Shining, The

Shining, The

Released: 1980

MPAA Rating: R

Genre: Ghost/Haunted House

Nuts and Bolts: The Torrance Family moves into the Overlook Hotel for the winter. But the hotel is haunted by dark forces that only young Danny Torrance seems to be aware of. But the danger heats up as his father Jack becomes a vessel for the evil that lies within the Overlook’s walls.

Summary: Former teacher turned writer Jack Torrance interviews for a job at the Overlook Hotel in the mountains of Boulder Colorado. The Overlook closes for five months out of the year and is in need of a live-in caretaker who will make repairs and keep the boiler running during the long winter. Jack is hungry for an opportunity that will allow him the peace and isolation to work on his writing. After painting a very attractive portrait of life at the Overlook, Ullman finally breaks down and reveals some of the hotel’s less distinguished history. Apparently in 1970, the Hotel’s former caretaker Charles Grady went insane and butchered his family (Two little girls and his wife) before taking his own life. Jack is impressed by the story but it doesn’t quell his desire to get the job.

Meanwhile across town, Jack’s wife Wendy takes care of their little boy Danny. Even at his young age, Danny has a slightly ruptured psyche. He communicates with an imaginary friend named Tony. Tony is (as Danny believes) a little boy that lives in his mouth. Tony speaks in a raspy voice and sometimes tells Danny things; things that Danny should not even have knowledge of.

Almost immediately, Tony informs Danny that his father got the job and that he will be telephoning any moment with the good news. Seconds later, the phone rings and Wendy answers. While Danny is brushing his teeth, he suffers some sort of episode wherein Tony warns him of the dangers of the Overlook Hotel. Danny falls to the floor and his mother calls a physician. During the ensuing conversation, Wendy reveals that Jack once dislocated Danny’s arm one night during a drunken rage. It is explained that the first appearance of the mysterious Tony coincided with that event.

A few days later, the Torrance’s leave their humble home in favor of the Overlook. During the ride, Jack regales his son with tales of the Donner party and their reversion to cannibalism. Wendy is concerned about Jack filling Danny’s head with such vile images, but Danny isn’t concerned. He saw it all on TV.

Arriving at the Hotel, Stuart Ullman takes Jack on a tour of the facility. He introduces Wendy and Danny to the Hotel’s lead cook Dick Hallorann. Dick gives them a tour of the kitchen and it is at this time that we discover that Dick harnesses a strange power. Speaking telepathically to Danny, he offers the boy some ice cream. Hallorann instantly knows that Danny is telepathic as well. Dick addresses the boy by his nickname Doc.

Later on, Hallorann gets Danny alone and reveals to him that they both possess a power called Shining. It is a way of communicating without ever having to speak. The Shining also increases sensitivity and people who shine are sometimes known to have visions of the past or future. He goes on to say that even non-living things possess the power too, including the hotel.

Danny is very powerful with the Shining and as he reads Dick’s mind, he learns that the older man is terrified of room 327. When Danny inquires about the room, Hallorann quickly changes the subject. He stridently commands Danny to stay out of room 327. From this, we now learn that the persona of Tony is really just a five-year-old’s way of translating the essence of the Shining ability. Hallorann and the rest of the Overlook staff leave the building and the only ones remaining are Jack, Wendy and Danny.

A few months later, Colorado is hit by the worst blizzard to occur in many years. All of the access roads are closed off and the Overlook is completely sheltered in by snow. Jack has taken to writing in a large study, but he is slowly growing frustrated with the work. Wendy and Danny play outside in the snow.

Contained within the Overlook property is a huge Hedge Maze. Danny and Wendy travel through the various circuits until they finally find their way out. From the window of the hotel, a disheveled Jack looks down upon them.

Jack continues with his writing, but his heart really isn’t in it. He is slowly being taken over by an evil presence inherent inside the hotel. He barks at Wendy at considerable length concerning his dedication. Wendy begins to get concerned about Jack.

Before long, Danny is roaming about the upper hallways of the hotel. He sees the ghosts of the Grady girls standing at the end of the corridor beckoning him. He also begins to see overflowing seas of blood flooding down from the third floor elevator doors. It is Danny’s telepathic shining that allows him to perceive these images.

