(Stanley Kubrick, 1980, USA/United Kingdom, 146 minutes)

For a special Halloween show we are pleased to have excuse to run the classic The Shining, Stanley Kubrick’s film adaptation of Stephen King’s bestselling novel. Met with puzzlement upon its initial release (including from King himself, who famously didn’t like the film), it wears its 41 years well and its influence on the next generation of horror filmmakers is clear. Here we have Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson), a frustrated writer hoping that a gig as caretaker in the off-the-grid mountainside hotel The Overlook will get his creative juices flowing. Wife and young son in tow, instead he finds that The Overlook’s bloody past weighs heavily on his own psyche, and with the nearest help far away the family is in for a long winter indeed.