, “Here’s Johnny!” Yet The Shining probably lasts simply because it’s so many things to so many people, hence the varied interpretations found in Room 237. The Shining is a horror movie, to be sure, complete with gory murders and unexpected jolts, to say nothing of ominous atmosphere that lasts from beginning to end. Moreover, The Shining is a character study, an exercise in paranoia, a fantasy with supernatural elements, and a tragedy. So even though it’s excessive and frustrating and weird, it’s almost completely unique. Employing King’s novel as a springboard, Kubrick—who cowrote the script with Diane Johnson—embarked on a demented flight of fancy.

          As has been endlessly reported in articles and books and documentaries, Kubrick utilized painstaking production techniques, building a gigantic set, shooting innumerable takes, and attenuating production over a reported 500 days. The parallels between this Bataan Death March approach to filmmaking and the storyline are inescapable, because The Shining follows author Jack Torrance (Nicholson) as he and his family occupy the remote Overlook Hotel as winter caretakers while Jack tries to write a novel. Some combination of Jack’s mental problems and unknown forces occupying the hotel transform Jack from a family man into a maniac. Caught in the path of his rampage are his timid wife, Wendy (Shelley Duvall), and their psychically gifted son, Danny (Danny Lloyd). Things don’t go well for anyone.

          Kubrick shoots the hell out of his remarkable set, creating mesmerizing images with gimmicks including Steadicam photography, while the eerie score by Wendy Carlos and Rachel Elkind accentuates the oddity of it all. By the time the film concludes with an epic nighttime chase through an outdoor maze blanketed in snow, Kubrick has generated such a potent quality of claustrophobia and fear that The Shining is more than just spooky—it’s upsetting. 

The Shining: GROOVY

Salem’s Lot: The Movie (1979)

          Even though the 1976 movie adaptation of horror novelist Stephen King’s first book, Carrie, was a solid success, it took Hollywood a few years to dip back into the King well—and the follow-up project appeared on the small screen rather than in theaters. After attempts to turn King’s book Salem’s Lot into a feature ran aground, the piece was reconceived as a two-part miniseries that would allow for the narrative sprawl that gives King’s stories their folksy texture. The shift worked, because the Salem’s Lot miniseries was an Emmy-nominated hit. Then, after its November 1979 TV run, the movie was chopped down to feature length and issued to theaters outside the United States. But here’s the twist—King stated at the time he preferred the shorter version, even though it excised nearly half the plot. Go figure.

          Watched as a stand-alone feature, Salem’s Lot: The Movie is underwhelming, and not just because of the choppy edits that appear wherever a big chunk of material was removed—even the unbroken scenes feel ordinary, with a few noteworthy exceptions. The story, of course, is a typical King lark about good people confronting a bad place. Ben Mears (David Soul) is a novelist who returns to his hometown of Salem’s Lot, Maine, to write about the Marsten House, an imposing edifice just outside town where horrible things are rumored to have happened in the past. Mears wants to explore the notion of whether houses can truly be haunted. However, someone else got to the Marsten House first—elegant Englishman Richard Straker (James Mason), who plans to open an antique shop in town, recently bought the place. It turns out Straker is the accomplice to an ancient vampire who plans to feast on the people of Salem’s Lot, converting them to an army of bloodsuckers. Once a trail of bodies and a series of supernatural confrontations reveals what’s happening, Mears endeavors to defeat the monsters with help from unlikely sidekicks including a little boy and an old man.

          Viewed in the 112-minute version, the story feels contrived and overwrought, because useful elements including a prologue/epilogue device and various subplots aren’t there to buttress the outlandish narrative twists. Director Tobe Hooper stages several fun shock scenes—the best bits involve a ghostly vampire kid floating in fog outside a bedroom window while calling to a young friend on the other side of the glass—but Salem’s Lot merely seems like a classier version of the supernatural escapism that producer/director Dan Curtis made for TV throughout the ’70s, in projects such as the spooky 1972 telefilm The Night Stalker. Still, there’s a lot of nihilistic bloodshed here for a small-screen project, even though Salem’s Lot isn’t gory, and Mason is terrific as the charmingly evil Straker. (By contrast, leading man Soul, of Starsky & Hutch fame, is hopelessly bland.) Still, it’s a head-scratcher why King fancied this version over the three-hour mother lode.

Salem’s Lot: The Movie: FUNKY

Carrie (1976)

          It might be exaggerating to call Carrie a good film, since it’s unabashedly campy and lurid, but there’s no arguing with results—among other things, the movie earned two Oscar nominations, elevated director Brian De Palma to A-list status, turned leading lady Sissy Spacek into a star, initiated an epic relationship between Hollywood and novelist Stephen King, and became one of the most popular horror movies of the ’70s. Considering that the flick is so trashy it features beaver shots beneath the opening credits and culminates with a blood-soaked teenager using telekinesis to slaughter her classmates, that’s quite a list of accolades.

