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Sorry to be so late to the game with my take. When I posted this question, I wasn't sure if I'd have anything interesting to add, but all of your finely considered contributions have inspired me to chip in. So lemme tell you my SHINING stories, and then I'll respond to a few salient points made in this thread.
First off, it appears that many of us share the same initial experience with THE SHINING: youthful dread. I've often told this story, but as a child I was absolutely petrified by the ads (yes, the ads) for THE SHINING and A CLOCKWORK ORANGE that ran in the old Movie Channel guides in the early 80's. Just the iconic image of Nicholson's maniacal mug busted through the bathroom door was enough to send chills down my spine (although I'm not quite sure why the CLOCKWORK ORANGE poster art scared me so.) Incidentally, I was also stone cold terrified of David Lynch's THE ELEPHANT MAN, based solely on seeing the section where John Merrick is first unmasked. Today, Kubrick and Lynch are two of my all-time favorite directors. Go figure.
In any case, as a result of my childhood fears, I didn't see THE SHINING until.....my first Horror Marathon, the 1993 NIGHT OF THE LIVING DREXEL. But then again, I didn't really see it there either; rather, I caught the first 20 minutes. As many of you know, my only two Horror Marathons at the dear departed Drexel North (R.I.P.) were mildly marred by my status as a high school marching band member, and the attendant duty to attend the same damn marching band contest at Tecumseh High School in New Carlisle two years in a row on the same damn date which happened to be the day of the Horror Marathon. Not that I'm bitter about it or anything.
So anyway, yeah, I showed up for my first ever Horror Marathon, bought a t-shirt, sat down with my friends, heard Bruce give his opening spiel, watched the trailers for ARMY OF DARKNESS, NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS and some others, saw the opening 20 minutes of THE SHINING...and then exited the theater so that my older brother could drive me to my high school, so that he could then drive me to New Carlisle and back. And get this: aside from knowing the cast, the director, and that Stephen King wrote the book, I had no clue whatsoever about what the hell THE SHINING was about. None. So I missed the majority of this unknown film that had so haunted my childhood nightmares, along with A CHINESE GHOST STORY and NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD. But hey, I made it back for the great Brian Yuzna-directed, Mindy Clarke-starring ode to undead goth bondage that is RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD 3. And I made it through the rest of the Horror Marathon unscathed.
So how did I actually see the entirety of THE SHINING? Well, a few days later, my dad took me to Blockbuster Video and I rented the film. And I remember liking it, so much so that I read the book shortly thereafter. Being a 16-year old horror fan who had just received his first major exposure to R-rated terror flicks (and what a bunch that 1993 Horrorthon featured!), I found THE SHINING to be cool....mainly because by 1993 it had entered into the cultural lingua franca as being a signifier of cool. But I don't know if I found it particularly terrifying. Oddly enough, one of my fondest memories from this seminal period of emerging fandom was from catching part of tv edit of THE SHINING when it played early on Halloween Sunday morning on local tv a week after the Marathon. This was back when local channels still ran a random film at 2am on the weekends, so seeing part of this iconic flick that I'd finally discovered (while half awake) brought back immediate fond memories of the Horror Marathon from the weekend before (I was a little obsessive about the Drexel North back then.)
It was only later that THE SHINING started to work its magic on me. After first viewing it in 1993, I then saw it again quite a few times over the next 7-8 years, the result of a boom in local theaters starting midnight series, me acquiring the VHS version of the film and playing it at two of my home video basement continuations of NIGHT OF THE LIVING DREXEL, etc. etc. And like any film with which you grow so familiar, its effects began to wear off on me a bit. So many of the lines from the film have taken on a call and response infamy that they started to lose their power over me, and more and more I admired the craft but not the impact of the film. So I called a moratorium on watching THE SHINING. In fact, when we last showed it at 2005 Incredible 2-Headed Marathon, I only saw a few minutes before heading out to the lobby to chat with friends.
So what hooked me back in? Yep, it was ROOM 237. We've debated that film before, so I won't go into it too much; suffice it to say that Rodney Ascher's intent isn't to validate or mock the SHINING theorists, but to examine the power of art to inspire and how sometimes strange and offbase analysis can still contain the seeds of greater truth. When I saw ROOM 237 last spring, it opened up so many interesting thoughts in my head that I pulled out the SHINING Blu-Ray and gave it a whirl. And suddenly, like magic, THE SHINING was real and fresh to me, the result of this documentary and my years-long break from the film....and from me having lived a lot more life in the interim.
And this was a whole different type of magic. Now, when I see the film, I'm newly receptive to all of the underlying creepiness of the setting, the mood, the score. In many ways, THE SHINING is a giant haunted house shock machine, but the truly unnerving parts of it are tucked in the corners, the little character details, the things that aren't quite explained. I can understand the criticism of Nicholson's instant mania, but that also assumes that Kubrick was going for a traditional plot or story. So many of his films offer the ostensible plot as a red herring to draw the audience in (there's a mysterious monolith whose origin needs exploring, a violent young man terrorizes London, a man is jealous of his wife's imagined infidelity so he goes carousing in the underworld), yet end up serving as meditations on greater themes and primal human fears. To borrow a much used phrase, Kubrick's oeuvre (especially post-STRANGELOVE) dabbles heavily in pure cinema.
Now that might not be to everyone's taste. People were disappointed that EYES WIDE SHUT wasn't the erotic fantasia they thought it would be. And yes, THE SHINING has often been panned, especially by Stephen King (who, oddly enough, has famously quoted James M. Cain's dictum about film adaptations not having a whole lot of influence over the power of the original books...even though King keeps coming back to Kubrick even all of these years later.) But again, it's not really Kubrick's fault if the film of THE SHINING doesn't live up to people's expectations.
This might be a side tangent, but I've never quite understood the need some people have for a film adaptation to match up to the source material. As Worldsfinest so accurately noted, literature and film are two very different mediums. You can sit with a book for days, absorbing the story, letting it slowly unfold. Most films have a few hours to work the same trick. And that's fine. I used to teach DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF ELECTRIC SHEEP with BLADE RUNNER, just to illustrate how each work had its own merits inherent in its form, and how translating the book verbatim to the screen in 1982 (or maybe even now) wouldn't really have worked. Plus, if you want the events of the book, just read the damn book.
All right, I've rambled on quite a bit. But that's my take on THE SHINING....until I see it again in two weeks.....and until NASA starts questioning me about the Apollo 11.....
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