Wendy returns from the boiler room and goes into the office to check on Jack. Jack is asleep at his typewriter having a nightmare. He awakens with a start and describes to Wendy how he had a horrible dream in which he chopped her and Danny up into little pieces. (Jack has the Shining too.) As Wendy tries to console her husband, Danny enters the room. He is in a state of shock and is found sucking his thumb. Large purple bruises are found on his neck and throat. Wendy freaks out because she believes that the bruises came from Jack. Calling him a son of a bitch, she retreats from the room with Danny in tow.

Jack is thrown aback by the accusation. Leaving the office he wanders down to an old ballroom known as the Gold Room. Although the room is empty, Jack believes that there is a bartender and a fully stocked liquor shelf at the other end. He engages in conversation with the ghost and orders a bourbon on the rocks. (He is actually drinking nothing) Wendy soon enters claiming that Danny told her of a strange woman who attacked him. Reluctantly, Jack agrees to go check it out.

He finds the door to room 327 ajar. Entering the suite, Jack finds a healthy young woman emerging naked from the bathtub. Entranced by this encounter Jack falls into her embrace. As the two begin to kiss, Jack looks into the mirror behind her to see the woman as she really is. The woman is a cackling wrinkly old hag with rotting flesh. Jack flees from the room screaming.

Later however, he tells Wendy that he found nothing at all in room 327. While the two argue, Danny suffers a vision that terrifies him. In not so many words, the fictitious Tony tells him that Jack plans on murdering Wendy. Danny’s psyche cannot accurately translate such a concept and so his brain reflects the message in the form of the word, Redrum. Danny isn’t sure what Redrum means but it terrifies him regardless. Mustering all of his Shining capabilities, he sends out a mental S.O.S to Dick Hallorann.

Hallorann is in Miami Florida when he receives Danny’s mental cry for help. He tries to contact the Overlook but soon learns that the phone lines are down. Fearing the worst, Dick books himself the first flight to Boulder.

By this point, Jack is becoming more and more insane. He returns to the Gold Room, which is now alive with people. (Again, this is all Jack’s perception. The room is actually empty) He orders another drink from bartender Lloyd, which is quickly spilled when Jack bumps into a waiter named Delbert Grady. The waiter is profusely apologetic and offers to clean his shirt for him. The two go into the bathroom where it is revealed that Delbert is a past reincarnation of Charles Grady, Jack’s predecessor. Grady tells Jack that his son has a great talent and that he is using it to interfere with the plans of the management. Grady subtly suggests that Jack should ‘correct’ the problem Jack dutifully agrees and we now see that he is almost entirely consumed by the influence of the Overlook. He no longer even tries to deny the effects of the spiritual presences.

At this point, Wendy has gone into Jack’s office. She looks at the sheaf of papers he had been typing out for the past few months. Every line on every single page repeats the same phrase over and over. “All work and no play make Jack a dull boy.” Jack finds her in the study and decides that he has to kill her. Wendy still loves her husband, but now she fears for her life. Picking up a baseball bat, she swings it defensively while backing up the winding staircase. Jack lunges after her, but Wendy knocks him down the steps spraining his ankle and rendering him unconscious. Wendy drags Jack’s bleeding body to one of the steel pantries in the kitchen. Wendy locks the door and Jack comes to. Wendy says that she is going to leave on the snowmobile to take Danny to the hospital. Jack laughs menacingly at her and reveals that has destroyed the snowmobile. Wendy flees the room to ascertain the validity of Jack’s comments. Sure enough, Jack has ripped out the distributor cap on the snow mobile and the family is left stranded. Wendy is drained of all energy and tries to take a nap. She is awoken by the sounds of Danny screaming Redrum over and over again. He has written in on the door in lipstick and Wendy can see through the mirror that Redrum is Murder spelled backwards.

Jack is released from the pantry by the ghost of Delbert Grady. The management has decided to give Jack one more chance to get rid of his family. Jack finds an old fire ax and begins searching for Wendy and Danny. He chases Wendy throughout the house and corners her in the upstairs bathroom. Wendy locks herself in but Jack begins whittling at the door. As Jack tries to work the handle of the door, Wendy slices at him with a large kitchen knife. She is able to skirt past him and flees to another corner of the hotel.

At this point, Dick Hallorann arrives at the Overlook on a Snow Cat snowmobile. He enters the foyer and begins calling out. Jack emerges from behind a pillar and drives the axe deep into Hallorann’s chest. Dick falls to the floor dead. Danny uses the Shining to hear Hallorann’s death cries. Screaming aloud, Jack is now alerted to Danny’s presence. He begins chasing him through the kitchens, but Wendy helps Danny escape by shoving him through a small window into a huge bank of snow.

