Aspiring writer, Torrance (Nicholson), takes a job as a winter caretaker at the isolated, snowbound Overlook Hotel to create space in his life for a writing project. The hotel’s macabre past doesn’t put him off the job or raise questions in his mind like, Is this really suitable for my wife and possibly-psychic young son? Had we somehow not anticipated it, we have an inkling now that things will not go well. What follows is a chilling study of descent into madness rather than a ghost story. But who goes mad – Torrance or maybe all three. Which events actually happen within the story and which might be hallucinations is not clear nor is it obvious how or why things happen. It is this pervasive sense of uncertainty and unease, and the reliance on suspense rather than limb-chopping, that makes The Shining a truly great horror film from a perfectionist director.

Three people descend into versions of madness or psychic terror, and we cannot depend on any of them for an objective view of what happens. It is this elusive open-endedness that makes Kubrick’s film so strangely disturbing. Roger Ebert , Chicago Sun Times.

What I really admire about this film is that no matter how many times you watch it, the sensations it creates are never diminished an almost perpetual feeling of discomfort and dread that cant consciously be suppressed. David Mercier, FilmJudge.co.uk