The Shining (1980)
Stanley Kubrick's 1980 film The Shining is an excellent psychological thriller that owes the majority of its fame to the cinematography used within the film, primarily done by John Alcott. This review will be entirely focused on the camera work and cinematography within the film, with brief mentions of the story and other aspects when relevant.
The opening to The Shining gets straight to the point, showing both the main technique the film will use and the atmosphere that will be constant throughout the film. The opening scene follows the Torrance family car as Jack drives all the way to the Overlook Hotel. The camera, from a bird's-eye view, follows it throughout the journey, taking roughly 15-20 seconds between cuts, with the yellow car the only one driving the road for nearly the entire journey. The bird's-eye view that tracks the car establishes to the audience that the place Jack is going is entirely secluded and out of the way of any and all society, immediately setting the main purpose of the camera work, which is to show complete isolation in the Overlook Hotel.
When we get the initial tour of the Overlook Hotel, we see the family and guide walking through the rooms. Again without cutting, the camera follows them from a long shot perspective as they go room to room with the staff in the background. At this point in the film, the Overlook Hotel looks like a marvelous and lively place, letting us the audience watch as, after the staff leave, it becomes more eerie and creepy over time. An excellent example of the Overlook Hotel becoming a creepy setting is the scene where Danny rides his tricycle through the corridors while the camera follows directly behind him. This scene was shot using a new technology called the Steadicam, which glides smoothly at a low angle. It not only looks like we the audience are chasing him as he bikes through the corridors, but since the scene goes for a good amount of time all without cutting, it lets us see how quiet and vacant the Overlook Hotel is, building a level of suspense and a feeling that something bad may happen at all times.
I feel it's important to briefly mention the sound used within the film, as it is essentially split into two halves. The first half of the film relies on diegetic sounds to add to the emptiness of the Overlook Hotel, whilst the second half uses more non-diegetic sounds to create suspense and dread, adding to the horror aspect of the film as a whole.
At two separate points within the film, the camera does an excellent job at showing the characters' reaction to the horror, then showing it to us the audience. The first example is when Danny encounters the twins. As he turns the corner, the Steadicam glides backwards in front of him, tracking his movement as he stops and sees the two at the end of the corridor, before the camera goes into an extreme close-up of his scared reaction to them. The second and greatly more effective example of this is the scene where Wendy, looking for Jack, reads the typewriter. The camera does a close-up as she looks terrified, then cuts to a POV shot showing Wendy's perspective and the ominous writing: “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.” Both of these scenes do a good job of building suspense, as it's not just our reaction to the horrors of the Overlook Hotel, but the characters experiencing it first-hand.
Shifting focus to the bar scene with Jack, it easily stands out against the rest of the film. We see a long shot of the crowded Gold Room as Jack sits down at the bar for a drink, being completely foreign to the vacant corridors and rooms in the rest of the film. As Jack sits at the bar, the camera uses a close shot of Jack as his expressions twist, looking more manic and hyperactive. This shows this is the moment where he begins cracking, with the fact that he is hallucinating drinking in a crowded bar being a clever callback to an earlier scene where we hear about a previous outburst he had and that he had stayed sober since. It acts as a literal demon in a bottle for him, seemingly manifested by the hotel—the real antagonist of the film—as a means to manipulate and instigate Jack's insanity.
The next scene is one most will know even without watching the film. The famous “Here’s Johnny" scene manages to be the horror highlight of the film. The camera perspective as Wendy cowers behind the door is side-on, only letting us see the axe piercing the wooden door, only to cut to Jack swinging. The camera focus is on the axe as he repeatedly drives it through the door, then cuts to an extreme close-up of Jack poking his head through and delivering the iconic line. This creates an intense impending doom, as we hear the axe smashing the door without knowing exactly what Jack’s doing between the cuts.
The final scenes I want to talk about are, in my opinion, the pinnacle of The Shining's cinematography, being the two scenes in the hedge maze. The initial scene shows Jack looking down on the model maze in the hotel, then cuts to the actual maze with Danny and Wendy from a bird's-eye view. This not only shows the true scale of the maze and how large the environment is compared to the people residing in it, but creates the sense of isolation and, more importantly, no escape, as the hotel as an entity wants them to stay forever. Finally, in the climax of the film when Jack chases Danny through the maze in the snowy night, the camera goes between following Danny and a close-up shot of Jack as he screams out to Danny, threatening him. This creates the illusion Jack is closer to Danny than he is, creating a spine-chilling chase that ends with him stuck in the maze, freezing out in the cold.
Overall, The Shining makes excellent use of cinematography to turn the Overlook Hotel from a modern-looking paradise of a hotel to an eerie place where every corridor stretches out a little too long and our main characters feel out of place despite being the only ones present. The hotel itself feels like an entity within the film, and this can be seen in the constant tracking shots where we feel like a character in the film stalking Danny and Wendy