The Shining

A labyrinthine horror in which isolation, madness, and supernatural forces intertwine into a sinister symphony of nightmare. Stephen King famously despised this adaptation of his novel—perhaps because Stanley Kubrick shaped it entirely on his own terms. Legend has it that Kubrick once called King at four in the morning to ask, “Do you believe in God?” His version of The Shining is not a conventional horror film but a hypnotic, meticulously constructed ritual of fear. Jack Nicholson’s portrayal of Jack Torrance teeters between grotesque and terrifying, while the Overlook Hotel itself becomes an almost sentient force, ensnaring its inhabitants in its eerie, inescapable logic. Meanwhile, Krzysztof Penderecki’s chilling music seeps into the audience from the very first frames, instilling an existential dread that lingers long after the final shot.

Mikołaj Mizak

Stanley Kubrick was born in 1928 in New York. He worked as a photographer for the “Look” magazine before he began his adventure with movies. His first pictures were documentaries. He directed his first feature film Fear and Desire in 1953 as an independent producer, which back then was not a common practice. A genius, an author of visually perfect, epic masterpieces, often about the most important matters of human’s nature: Paths of Glory, A Clockwork Orange, 2001: A Space Odyssey or Barry Lyndon.

American Film Festival catalog