Jack limps outside to go after Danny. Danny flees into the hedge maze, but Jack easily keeps up with him by following the boy’s tracks in the snow. As soon as Danny gets a far enough lead on him, he begins back-tracing his own footsteps. He walks backwards several feet and then hides within a small alcove in the hedge. Jack continues to follow his son’s footprints walking right past the spot where Danny lies hidden. As Jack lumbers past him, Danny emerges from hiding and retreats in the opposite direction. Since Danny has been in the maze before, he knows the way out, leaving his demented father spinning his circles trapped in the maze.

Meanwhile, Wendy is still racing about the corridors of the hotel. All at once, the trapped ghosts of the Overlook Hotel make their presence known to her. She races outside where she finds Danny emerging from the maze. The two start up the snowmobile left behind by the late Dick Hallorann and leave the hotel. Jack meanwhile passes out in the snow and dies from hypothermia.

Inside the Overlook Hotel, we now see that Jack’s face appears on a hallway photograph that was taken on July 4th 1924. The image harkens back to a comment made earlier by Delbert Grady. “You are the caretaker. You’ve ALWAYS been the caretaker. Now the Overlook Hotel owns him body and soul and Jack’s spirit becomes permanently assimilated into the Hotel’s collective conscience.

Acting/Dialogue: The acting is really hit or miss here. This is probably Nicholson’s most triumphant role and yet, I really think he overacts his way through a lot of the scenes. The transition between sanity and looniness happens way too quickly. However, all things being equal, this is Jack the way we want to see him. Crazy eyes and all. Even though his performance may be a bit over the top, he is still very provocative in the roll of Jack Torrance and it is Nicholson’s performance, alone which elevates this film into the hallmark of modern horror cinema. Shelley Duvall plays beleaguered wife Wendy Torrance. At first, her performance is really nauseating and she delivers some of the worst dialogue I have seen in a film to date. I know I say this a lot, but Duvall is literally painful to watch. She comes off as a tired old maid hooked on Valium who can barely stay awake long enough to belch out a few corny off-handed lines. However to her credit, the Valium eventually wears off and Duvall wakes up about half way through the script. As a solid film character she’s a bust, but as a terror stricken woman fighting for her life, she delivers 100%. Her most compelling moments take place during the baseball sequence and the bathroom scene. I have never before seen a more convincing looking portrayal of stark terror in an actress before. It’s a shame that it takes her an hour or so before we finally get to see what she is truly capable of. Danny Lloyd however must have swallowed the valiums that Duvall forgot to imbibe. Flat and wooden, this kid doesn’t even crack a smile throughout the whole picture. I can forgive a lot of his performances because he’s so young but I really believe that Kubrick could have done a lot better than this kid. Scatman Crothers is always a joy to watch and he brings his usual charisma to the roll of Dick Hallorann just as he does with everything else. The dialogue all around is excellent (with the exception of Duvall’s lines). Each line is said with great deliberation and Kubrick forces us to hang on every syllable allowing us to ingest the full weight of what we are witnessing.

Gore: The gore is kind of minimal in this, and even what little bits there are do little to enhance the story. We see a quick snippet of the dead Grady girls lying in the hallway. Their bodies are pretty bloody but the shot is very fast and we don’t get to see too much. Then there is the scene where Hallorann dies. A gruesome demise, Jack’s ax buries itself almost totally into Hallorann’s heart. We later see his bloody body lying on the floor of the foyer.

Guilty Pleasures: We get a full frontal boob-n-bush shot of the young woman exiting the shower in room 327. However, this scene is really set off when the woman becomes this withered saggy baggy haggy with a nasty case of twat-rot. This is some really nasty looking shit. I swear to God, I think her tits had calluses on them from dragging across the tile floor. There’s also a later scene inside of Hallorann’s Miami bungalow where we see two portraits of 70s style Afro-queens in the all-together.

