The Shining (1980)

directed by Stanley Kubrick

Alisha Gorder

I was twelve when I visited Oregon with my parents and we stayed at the Timberline Lodge. It was the trip where I decided I wanted to one day live in Portland, which we drove through on our way to Mount Hood, and where I became obsessed with feather beds—the only beds the Timberline used.

At the time, I hadn’t seen The Shining, but it was one of my mom’s favorite scary movies, which meant I already loved it too. What I knew was that a man went crazy taking care of a hotel, and that the Timberline Lodge was where it happened—or at least where the exterior shots were filmed.

We made a plan to watch it together when we got home. It was rated R, which was exciting—the first R rated movie I’d been allowed, even encouraged, to see. But I can imagine my parents telling themselves that it came out in the ‘80s, and R meant something different then—much less than it does now.

To this day, the music gets me. The stark, blue font, all caps, introducing the film like whoever made the opening credits didn’t care. The Going-To-The-Sun Road in Glacier I’d drive with my parents two years later. The river of blood. But what made me stop watching were the twins hacked up in the hallway—the actresses little girls the same age as me.

I wanted to keep going, to persevere full throttle in my new role as a daughter who watched horror movies with her mother. Even now, it’s hard to differentiate between my love of scary movies and my love for her; hard to distinguish how much my desire to feel fear was inherited or cultivated by my want to relate to her as someone beyond just my mother. I’m the age now that she was when The Shining came out, and I wanted to feel close to that version of her—someone who watched Shelley Duvall lock her knocked-out husband in a pantry or Jack Nicholson axe down a door before I was even born.

At some point during the next four years, I finished the movie. I don’t remember exactly when, only that by the time we visited the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park when I was sixteen, I had seen the whole thing. We drove to the Stanley as a side-trip while we were in Colorado spending Christmas with family. It was a stately, stark white hotel with a red roof, about an hour or so from Denver, set against a backdrop of mountains; the same place Stephen King checked into in 1974, just before the hotel closed for the winter—an experience that would inspire the novel that would in turn inspire Kubrick’s film.

It’s said that King and his wife were the only guests at the hotel that evening; that he was poured a drink at the bar by a man named Grady; that he stayed in room number 217 (changed to room 237 in the movie); that he dreamt of his three-old-year son running down the hotel hallways, screaming, his eyes wide. “I got up, lit a cigarette, sat in a chair looking out the window at the Rockies,” King is quoted as saying, “and by the time the cigarette was done, I had the bones of the book firmly set in my mind.”

What I remember most about the Stanley is The Shining miniseries (shot on site, per Stephen King’s request) playing on a loop on the hotel room television, and the nighttime ghost tour that ended with us in an underground tunnel, snapping photos in an attempt to capture orbs. We were told about reports of guests hearing ghost children playing, of doors opening and closing and flickering lights, of shadowy figures caught on camera not seen by the naked eye. I spent that night listening for strange sounds or voices, waiting to see some supernatural something as much as I didn’t want to, or think that I would.

But it’s easy to suspend disbelief when told the right stories, and for me, The Shining is one.

For the first two hours of the film, it’s hard to know if what Jack Torrance is seeing—the woman in the bathtub, the partygoers in the ballroom, Delbert Grady—are actual ghosts, or pure hallucinations—the consequences of a lost mind.

Maybe he’s spent too much time locked up writing. Who hasn’t been there? In Jack’s interview for the job, the manager warns him about the “tremendous sense of isolation” that can be experienced during the off-season at the Overlook, but Jack says it won’t be a problem. “I’m outlining a new writing project,” he says, smiling, “and five months of peace is just what I want.”

Here, Jack is every writer ever, including me when I started this essay, convinced a weekend without roommates and no plans besides working was exactly what I needed. Instead, I spent a good chunk of my “alone time” spiraling into a dark place on WebMD, desperately looking up symptoms of strep which I wasn’t sure I had (I did) and comparing Google image results with what I could see at the back of my throat using the flashlight on my phone, tongue out like Jack when he really starts to go crazy. Who knows where I’d be in a month.

It’s not until the ghost of Delbert Grady lets Jack out of the pantry that we understand just what kind of paranormal activity the Torrances are up against. The spirits are alive and well—menacing and capable, going so far as to unlock doors. Jack’s wife Wendy begins seeing them too—the man in the furry bear suit, the bloodied guest in a bowtie raising his glass (“Great party, isn’t it?”), the skeletons in the lobby. All of it absurd and terrifying, and—while I’m watching—very, very real, enough to make me glance over my shoulder, or flinch at an unexpected sound inside my own seemingly safe house.

I’m not someone who believes in ghosts, but I don’t not believe in them, either. I like the idea of them—neutral, if not friendly—in situations like haunted hotels or houses where I can leave and not worry that I’m being followed; where I know that if they exist, they are safely contained; where there are security guards and guides that make me feel taken care of, no matter what spirits are supposedly around. I want to believe when and where I want to; to feel uneasy, but still in control; to tiptoe the line between what’s real versus pretend, knowing I can walk out the door, flip on the light, or turn off the T.V. at any given moment. These are basic wants, really—ones that my favorite horror movies (The Ring, The Blair Witch Project, not to mention The Shining), in the worlds they create, take away, which only draws me all the more closely to them.

It was the Timberline Lodge that asked Kubrick to use a room number other than 217 in his movie. The lodge worried that visitors would shy away from staying in even a fictionally haunted spot overnight. Room 217 became room 237, which didn’t exist at the Timberline. “Curiously, and somewhat ironically,” the lodge’s website now claims, “room 217 is requested more often than any other room at the Timberline.” This comes as no surprise to me—this kind of ghost tourism. We love ghost stories, even made-up ones. And when they’re done well, the details don’t matter as much.

So what if room 217 technically means nothing at the Timberline, or that according to the film’s script, the Shining twins aren’t twins after all, but instead everyday siblings, ages eight and ten? I’ve re-watched many times since my first viewing and I still am not sure I fully understand the last shot—what it means that Jack Torrance, creepy eyebrows and all, is there at the front of the photo from the ‘20s, taken at the Overlook Hotel’s July 4th Ball. It’s impossible, and yet it isn’t, and I only partly care. What matters more is the feeling I get after—the eeriness that settles at the end of a film that knows it’s good.

In the iconic scene that made me turn off the television all those years ago, when Danny comes around the corner on his trike to find the Grady girls wanting to play forever down the hallway, Tony (Danny’s talking finger my mom loves to impersonate) reminds him of a piece of advice:

“Remember what Mr. Hallorann said,” Tony croaks. “‘It’s just like pictures in a book, Danny. It isn’t real.’”

Oh, Tony, I think. If only it were that easy.

But if it was, I want to know, would we still be watching?

Alisha Gorder lives and writes in Berkeley, California where she is a publicist at Catapult, Soft Skull, and Counterpoint Press.