I have experienced real horror as a child. Not because I was into Stephen King and Stanley Kubrick’s horror books and movies at a young age. They frightened me too much. Even Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” music video terrified me. Just hearing the opening chords to that song was enough to make me flee whatever room I was in. (Halloween was a right fucking pisser.)
In Danse Macabre, his 1981 non-fiction overview of the horror genre, Stephen King writes that terror “arises from a pervasive sense of disestablishment; that things are in the unmaking.” He should know. Horror, he defines, also elicits a physical reaction by showing something that is physically wrong, e.g., the revulsion you feel at the sight of maggots, rotting flesh, hoards of cockroaches, whatever you shrink from most.
I knew Stanley Kubrick-like terror because I had lived it. In the mid-1980s, I lived in a council house in a small town in north-east Scotland with my mum and siblings, after she had taken us and left my father. He was a fisherman who turned violent when drunk, which was pretty often.
The Shining and the Power of Murderous Narratives
After nearly a year of living in shelters, my mother secured a good council house at the edge of town, overlooking fields and farms. (We were lucky. This safety net no longer exists, and that’s another kind of horror.)
In a scene much like that terrifyingly famous one from Kubrick’s 1980 horror film, The Shining, my father smashed the wire-and-glass pane of the locked front door. He was so drunk that he barely succeeded. Worse, my younger brother, who still harboured illusions of paternal love, ran to the door yelling, “It’s Dad!” and unlocked it.
Dad staggered in, chose my mother’s chair in front of the fireplace, and sat in a stupor. Mom and my siblings quietly took a place together on the sofa. Loathing and hatred from my mother and older sister filled the room like steam in a sauna. Eventually, even Dad noticed this and realised there was no place for him in this family anymore.
He motioned me over. I remember thinking he might give me money. I was only six. He cuddled me for what seemed to be too long. After that, my memory mercifully fades.
When a child’s parents destroy the family, what remains is the greatest sense of disestablishment you can imagine. It is the collapse of every norm you cherish. War is hell, of course, but an unsafe home combines all your neuralgic sensitivities into one. When a parent is violent toward the family (rather than some dreaded outsider), the dread is compounded. It is a monstrosity made visible.
The horror genre, then, is concerned with disestablishment, with collapse, with things falling apart. Horror isn’t just fear: it’s the collapse of one narrative and the brutal imposition of another at any cost. This is what my father did. He couldn’t accept that the story had changed and sought, through violence, to reimpose his own narrative. When people act violently collectively, however, they need a larger story to explain and to justify their actions.
Indeed, narratives can be so powerful that they light the fuse for murder and genocide. Narratives don’t just reflect reality; they shape it. When individuals or societies adopt a narrative that justifies their identity, their actions, or their suffering, violence often follows as a logical endpoint. This is how stories become weapons.
The two versions of The Shining – the 1977 novel by Stephen King, and the 1980 film adaptation by Stanley Kubrick – are both ultimately concerned with the social effects of powerful narratives. King fears the suppressed imagination and economic extinction, while Kubrick critiques the grand narratives of race and power. Both converge in showing how narratives can kill, especially when work, family, community, and history collapse.
Stephen King’s Horror of Solitary Economics
Stephen King’s vision for The Shining is primarily about the failure of Jack Torrance. He is a failed teacher, sacked from his job for assaulting a student after longstanding concerns about his alcoholism. (“That morning, he had called Bruckner, the department head, and told him to please post his classes. He had the flu. Bruckner agreed, with less good grace than was common. Jack Torrance had been extremely susceptible to the flu in the last year.”)
He is a failed father who broke his son’s arm while losing his temper. He is a failed husband, downwardly mobile from a teacher at a private academy with a budding literary career to a caretaker at a hotel, with a car on its last legs and a dwindling bank account. He is a failure as a writer, too: as the novel progresses, he comes to see – or is led to believe – that the motivations behind the play he has been writing are all wrong.
In the totality of his failures, Jack represents the crushed individual soul, the artist denied voice and agency. This seems to be one of King’s deepest fears.