The Good: Like everything Stanley Kubrick does, the Shining is a film that works on multiple levels. Just like the music score that he uses, there are many themes layered on top of one another that ebb and flow throughout the course of this story. The most prevalent theme that is explored here is that of the duality of man. From a flat perspective however, it would appear that the most overt theme would be the commentary regarding the treatment of Native American cultures. Two times throughout the film it is mentioned that the Overlook Hotel was built atop an Indian burial ground. Native American references are seen throughout the hotel corridors in the forms of artwork, tapestries and designs. Even the name Overlook appears to have its own double meaning. The architects of the hotel named it as such because the building overlooks the Rocky mountains. But we can easily translate that to suggest how society has overlooked the plight of the Native Americans. However, I really don’t think that is what Kubrick was going for with this. I believe he was merely using the Native American reference as a way of illustrating a much broader point. From this film, I gathered he was trying to comment on how the modern American nuclear family tends to turn a desensitized blind eye towards the violent bloodstains of our past. There are several examples (beyond the Native American ones) that help to support this. Two times throughout the film we see Danny Torrance sitting in front of the television watching Road Runner cartoons. (We never actually SEE the show itself, which I think was done as part of the whole ‘see no evil’ angle.) Danny is completely unimpressed with what he is watching even though we all know that the Roadrunner is typically an extremely violent cartoon. But we overlook the extreme nature of such a cartoon in favor of its humorous elements. Earlier in the film, Jack tells Danny about acts of cannibalism. But Danny already knows about it because he had seen it on TV. Again, the child seemed duly unimpressed by the sheer violent nature of such a subject.

Kubrick makes use of mirrors a lot in this movie to help flesh out his duality angle. At every stage of Jack’s downward spiral into madness we see a mirror. If you watch closely, most times Jack’s attention is focused on the mirror more so than the person he is speaking with. He is not focusing on the attention of the ghosts but rather on his own dark reflection.

All of this helps to flesh out Kubrick’s secondary theme, which is that of “Those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it.” This is first shown by the history of the hotel itself. Throughout its checkered past, the business has opened and closed and opened again. Each new incarnation of the hotel attempts to forget about what came before, but ultimately the old evils rise again. This is shown more prominently with the characters of Delbert and Charles Grady. Delbert was a waiter in the hotel in 1924 who was forced to ‘correct’ his wife and two daughters for interfering with the hotel’s plans. His own descendent Charles Grady was the winter caretaker of 1970 who likewise suffered the same schism that his forbearer dead. In the end, Jack suffers a similar fate as we learn that he is destined to repeat the same crimes over and over again. Another example of ignoring our dark past comes from the character of Stuart Ullman. The ‘see no evil/hear no evil’ theme is addressed again. Although Ullman reveals the history of the Overlook to Jack, we are left with the impression that the hotel management has taken great measures to sweep all of their dirty secrets under the rug. As such, the hotel has a dual nature that is reflected not only by the ghosts trapped within but by the characters of Jack and Danny as well.

Another metaphor that I found interesting was the use of pictures. Throughout every room and office of the hotel we can see dozens of framed photographs hanging on the walls. Through the pictures, our likeness is immortalized for all time and trapped inside the framework of the photo. This is not too dissimilar to the Hotel itself. The restless spirits who have died there are forever trapped and even Jack is shown to become a part of the collective essence of the hotel when we see his image in a photograph from 1924.

Interesting note: Although I don’t believe it was intentional, there are a lot of references to childhood icons throughout this picture. The character of Wendy is of course the matriarch of the film and she bears the burden of watching over her son who is spiraling through a sea of his own traumas. I parallel this to a character by the same name in J. M. Barr’s Peter Pan. Wendy Darling was a sensitive caring personality in charge of overseeing the safety of a group of Lost Boys. Another children’s reference stems from Danny’s nickname. He is sometimes referred to as Doc and Dick Hallorann even mimics Warner Bros. Creation Bugs Bunny by saying, “What’s up Doc?” As we all know, Doc is also the name of one of the seven dwarves from Snow White. Then there’s the matter of the Grady twins. In the Kubrick film, the Grady girls bear an uncanny resemblance to the popular concept versions of the character Alice Liddell from Alice in Wonderland. We also see Danny watching episodes of the Road Runner cartoon at two different time throughout the movie. There is also a segment where Jack begins quoting lines from the story of the Three Little Pigs. I suppose that all of this thrown together is meant to represent the loss of innocence. Danny is a young boy, but he is forced to endure the harrowing nightmares of an extremely adult reality. It’s a subtle allegory to the advice of ‘putting away childish things’. Now is the time for Redrum to become Murder.

Okay, enough with the artsy fartsy metaphorical bullshit. Nicholson is a total fucking toys in the attic, looney bird in this flick. He punctuates every word with such acidic deliberation that it practically knocks us over.

There are also a lot of great camera shots put to use here. The eeriest moment occurs when Jack is staring out the window as Danny and Wendy are playing in the snow. Jack looks about as evil and as creepy as a person can possibly get. This is the only time that I can recall when a film character actually gave me the willies.

