SCREAM YOUR ENTHUSIASM (1)

By: Crockett Doob
October 2, 2024

One in a series of 25 enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, on the topic of favorite horror movies. Series edited by Heather Quinlan.

THE SHINING | d. STANLEY KUBRICK | 1980

Why is everybody so obsessed with The Shining? Me included.

Like, I’m so obsessed, I avoided the documentary, Room 237, the same way I’ve avoided social media and cocaine. I didn’t need to think about The Shining more.

Okay, so why? The cinematography? Once, while babysitting, I got the kids to agree to watch it, which was stupid, but I was pleasantly surprised when they thought it was a new movie. Yes, it still looks that good.

I could go on and on. The point is I couldn’t figure out why.

Then my brilliant editor, Heather Quinlan, said, “You could just send me 300-500 words of ‘All work and no play make Jack a dull boy,’” and that’s when it clicked:

The Shining is Writer Porn! Or not even! It’s Writer’s Block Porn!

Also in this genre:

Wonder Boys
Barton Fink
The Melissa McCarthy/Dorothy Parker movie with the many typewriters
The Ben Stiller one where he’s doing drugs while (not) writing episodes of Alf

At the height of my Shining craze, it’s not that I had writer’s block; I wasn’t writing at all, but I wanted to be. So it was cathartic watching Jack Torrance type-type-type away, knowing he was writing gobbledygook.

But during the scene where Jack’s wife, Wendy, serves him breakfast in bed and asks how his writing’s going, she then says something, I think, vital: “It’s just a matter of settling back into the habit of writing every day.”

When I finally wrote my first novel after struggling with it for years, I had Wendy Torrance to thank. Here’s what happened: I wrote, left it, came back to it the next day, and pretty soon I had a book! None of this self-aggrandized blocked stuff. Just do it every day. Or, as Chef Hallorann put it, “You got to keep regular if you want to be happy.”

Shelley Duvall, who played Wendy Torrance, died in 2024. Notoriously abused on the set of The Shining, there’s been plenty of speculation about how her descent into mental illness was directly caused by the horror of working with Stanley Kubrick.

In a PBS NewsHour interview, director Sarah Polley discussed Women Talking, her 2023 film about sexual assault in a religious colony. Due to the traumatic subject matter, Polley had a mental health professional on set at all times. She brought up this concept of the madman director who makes everyone’s life hell for the sake of art. She said that making art doesn’t have to be an operatic, tortured act where you drag everyone down with you. You can be … what’s that word? Professional. Otherwise, the artist becomes the art, not the other way around—something Stephen King addresses in his book, On Writing. Also, Stephen King’s version of Jack Torrance does finish his writing project before trying to murder his family.

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SCREAM YOUR ENTHUSIASM (1)

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