Midway through totemic 80s skin-crawler The Shining there’s a scene where Jack Nicholson’s disheveled caretaker, scouring the Overlook Hotel for the antidote to writer’s block, stumbles on a scale model of the hedge maze his wife and son are exploring outside. He glares down at it (Nicholson’s eyebrows really deserve an Oscar apiece) and the film cuts to a slow zoom from above, showing us his family wandering through the model, as innocent and unsuspecting as Pac-Man’s ghosts. It’s an obvious visual metaphor for Jack’s mounting ogreish tendencies – you can feel him itching to stretch out a thumb and squish them. But it also sums up a film in which the horror isn’t really driven by grotesqueries like blood-filled elevators, but the quiet hostility of the spaces around them – the vast, silent ballrooms, corridors and stairwells that eat away at your imagination as Kubrick’s queasy camerawork feeds you through them.
There’s a similar model in 101% and Reddoll’s The Suicide of Rachel Foster, showing the Timberline Hotel’s situation high in Montana’s mountains, a “You Are Here” flag fluttering jauntily from its roof. So far, there is nothing particularly amiss about that model, no suggestion of malice. I have a feeling that may change.
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Source : rockpapershotgun.com