Another great camera angle involves the hedge maze. At first we see Jack looking down at a scale model of the maze, but as we draw closer we can see Wendy and Danny running around at the bottom of it.

I also liked the scene when Jack is attacking Wendy in the study. As the two are slowly ascending the steps, we are shown a neat camera trick, which helps to illustrate the isolation that has been born between the two. The camera switches back and forth showing Jack’s face in the background, with the back of Wendy’s head in the foreground and then cut to a close up of Wendy’s face with the back of Jack’s head in the foreground. At no point during the entire sequence do we see both of their faces within the same shot at the same time.

There is another scene that I like, which I think was done to illustrate Jack’s last attempt at trying to shirk the influence of the hotel. If you look carefully at the type written papers, which read “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy,” you will plainly see that some of the words are deliberately misspelled the further down the page you go. It seems as if Jack was trying to resist the programming of the management and save his own soul. Of course we know, how THAT turns out.

In the beginning of the film, we are told that prolonged exposure to the Overlook has been known to incite cabin fever and a sense of claustrophobia. I think Kubrick does an excellent job at showing this and as you watch the film, you can almost feel the walls of the hotel closing in around you (And those are some pretty tall fucking walls!).

Then there’s the music. I’m not going to go into a lot of details here, since this review is already 18 pages fucking long. But suffice it to say, that the film score is just as complex and captivating as the scenery in which it appears. The music blends well with each scene and it actually moves along with story.

Side note: I guess it sounds like I’m doing a lot of Kubrick dick-stroking with this review doesn’t it? To be honest, I’m not really a big fan of the man or his movies. But I recognize that Kubrick tries to bring a thought provoking esoteric quality to his pictures, and I feel I owe it to the Shining to at least explore those avenues within this review. That being said, let me just end this by saying that the above conclusions represent what I alone took from the film. What you may gather from it, or what Kubrick was actually trying to put forth may be something completely different. Overall, the Shining may not be the single best movie you will ever see, but it is definitely deserving of multiple viewings and I feel that it earns a solid place in the history of the horror genre.

The Bad: I’ll begin with the most obvious warning signs. This is a movie that was based on the best selling novel The Shining by author Stephen King. With that in mind, it needs to be mentioned that Kubrick was not out to do a completely faithful adaptation of King’s work. As such, the differences between the novel and the movie vary greatly. Fans of the King novel may prefer the 1997 mini-series adaptation of the Shining, as that is much more faithful to the original work than the Kubrick film is. Fans of the novel will likely be very disappointed by the Kubrick version. Stanley Kubrick’s Shining really needs to be regarded independently of the source material.

This movie was filmed in 1979 for a 1980 release date. With that in mind, the Shining is a piece of work, which is as hopelessly dated and trapped in the 1970s as Jack Torrance is in the photograph on the Overlook’s wall. Danny Lloyd is forced to suffer through the shittiest looking bowl-haircut I have ever seen. Jack’s hair doesn’t fair much better, but that’s okay because it goes over well when it comes time to do his whole crazy-fucker shtick. And who in the fuck told Shelly Duvall how to dress? She wears the most abhorrent looking throwbacks to the 1970s that have ever disgraced celluloid. Red knee-high stockings? Ughh! Ironically, her clothes aren’t really all that much different than what she wore on Shelly Duvall’s Bedtime Tales.

One of the worst things about this movie involves the character of Jack Torrance. A down on his luck teacher-turned-writer, Jack is supposed to represent the ‘every’ man of the baby boomer generation. He is supposed to be a man not unlike our own fathers, brothers or neighbors; a regular Joe who slowly becomes influenced by the evil forces present inside of the Overlook Hotel. The problem with this is that Jack comes off like a crackpot from the first time that we see him! During the interview scene, he carefully selects his words as he explains to Ullman that his wife and child will LOVE staying at the Overlook. It comes off as Jack saying whatever he will to appease his future boss. He doesn’t really give a fuck if Wendy or Danny likes the place or not. Later on, Jack treats his son to a sardonic tale of cannibalism. He seems to take great pride in spooking the little kid. No matter how reserved he may attempt to act, there’s no getting away from Jack’s ‘crazy-eyebrows’. The Shining is meant to be a story showcasing a sane man’s fall towards insanity. But rather than that, we get a guy who starts off as a maniac and just becomes a LOUDER maniac as the film progresses.