It also animates most of Stephen King’s 1987 psychological horror, Misery, in which the writer Paul Sheldon is literally imprisoned and forced to write a novel in the Colorado home of psychotic fan Annie Wilkes. The metaphor barely requires decoding: an artist is trapped by the demands of his audience, forced to resurrect a character he thought he’d killed off, subjected to both physical mutilation and creative control. Sheldon cannot move, both literally and literarily, without permission.
Misery is, in many ways, a companion piece to The Shining: where Jack Torrance is undone by the absence of recognition, Paul Sheldon is brutalised by its overabundance. The result is the same: entrapment, imprisonment, a voice surrendered.
What makes The Shining particularly resonant as a novel is the economic distress the Torrances find themselves in. Published in 1977, The Shining came at a moment of particular dislocation. (Horror has often followed economic rupture: the 1930s monster movies paralleled the Great Depression; the rise of the slasher film in the early 1980s also tracked working-class alienation.)
Nixon had taken the US dollar off the gold standard in 1971, and currencies were now floating freely on the market. Stagflation was a new and distressing malaise. Factory jobs were going as advanced economies restructured. The oil shocks of the early 1970s injected massive doses of inflation into economies worldwide. The golden age of capitalism was over.
King writes very deftly about the Torrance family’s anxieties about money and downward mobility. “Jack and his pride! Hey no, Al, I don’t need an advance. I’m okay for a while,” King writes. “The hallway walls were gouged and marked with crayons, grease pencil, spray paint. The stairs were steep and splintery. The whole building smelled of sour age, and what sort of place was this for Danny after the small neat brick house in Stovington?” King writes with equal insight (from personal knowledge, we know now) about the slide into alcoholism that moves insidiously from weekend fun to destroyer of relationships:
She had waited, dumbly hoping that a miracle would occur and Jack would see what was happening, not only to him but to her. But there had been no slowdown. A drink before going off to the Academy. Two or three beers with lunch at the Stovington House. Three or four martinis before dinner. Five or six more while grading papers. The weekends were worse. The nights out with Al Shockley were worse still. She had never dreamed there could be so much pain in a life when there was nothing physically wrong. She hurt all the time. How much of it was her fault? That question haunted her.
Economic anxieties animate many of the fears in King’s early work. In Night Shift (1978), many of the stories have horrors emerging from the crushing weight of financial failure, downward mobility, and the fragility of blue-collar masculinity. “Graveyard Shift”, one of King’s greatest early stories, is like E. M. Corder’s The Deer Hunter (1979), but set inside a textile mill.
Graveyard Shift is a portrait of industrial horror as material condition: the machines scream, the floorboards rot, and the foreman doesn’t care if you live or die. The rats beneath the floor aren’t just vermin: they’re the buried sins of the industrial age, and they eat the workers alive. The protagonist, Hall, is a drifter, expendable, a classic post-industrial worker without prospects or protections.
Similarly, the old men who gather in the 24-hour shop in the story “Grey Matter” live without hope, their futility foreshadowing the mindless, multiplying amoeba that consumes Richie Grenadine. Like Cimino’s factory workers in The Deer Hunter or Friedkin’s long-haul drivers in Sorcerer (1977), Stephen King’s early protagonists are men whose environment is utterly indifferent to their survival
Stephen King understands how economic insecurity terrorizes people. In the memoir section of his 2000 book On Writing, he writes movingly about his first years teaching, living in a trailer, working in an industrial laundry during the summers, and trying to snatch the time to write. As a working horror author, he knew how money worries were a key entry point to people’s innermost fears of loss, isolation, and degradation. He writes in Danse Macabre about Stuart Rosenberg’s 1979 film, The Amityville Horror, and how it’s “a financial demolition derby”:
… [L]ittle by little, it is ruining the Lutz family financially…. ‘It’s on the market for a song,’ the realtor says with a big egg-sucking grin. ‘It’s supposed to be haunted.’ Well, the house that the Lutzes buy is indeed on the market for a song (and there’s another good moment – all too short – when Cathy tells her husband that she will be the first person in her large Catholic family to actually own her own home; ‘We’ve always been renters,’ she says), but it ends up costing them dear.
