Alas, still no sign of “Fear & Desire,” Kubrick’s 1953, feature film debut that the director disavowed and deleted out of circulation he was so unhappy and embarrassed with it’s apparent amateurishness. A much-sought after holy grail of cinema, the picture screened for the first time in 40 years in 1994 at New York’s Film Forum to much protest and anger from the director himself who actually attempted to prevent the film from screening to no avail.
Back to Channel 4’s “The Shining” paean. Their painstaking recreation evidently included hiring look-a-likes of the crew and cast members including Shelley Duvall and Danny Long, as you get a Kubrick-like P.O.V. of him walking through the sent up to his director’s chair as the crew prepares to shoot the famous scene of Danny Torrance, the son of Duvall and Jack Nicholson’s characters, riding around the haunted corridors of the Overlook Hotel in his bigwheel toy bike.
It’s not a big stretch to call “The Shining” a masterpiece, we don’t think, but that’s exactly what this spine-tingling classic is and it’s probably our favorite Kubrick picture and perhaps the greatest horror film ever made (it sends shivers throughout our body, every time we see the creepy lodestone). Though it’s not “true” horror for purists, it’s what we consider what good horror movies should be (as most suck) and it’s perhaps the single most terrifying film we’ve seen. Others will surely claim that there are far scarier films than this eerie psychological dread, but there’s something astoundingly disquieting and unnerving about those ghostly twins, Shelly Duvall’s helpless looks of sheer terror, Nicholson’s off-the-rails performance, those creepy voyeuristic and claustrophobic steadicam shots and Krzysztof Penderecki’s jarring, discordant score that haunts us and instills near panic every time we even think of it.
Creepiest, ambiguous shot of all time in cinema hands down? The “bear shot,” where Duvall, feebly racing around the halls of the Overlook Hote,l stumbles upon an brief, but arresting moment where a man in a bear suit kneels suggestively at the feet of a bed seemingly ready to fellate an older gentleman hotel guest. The stop-you-in-your tracks moment is mysterious, transfixing, fascinating and utterly horrifying. In fact, when we looked up the scene on YouTube, we started to nearly hyper-ventilate and had to stop the scene before the “moment” happened. We can barely stand to look at the picture above. The Steadicam was practically invented for “The Shining,” and its use is iconic and landmark use in the film is a watershed technical achievement in cinema.
Watch: Channel 4’s Stanley Kubrick Season Promo
Watch: “The Shining’s” Bear Shot
