‘The Shining,’ Domestic Violence, and the Architecture of Horror

“Horror isn’t in the gothic and ghostly, but in the people we’re taught to love. Horror is close to home.”

“Heeeere’s Johnny.”

This was my father’s favorite way to enter a room, snapping his head violently around the doorframe, spitting the line in all its gleeful viciousness from between his perfect lines of white teeth. I remember the way the blue scorpions on his arms crept around the door, the swollen bloom of blood spiralling from my chest, the surge of nausea in visceral splinters.

Jack Nicholson’s infamous ad-lib of this line in The Shining has been voted the scariest scene of all time in horror. As a child, I was familiar with the image long before I watched the film in my twenties. One of my father’s books, 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die, had the iconic scene as its cover—a wild grimace and fierce violence I also recognized in the man that slept in the room across from mine.

As an adult I spent a long time searching for the film, in the way you subconsciously seek to locate images from your childhood. When I watched The Shining for the first time, it was almost ten years since I had spoken to my father. I knew immediately that it was my favorite film, and after the feeling of its scenes had settled on me, I remember the way it leant new weight to a horrifying sequence of memories, like images developing uncomfortably in a darkroom: Hitchcock’s Psycho on the top shelf in our living room; the meticulous construction of terror; the surge of panic when he entered a room.

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When The Shining was released in 1980, it was to mixed reviews. One of the main criticisms of the film was its pace: scenes stretched out for longer than necessary, the conventional rhythms of 1970s horror avoided. Stanley Kubrick’s scenes simmer with tension in slow, steady undercurrents. Something feels off-kilter.

Before filming, Kubrick and Diane Johnson read Freud’s famous essay, “The Uncanny,” which explored the disturbing effects of the strangely familiar. The word derives from the German “unheimlich,” which translates as “unhomely.” The essay’s central thesis is that the homely carries the unhomely; that it can become a place of terror rather than safety. The Shining as a whole is shot through with the uncanny residing in the familiar. Achieved through structurally impossible, disorientating architecture and simmering tension, the film is equally concerned with the undercurrents of violence as the violence itself. The change of atmosphere in a room is inexplicable to those without a heightened sensitivity to it; that the film amplifies these undercurrents so precisely is due in part to Kubrick’s technical prowess: The use of the Steadicam allows what Roger Luckhurst calls a “dream-like, subjectless glide through the spaces of the hotel.”

The uncanny relies on the familiar twisting into the unnerving, the residue of something off-kilter; linguistically, it contains home—and home is where horror blooms. This sense of unease permeates all interactions between Jack and Wendy; the slow, methodical tension in their delivery mirrors the undercurrents of domestic abuse with startling precision: the gradual, excruciating accumulation of distress, unvoiced anxiety, a calculated cycle of Jack’s emotionally manipulative behavior. The uncanny, then, rests in the spaces of their interactions and in the spaces of the hotel through which the camera glides; it requires the slow pacing that was the source of the film’s criticism. In the BFI Classics edition of The Shining, Luckhurst writes, “Doesn’t [The Shining] set about decisively and perversely to refuse the intrinsic architecture of gothic horror, its sublime heights, deep shadows and dungeon depths?”

This is the film’s power: It locates its terror largely in the slow burn of the domestic and the uncanny. It spoke to a terror that ran parallel to my own, sprung from the potentialities of violence that a drawer closed too forcefully could indicate. It lay in the banalities of the everyday: a set of keys slammed too fiercely on the stairs; the snapping of a door handle, jerked upwards in a clenched fist; the slow change of pressure in a room that signaled a turn of mood. The splintered wound in the door where his fist met the wood in my grandparents’ house, fractured white paint. His hands wrapped around my mother’s neck while she held me, months old. The pace of abuse is steady and gradual, building to breaking point.

Horror isn’t in the gothic and ghostly, but in the people we’re taught to love. Horror is close to home.

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My mother stood in the kitchen of their old house, her hand resting on the counter. The kitchen was a dark yellow in the Sunday evening light. Something inconsequential had resulted in an argument. He screamed at her, and, without warning, smashed his fist hard into hers. The force broke the bones in her hand. The back of her hand raised into a thick, swollen curve, her fingers hanging loose from her hand like spiders’ legs. Whenever my father looked me in the eyes and promised me he would never hurt us, I replayed this scene over and over again. It was the first time I learned that a promise could sound like a threat.

Much of The Shining speaks so well to domestic abuse and its patterns: claustrophobia, confinement, misdirection. Which version of events is real? Who gave Danny the bruises on his neck? We’re encouraged, repeatedly, to doubt ourselves and our instincts—and this is the premise on which abuse rests. Even after we learn that Jack once dislocated Danny’s shoulder, he insists, “I love you more than anything else in the whole world. I would never do anything to hurt you. Never. You know that, don’t you?” It’s a familiar pattern: inflicting pain, and hoping that the expression of love withdraws its effects—or, worse, makes the action justified.

