The Shinning

His name is Jack Torrance. He fancies becoming an acclaimed author. A successful (in the material sense), a famous one. His real life is far from that.

He gets a temporary job in an isolated hotel. He, his wife and son move there. To be the only inhabitants of the huge place in the winter months.

He dreams of being some sort of Scott Fitzgerald. He would have wanted to live and enjoy that cool atmosphere of the 1920s. He is somewhat haunted by the ghost of Gatsby.

He moves into the loneliness of the hotel at the mountains. In the long empty days, he wanders about rooms and corridors. He writes or tries to. He starts to see things and presences that are not there. Or that were there, but in the distant past. In the 1920s. Ghosts from a fascinating and mundane age of social parties, sophistication and pretended intellectual conversations.

The ghosts appear here and there and devour his reason, with promises of a non existent world. The Shinning is psychological horror at its best.

The Shinning, 1980. Stanley Kubrick.