So it is with The Shining. Jack’s fork in the road is when he realises he cannot leave the hotel, even though he knows by now it is destroying his family. The vision of the destitution this would entail, and the utter destruction of his self-image, is overwhelming:
What then? Whatever then? They might be able to get to the West Coast in the VW, he supposed. A new fuel pump would do it. Fifty miles west of here and it was all downhill, you could damn near put the bug in neutral and coast to Utah. On to sunny California, land of oranges and opportunity. A man with his sterling record of alcoholism, student-beating, and ghost-chasing would undoubtedly be able to write his own ticket. Anything you like. Custodial engineer – swamping out Greyhound buses. The automotive business-washing cars in a rubber suit. The culinary arts, perhaps, washing dishes in a diner. Or possibly a more responsible position, such as pumping gas. A job like that even held the intellectual stimulation of making change and writing out credit slips. I can give you twenty-five hours a week at the minimum wage. That was heavy tunes in a year when Wonder Bread went for sixty cents a loaf.
This is what causes the fracture between Jack and Wendy. She places the family first and imagines survival at whatever cost. He sees her desire to leave the hotel and take her son with her as the annihilation of his identity. It would destroy the narrative he retains of himself —despite the loss of his teaching job —as accomplished, a provider, a man. So he surrenders his family because he cannot give up that self-image. The narrative is murderous.
Stanley Kubrick’s Systems of Doubling and Erasure
Stanley Kubrick’s vision for The Shining is quite different, as is well known. Famously, Stephen King hates the film. Where King finds tragedy in the smothering of the individual, Kubrick draws a larger, national canvas.
Indeed, the Colorado setting, so beautifully and ominously laid out in the opening credits, reminds me of that wonderful passage from William S. Burroughs’ Naked Lunch (1959) about America’s inherent lurking violence: “America is not a young land: it is old and dirty and evil before the settlers, before the Indians. The evil is there waiting.”)
The Overlook hotel becomes not so much a beehive into which our luckless protagonist has stuck his hand (as King describes it) as a vast archive of systemic violence. Hotels are symbolic meeting places, the aggregate of countless residual memories, and The Overlook has overseen genocide, violent masculinity, and finally, myths of individual genius. The Shining in Kubrick’s hands thus becomes about the horror of systems that obliterate individuality. It is about grand narratives and their ability to exterminate on a mass scale.
The genocide alluded to at the start of the film. “This site is supposed to be located on an Indian burial ground, and I believe they had to repel a few Indian attacks as they were building it,” manager Ullman (Barry Nelson) near chuckles. A more subtle allusion is when they are touring the lobby, and Wendy (Shelley Duvall) admires the decor. “Are all these Indian designs authentic?” she asks. “I believe they’re based mainly on Navajo and Apache motifs,” Ullman replies. The hotel has already absorbed them. Just as Jack (Jack Nicholson) is finally absorbed.
The Overlook does not merely sit on a metaphorical grave: it is the grave. The hotel’s absorption of Native American aesthetics is not respectful but parasitic; visual motifs are drained of meaning, like trophies mounted on a wall. This is not accidental. The Shining doesn’t focus on genocide to provoke guilt but to underscore the deep-rootedness of violence within supposedly civilised structures. The building becomes an archive of conquest. Like Stalin’s liquidation of the Kulaks in 1929 or the US Cambodian genocide in 1973, state violence is rationalised, systematised, and repeated. Every architecture of power eventually demands blood.
Throughout The Shining, Kubrick presents a world without original agency. Everyone is playing a role. All the conversations between Jack, Wendy, Ullman, and Hallorann (Scatman Crothers) sound staged, inauthentic. Jack doesn’t become someone else over the course of the film; he discovers what he already was. His transformation is not a descent into insanity, but a recursion.
“You’re the caretaker,” Grady (Philip Stone) tells him, “You’ve always been the caretaker.” The moment lands not just because it is deeply uncanny, but because it is a key theme. There is no individual will here. Jack is a function waiting to be executed, in every sense.
This might also be seen as the role of the father: to enact the violence required by the system to preserve its continuity. The individual is nothing; the structure endures.
This sense of recursion is symbolised in Shining through the use of mirrors, mirror images, and reflective surfaces, which abound throughout the Overlook. The bathroom scene with Delbert Grady (or is it Charles?) is multiply mirrored. The two little girls are uncannily twinned. The scene where Halloran receives Danny’s “shine” is perfectly mirrored, as he lies in the middle of the bed, bedside tables and lamps on either side.