          Based on King’s first novel, Carrie tells the sad story of Carrie White (Spacek), a misfit American teenager so ignorant to the ways of the world that she freaks out upon getting her first period while showering in the school gym. Her vicious classmates, led by instigator Chris Hargensen (Nancy Allen), taunt Carrie mercilessly, pelting her with sanitary napkins, so Carrie is excused from school for the rest of the day. Once she returns home, we discover the source of Carrie’s troubles—her lunatic mother, Margaret White (Piper Laurie), is a Bible-thumping abuser who considers sexual development sinful and tortures Carrie with long imprisonments in a closet.

          As Carrie reels from the shower incident and her troubles at home, she discovers the ability to move objects with her mind. Meanwhile, Chris is banned from the upcoming prom—indirect punishment for tormenting Carrie—so she plans grotesque revenge. Adding a final thread to the story is Carrie’s sympathetic classmate Sue (Amy Irving), who persuades her dreamboat boyfriend, Tommy (William Katt), to take Carrie to the prom. One bucket of pig blood later, it all goes to hell.

          De Palma and screenwriter Lawrence D. Cohen took relatively few liberties with King’s narrative, so they delivered his signature combination of gore and pathos intact, and Carrie zooms along at tremendous speed. Excepting two ill-conceived comedic sequences (both of which feature cringe-inducing music), Carrie is laser-focused on developing empathy for the protagonist and setting up a Grand Guignol climax. Generally speaking, Carrie is an efficient movie, and some of the picture’s elements exist on an elevated plane. De Palma’s trademark tracking shots manifest in full force, for instance (though the shots are akin to guitar solos in overwrought hard-rock songs, flamboyance for the sake of flamboyance). Additionally, De Palma uses the supporting cast like an orchestra, getting exactly the right single note each from Allen, Irving, Katt, Laurie, and others (including Betty Buckley and John Travolta).

          Spacek’s Oscar-nominated performance holds Carrie together, since her character’s emotional journey drives the story. As played by Spacek, Carrie is fragile during early scenes, ferocious when assaulting her enemies, and poignant once she realizes the tragic fate to which she has been consigned. De Palma’s ending represents his biggest departure from King’s book, and while the film’s concise denouement is more cinematic than the protracted conclusion of King’s narrative, it’s a bit much, right up to the notorious “gotcha” coda. Once again, however, there’s no arguing with results; Carrie made such an impression that it earned a Broadway adaptation in 1988, a low-budget movie sequel in 1999, and big-budget movie remakes in 2002 and 2013.

Carrie: GROOVY

Sorcerer (1977)

          Whereas many self-indulgent films by ’70s auteurs have been injured by time, William Friedkin’s Sorcerer has actually seen its critical stock rise in the intervening decades. There’s no question the director was due for a fall after scoring two blockbuster successes in a row with The French Connection (1971) and The Exorcist (1973), and prior to the release of Sorcerer, he did just about everything necessary to unsure the critical knives were out: He gave overbearing interviews extolling his own directorial genius; he let four years pass between movies; he elected to remake Henri-Georges Clouzot’s The Wages of Fear (1953), a sacred text for cinephiles; he let his perfectionist streak run wild, shooting outrageous numbers of angles and takes that put his cast and crew through a long ordeal in rugged South American locations; and he slapped a supernatural-sounding title onto the project even though Sorcerer involves nothing otherworldly, which understandably resulted in confused expectations because of his association with The Exorcist.

          As a result, Sorcerer was eviscerated upon its original release, even though some brave souls immediately recognized the film as a unique piece of deranged artistry. Seen now, the picture is a crazily intense thrill ride that matches the inherent tension of the plot with a probing descent into the psyche of an archetypal character driven insane by circumstance. Roy Scheider stars as Scanlon, an American criminal hiding out in South America and desperate enough for work that he agrees to join a crew driving trucks loaded with unstable nitroglycerin down 200 miles of bumpy jungle roads toward a demolition site. Playing the other unlucky souls sharing the task is an international cast: Frenchman Bruno Cremer, one-named Moroccan Amidou, and Spaniard Francisco Rabal. Crisply explanatory vignettes reveal why each man is a fugitive, but that’s about all the picture provides in terms of character; Friedkin is much more interested in dramatizing whether small men can rise to a life-threatening occasion.

          Sorcerer contains one of the most elaborately filmed suspense sequences in cinema history: The precarious crossing of a hand-made bridge across a jungle river in the middle of a horrific rainstorm. Using a staggering number of camera angles, Friedkin drags the scene out to create an excruciating level of tension, and that cinematic commitment carries through to nearly the entire film. Also noteworthy is the disturbing score by German synth-rock ensemble Tangerine Dream, making their debut in American films. For the last word on Sorcerer, I’ll defer to Stephen King, writing in his nonfiction survey of the horror genre titled Danse Macabre (1981): “I liked that one because there were a lot of close-ups in it of sweaty people working hard and laboring machines; truck engines and huge wheels spinning in soupy mud and frayed fanbelts in Panavision-70. Great stuff.”

Sorcerer: GROOVY