If you are a male between the ages of 40 and 50 who was raised on movies, you have probably seen The Shining dozens of times. I’ve met so many people like me who have and can recite whole passages from it. As I said to my son a few weeks ago, I could probably watch it, start to finish, at any time. And yet it’s not one of my favorite movies. I love it, I’ve memorized it, but it’s not up there with Raging Bull and Notorious and The Searchers—and it can’t hit the heights hit by 2001. But it does exert some kind of strange compelling force on people who love it. As Luckhurst argues, we are pulled into the maze again and again.

The film Room 237 is a complete waste of time; the five conspiracy theorists aren’t crazy enough, and their ideas are as dull as that kid sophomore year who say in your dorm room and asked if the color green he was seeing as the same color green you were seeing. But this BFI essay about The Shining never steers into such boring territory. It’s readable, intelligent, and done with just the right touch. Like the film itself, however, it is never definitive: each section deals with a trope or theme but never goes all the way. For example, Luckhurst argues that the Room 237 sequence is the “navel” of the film and points put some interesting things about how it’s constructed—only to conclude by praising Kubrick for “detaching point of view from any secure ground of identity.” But perhaps this is as far as anyone can go when talking about a film as slippery as this one.

Luckhurst spends the early pages placing The Shining in the context of 1970s and early 1980s horror films. Figures such as the haunted house and the psychic child have a history of their own, a history that Luckhurst traces for the reader. This pays off when he later examines the ways in which the Room 237 sequence reflects the most famous horror scene of all: the shower in Psycho. Now that’s pretty interesting. He also treats the opening shots of the VW bug (followed as if by a demon), Shelly Duvall’s terrific performance (Jack Nicholson gets all the nods but she is just as incredible), and the film’s soundscape. He is very good on the film’s indeterminacies: the “fact” (which I’ve never quite understood) that there could be no window in Ullman’s office, the two Grady girls appearing as twins despite our being told they were two years apart, or that Ullman tells Jack about Charles Grady’s cabin fever but that Jack meets Delbert Grady in the bathroom scene. To Luckhurst, these items contribute the dream landscape of the film, just like the ending photograph of Jack on July 4, 1921. Luckhurst gives the ending its due and notes that it took a week (a week!) for Kubrick to complete that tracking shot into the photograph. Dream or not, the house always wins. ( )

This seemed to me a missed opportunity. The beauty of the BFI Classics series is that it's not only for introductory studies (they do have their share of that, see Peter Krämer's lackluster entry on 2001), and even familiar classics can be made to be seen under a new light, as Will Brooker did for STAR WARS (a refreshing looking at the 1977 film only as that one film, not the phenomenon or the saga). And, of course Michel Chion managed to bring fantastic insight to his texts on EYES WIDE SHUT and THIN RED LINE, as did Iain Sinclair on CRASH: they were original. Luckhurst, unfortunately, is too by the book here, summing up neatly some anecdotes, some reception, of the critical debate, some historical context (wasting long, long pages trying to make place in into 70s horror) and nothing much. It gets better towards the end when he's more interested in looking at the movie itself--I enjoyed his take on the split intersubjectivity of the Room 237 scene-- and he does have terrific ideas (Jack's novel a forgotten modernist masterpiece!), but sadly they don't go very far, as if afraid of going off on some curious tangent (these details that suddenly open the film up seem to me to be part of the allure of the film). Watch Room 237 instead--there's more love and mystery there. ( )