Then there’s Shelly Duvall. Now I realize that what I’m about to say is cruel and disrespectful, but could this bitch BE any uglier? Holy Christ, this woman was beat to death with the ugly stick and then brought back to life just so they could beat her with it some more in order to get a fine consistent even blend of ugliness. I’m not sure what’s more horrifying to watch: her or staring at the naked old crone with the dripping saggies.

And speaking of the saggy baggy elephant, what point did she serve anyway? As far as I’m aware, she’s just another ghost trapped inside of the hotel. But the beginning of the film leads us to believe that room 327 contained a horror of great significance. After all, Hallorann was terrified of going in there. Kubrick gave us a strong build up with this, but ultimately it falls flat on its face.

Then there’s the death of Hallorann itself. This too seemed to serve no other purpose than to provide us with a gruesome death. Why did they bother to go through the effort of showing Hallorann’s trip across the country? He ultimately did nothing to help the Torrances except for leaving his snowmobile behind. And that in and of itself is just way to weak an excuse as to why the character had to die.

The one scene that I could have done without was the one with the blood-burping elevator. I really don’t understand what Kubrick is trying to say with this scene and it looks immensely fake looking. Rather than blood, it just looks like a fount of colored water. Maybe it’s supposed to be Red Rum. Who knows? A stupid visual, it detracts from the film and they should have just chopped it out.

I would have replaced the ridiculous elevator scenes with some more shots showcasing the history of the hotel. As very little of the place’s past is explored we really don’t get a very vivid sense of what went on there. The only character that is even remotely explored here is Delbert Grady. Why didn’t Kubrick flesh out some of the other ghosts as well? The naked woman in the bathtub was given no back-story and neither was the cock slurping dog-boy thing that Wendy found in the upstairs room. Having read the novel, I know who these characters are supposed to be, but Kubrick just sort of threw them in there as added color.

Then there’s the ending. Many fans despise the ending because of how much it varies from that illustrated in the 1997 mini series. In the novel and the mini-series, the outside of the hotel was surrounded by large green topiary cut to the shape of various animals. Kubrick replaced the topiary with a hedge maze. Initially I don’t really have any issue with it. I realize that in 1980 there simply wasn’t the budget to create realistic looking animated topiary, and so they had to go with the idea of the maze. In truth, I think the maze concept works better for Kubrick’s vision anyway (Although I am glad that King gave us the real deal in the re-dux version). Be that as it may, the final maze sequence is really just way too long. The film has a 146-minute running time as it is and I really don’t think that it benefited from this drawn out chase scene.

Fans from both sides of the camp frequently war over which is the superior film. But to put things into their proper and well-deserved perspective, they really can’t be compared to one another. Both films are excellent pieces of artwork and must be judged based on their individual merits.

Great Lines:

“Darling! Light of my life! I'm not gonna hurt you. You didn't let me finish my sentence. I said, I'm not gonna hurt ya. I'm just gonna bash your brains in. I'm gonna bash 'em right the fuck in!” --Jack as he’s about to attack Wendy on the staircase.

“My girls, sir, they didn't care for the Overlook at first. One of them actually stole a pack of matches and tried to burn it down. But I... ‘corrected’ them, sir. And when my wife tried to prevent me from doing my duty, I ‘corrected’ her.” –Delbert Grady telling Jack a watered down version of how he slaughtered his family.

“Redrum! Redrum! Redrum!” --Danny Torrance, speaking in the voice of Tony.

“Well, you know, Doc, when something happens, you can leave a trace of itself behind. Say like, if someone burns toast. Well, maybe things that happen leave other kinds of traces behind. Not things that anyone can notice, but things that people who "shine" can see. Just like they can see things that haven't happened yet. Well, sometimes they can see things that happened a long time ago. I think a lot of things happened right here in this particular hotel over the years. And not all of 'em was good.” --Dick Hallorann explaining to Danny what the Shining is.

“I wouldn’t harm a hair on his whole God damned head! I love the little son of a bitch!” --Jack explaining to Lloyd the bartender that he isn’t responsible for Danny’s bruises.

“Heeeeeeeeere’s Johnny!” --Jack imitating the Tonight Show host Johnny Carson's famous tagline while trying kill Wendy.

“Little pig. Little pig. Let me come in. Not by the hair on my chinny chin chin. Well I’ll huff. And I’ll puff. And I’ll blow this house in!” --Jack quoting rhymes from the Three Little Pigs while breaking down the bathroom door with an axe.

Overall Rating: 7 out of 10 severed heads.

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