In the Gold Ballroom, Jack is looking into a mirror when he talks with the bartender, Lloyd (Joe Turkel). Even when he is locked in the pantry, his face is mirrored in the door’s shiny surface as he screams at Wendy. The Shining strips away the idea of unique identity. Everyone is a role; everyone has predecessors.
The erasure of women is also performed throughout the film. Wendy is marginalised in every way, both formally and narratively. Even when she’s present, she’s out of place; a bystander in her own life. The scene where Jack insists on being left alone to work is emblematic: he claims the vast central lobby as his domain, while Wendy skulks in the kitchen or tends to the boiler, like an unpaid domestic. The hotel architecture itself is gendered: Jack takes the symbolic centre; Wendy’s existence is peripheral.
Even filmmaking is complicit in the architecture of control. Stanley Kubrick erases Shelley Duvall while filming a narrative about a woman being erased. In the “Making Of” documentary shot by Kubrick’s daughter Vivian, Duvall shows strands of her hair falling out from stress. Kubrick holds it up to the camera dismissively, ready to laugh.
His treatment of Jack Nicholson, by comparison, is like that of a favoured son, with fond smiles and indulgence. Art is also a system, an architecture, and so an organised erasure.
Consider also Hallorann. He comes to save the day in Stephen King’s novel. In the film, however, his murder is often seen as pointless. Kubrick draws out Hallorann’s return for nearly a third of The Shining: a journey across America, involving planes, snowcats, phone calls, and courage. And what happens? He is executed the moment he arrives. There is no salvation, and to many people, therefore, no point.
That’s what Kubrick is trying to convey. There is no heroic individual. We are crushed by the system. Halloran’s journey, so deliberate and difficult, becomes a false arc, the illusion of narrative agency. Hallorann doesn’t just die: the very idea of rescue is exterminated. His death is an echo of systemic betrayals: the Trail of Tears, lynchings, and conscription. Each time, the system calls and then consumes.
All of this—the recursion, the marginalisation, the symbolic slaughter—imagines The Overlook as less a “haunted house” than an allegorical machine. These are stories the hotel must periodically re-enact. Systems require repetition, and Jack is just the most recent iteration of the narrative.
If postmodernity is defined by the collapse of metanarratives, as Jean-François Lyotard wrote in The Postmodern Condition (1984), then The Shining still terrifies precisely because the imperial metanarrative hasn’t collapsed. The hotel symbolises its permanence. Its rituals must be performed.
Stanley Kubrick’s horror is that, even in our age of fragmentation, stories that kill are still being told, e.g., Russian President Vladimir Putin’s propaganda. Essentially, Kubrick is not particularly interested in the supernatural. What matters to him is the narrative: of the hotel, of violence, of America and other empires built on blood. The horror comes not from ghosts, nor from madness, nor even from Jack’s disintegration, but from the dawning awareness that you are part of a story whose narrative is murderous.
Convergence and the Post-Industrial Male Collapse
For all their stylistic and thematic differences, both King and Kubrick explore the same horror: the collapse of the post-war masculine identity, and the psychic violence that followed. Jack Torrance is, above all else, a man without a role to play. And in both versions of the story, this proves fatal, for his family and for himself.
The 1970s were a decade of disintegration. American cities decayed; industry declined; crime mushroomed; the promises of mid-century security curdled into unemployment, inflation, and aimless suburban sprawl. (See the movie Suburbia (1983) for the outcome of this fragmentation). For working- and middle-class men, particularly white men raised on the postwar dream of stable labour and linear progression, this was a quiet apocalypse. Their historical purpose – to provide, to lead, to build identity through labour – was evaporating. And with it went the narratives that had once sustained them. Cut adrift, men turned inward or turned violent.
Jack embodies this. He is a failed worker, father and artist, and he knows it. The hotel offers him a temporary reprieve: a larger stage on which to perform his fantasy of significance. The novel shows the hotel manipulating his fantasies and status anxieties, until he madly thinks: “Now it was this dirty nigger’s turn. This dirty, interfering nigger with his nose in where it didn’t belong. First him and then his son. He would show them. He would show them that … that he … that he was of managerial timber!” His desperate clinging to this narrative of himself drives him to murder. Anything rather than a further decline into blue-collar subservience. He was only doing the caretaker role so that he could finish his play. But play is always ongoing, and his part was already written.