In her discussion of gaslighting in Damaged Identities, Narrative Repair, Hilde Lindemann writes that the female victim’s “ability to resist depends on her ability to trust her own judgements, and . . . that is precisely what has been so badly broken down.” Gaslighting destabilizes this gut instinct by repeatedly insisting that it is founded on falsity (this is also how a number of tactics work more broadly to insist that women’s instinct is off-kilter, hysterical, an overreaction). My father insisted on many occasions that my mother was “poisoning” my mind with false information about his behavior and intentions; that what I thought I saw was misinterpreted; that the change of atmosphere in the room was merely imagined. This cycle continued for years. He liked to repeat the phrase, “What’s wrong with you?” in response to our reactionary emotions to his behavior. The scene in the gold room where Jack asks Wendy, “Are you out of your fucking mind?” runs parallel to this—the female victim’s instinct (and, importantly, the destabilization of it) is something that horror relies on.

This repeated misdirection is calculated to invite doubt, to call your instinct into question. Which emotions are valid in a situation? Is Wendy right to feel uneasy in the Overlook? Do I have a right to feel angry? Are Wendy’s instincts correct?

One of the most popular pieces of trivia from The Shining’s production is that the iconic scene where Shelley Duvall swings a baseball bat at Jack Nicholson on the stairs was filmed an excruciating 127 times. When considering gaslighting tactics and how they operate, it seems unsettling to consider the treatment of Duvall on set: kept isolated, Kubrick advised the crew to ignore her and refused to praise her work. At one point, she presented Kubrick with hair that had fallen out as a result of extreme stress.

In the baseball bat scene, this exhaustion and anxiety are apparent, and the scene makes for painful viewing as Jack mimics her speech patterns, threatens her, and she begs him, repeatedly, to stop. In her eyes I can read survival and terror all at once. I can read my mother, my sister and me, asking my father, repeatedly, to stop, and the scenes of his behavior replaying the next day, the next week, the next month, until we weren’t sure if we had asked nicely enough, or if we’d even asked at all. Cyclical psychological abuse holds corrosive power over your memory.

Repetition is famously at the heart of the film: gestures (Wendy hitting Jack’s hand with the baseball bat, and again later with the knife in the bathroom), doubles (the Grady girls, and Danny’s reflection in the mirror when speaking to Tony), and images (Danny entering the maze twice); repetition lies too at the heart of abuse to create patterns of doubt and destabilize instinct.

In a poignant essay on violence, Katherine Laidlaw writes, “How naive I was, to have thought that when someone hurts you, the polite response is to ask him to stop.”

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When I first watched The Shining, it was at the beginning of a developing obsession with horror. One of my favorite things about the genre is its preoccupation with space: haunted houses, abandoned hotels, empty hospitals. Its tropes have their roots in architecture and the experiences of distortion and confinement. In an article on The Shining in Sight and Sound, Jonathan Romney wrote, “The confinement is palpable: Horror cinema is an art of claustrophobia, making us loath to stay in the cinema but unable to leave.” This intersection of horror, and claustrophobic space, and, implicitly, the trappings of domestic abuse, speaks well to The Shining’s power: All three make us desperate, but unable, to leave.

My father used to work in construction in the city. When we visited, we walked past hotels and apartments and he would tell us what he built. I was fascinated. In our house, he spent days building bookshelves and tables, laying carpets, filling rooms with furniture they couldn’t hold so that it began to feel suffocating; the unheimlich at work in our tiny rooms, filled with wood to drown us out. A distorted home, a creeping confinement.

Sometimes I think of cruelty a lot like construction: a carefully planned infrastructure of piping, insulation, wiring, working from the inside out to build a structure and then wrapping it in a layer of dense concrete to close in and isolate. In construction, each square inch of steel or brick is placed carefully with a specific function in mind, part of a larger vision; cruelty functions in similar ways. Every interaction is part of a larger motive: My father’s every word and action was chosen carefully, designed to manipulate, refuse, invalidate. Recognizing these patterns is the beginning of resisting them. Architecture is designed to appear permanent, but infrastructures aren’t immune to demolition.

Luckhurst writes that in The Shining, “Danny will survive the Overlook because he has traced out the escape routes over and over”—and notes that he will only return to himself “as he escapes his father in the maze.” My mother, my sister and I had traced our own escape routes into the homes of family friends, into our relationship with one another. Our house simmered with tension in slow, steady undercurrents. I imagined his cruelty as a frequency chart, the peaks growing closer and closer together.

In Hope In The Dark, Rebecca Solnit praises the long, less visible work of the activists that brought about social change, rejecting the idea that “change happens in small, sudden bursts or not at all.” Like the methodical pace that gives The Shining’s terror its power, the slow work that comprises recovery lends power to the resistance of terror, too. It happened slowly in my family: We began voicing the patterns of his behavior to him, collectively recording the events as we remembered them, repeating them to one another and to him. We refused his apologies, because nothing changed. Once, toward the end, I screamed at him—the first time he heard me curse. I watched his face change with the flickers of a recognition that something had altered. He stared at me, and then at my mother, in silence.

When he left, almost ten years ago, he took the furniture from the rooms of the house. I remember looking at a cardboard box at the foot of the stairs—full of books, 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die placed on top. The house felt like a swimming pool being drained.

You trace the escape routes over and over. You learn the way that the building is constructed. Once you notice its infrastructure, the way it repeats itself to close you in, it begins to lose its power. You escape your father in the maze.