the little boy that lives inside my mouth

I was asked by Vol. 1 Brooklyn to write about my favorite Stephen King adaptation and obviously picked The Shining. I wrote a few hundred words about Kubrick's use of Freud's concept of "The Uncanny" as well as his mastery of "terror" over "horror."

The creepiest and most haunting parts of The Shining are moments of pure Radcliffian “terror,” filled with ambiguity and tension. Danny flinching his finger and squeaking in the voice of Tony, “the little boy that lives inside my mouth.” Jack staring eerily into the model hedge maze and seeing, somehow, his wife and child. The ghost butler telling Jack in a slow and deliberate voice, “I corrected them, sir, and when my wife tried to prevent me from doing my duty, I corrected her.” And the final ambiguous shot of the film, a slow zoom into the image of Jack Torrance smiling in a photograph that was taken decades before he was born.

The ten greatest Stephen King adaptations