This collapse of the male role, then, is not just psychological. It is historical. It is what we might call a quiet genocide: not a literal slaughter but the erasure of a social identity once so foundational it seemed eternal. Crucially, both the personal and the national justify their violence with narrative. Jack tells himself he is a blocked genius, driven to madness by thwarted potential, and this fiction permits his cruelty. America told itself it was fulfilling its “Manifest Destiny”, and this grand myth justified mass conquest, displacement, and genocide. One is intimate, the other imperial, but both are stories that kill. In King’s telling, it is an intimate tragedy: the soul of a man hollowed out by failure and fear. In Kubrick’s version, it is something colder and larger – a ritualistic extermination of the individual by systemic forces that long predate him.
The Shining, then, stages horror as the obliteration of identity, work, and soul. Whether from within or without, whether by alcohol or architecture, the man at its centre is exterminated. The story of Jack is the story of violence. The narrative is murderous.
The Shining and Humankind’s Ever-Lasting Horror
The final image in The Shining is among the most quietly chilling in cinema: a sepia-toned photograph dated July 4th, 1921, with Jack Torrance front and centre at a ballroom celebration. Over this final image, we hear crooner Al Bowlly’s “Midnight, the Stars and You” – sweet, slow, and sentimental. It is one of Kubrick’s most merciless ironies, deploying nostalgia to gloss over annihilation.
The obvious question raised by this haunting moment is: was Jack always at The Overlook? Or has he been absorbed, folded back into the hotel’s history like a Navajo carpet? The answer is deliberately unclear, but it hardly matters. In either case, individuality has been effaced. Jack is no longer a man, but a figure in a tableau, a role in a cycle, a chapter in a larger story.
The Shining, for all its mythic weight, and despite being released in 1980, is a profoundly 1970s-era film. Its dread is systemic, not supernatural. The ghosts, we realise, are us. It belongs with
Francis Ford Coppola’s conspiracy thriller, The Conversation (1974), Sidney Lumet’s dark comedy, Network (1976), William Friedkin’s crime thriller, The French Connection (1971), Martin Scorsese’s psychological drama, Taxi Driver, William Friedkin’s road trip thriller, Sorcerer (1977), and Roman Polanski’s conspiracy thriller, Chinatown, all films of collapse, without redemptive arcs.
These are films without heroes, where the self is not just tested but dismantled. Unlike the Reaganite 1980s that followed – the increasing Top Gun swagger and triumphalist return – the 1970s understood that there were no heroes. Only myths we tell ourselves.
This is why The Shining endures: because it conveys horror on both levels – the real and the imagined – at once. Stephen King gives us the collapse of a man, his better instincts lost to addiction, failure, and fear. Stanley Kubrick gives us the collapse of history, where all men are interchangeable, where ghosts are just echoes of violence, and where narrative architecture repeats, again and again and again.
This multiplicity of meaning gives The Shining a seemingly inexhaustible supply of interpretations. It’s about the genocide of Native Americans; it’s about the Holocaust; it’s a confession to faking the Apollo 11 moon landing. Rodney Ascher’s 2012 documentary Room 237 catalogues these perhaps madcap theories as evidence of how Kubrick’s film invites this obsessive decoding. It is, in Frank Kermode’s words (citing Claude Lévi-Strauss), a story with a “surplus of signifiers”.
In his analysis of shamanism, Lévi-Strauss noted that such a surplus does not obscure meaning but rather creates the conditions for previously inexpressible psychic states to find expression. The Shining, in this sense, operates like myth or ritual: through a radical profusion of symbols, it gives voice to psychological and cultural tensions that otherwise remain unreachable. It is a haunting by infinite voices, an endless hall of mirrors. Every story is reflected in it. It is the story of my father.
The Shining is thus a metafictional horror story: it’s about myths, about stories, and how they warp our reality, even to violence. Jack tells himself a story about creativity, masculinity, about his family, and it becomes his justification for cruelty. (“Have you ever thought about what would happen to me if I failed to live up to my responsibilities?!”) America tells itself a story about destiny, expansion, and exceptionalism, and it becomes the engine of genocide. In both cases – in every case – the story demands blood.
The narrative is murderous.