The Shining

Have you ever been so frightened of someone or something that it controls your thoughts and actions? When I was a small child, this "something" was the movie "The Shining". With the director's used of good actors and actresses, a vivid story line, and terrifying special effects, this movie frightens children, as well as adults alike.

As the story unfolds, the main characters are a family of a father, mother, and young son. They have to stay in a huge hotel as caretakers, snowed in for the winter months. The father, Jack Torrance, can't take the solidarity and ends up going crazy. His son, Danny, is also noticing dead people living in the house as ghosts. He has a special "sense" and only he can see and talk to these spirit people. These ghosts soon possess the child and his mother, Wendy, must shake him out of his trances. Jack becomes psycho at the end and attempts to kill his wife and son to live in the hotel with the spirits of the once living.

When they arrived at the scary hotel, just the sight of it made my insides hurt. Large, empty hotels are very scary to me now. As the young boy wanders throughout the hotel, he stops and talks to these mysterious dead people that once inhabited the hotel. He was advised at the very beginning to stay out of room number 217. The child is led, of course, down the corridors to this room by spirit children every chance they could get. Since I was a child, this scared me because they were my age. The horrors in that hotel room are what scarred my abilities to take showers or be alone as a child.

In this terrible, forbidden room, as the boy entered it, the floor was wet. The dead woman in the bathtub that attempts to strangle poor Danny has special effects makeup that is incredible. When Danny and Wendy are trying to escape the murderous Jack, I was terrified to see a wave of blood spew from the elevator. Everything looked and sounded believable in this movie; a key factor in scaring its audience.

It seems this movie was definitely generated and aimed for the "adult" audience. I'm not really sure why my parents let me see this disturbing movie in the first place! Through the believable acting, terrifying plot, and gruesome special effects, this movie was an instant classic. Even as it aims for the older audience, even then it is only for the strong of mind, heart, and of course, stomach.