The shining

 This past week we had the grand opportunity (for those of us who have not seen it) to watch the horror film, "The Shining." I, myself, had not seen this film before the mandatory screening for this class. With this said I was very impressed with how well this film was directed and edited for its time in movie history. For being a film that was made all the way back in 1980, the editing and graphics were quite amazing and fulfilling. For instance, when "Jack" goes to room 237 and sees a young attractive women naked in the bath tub who gets up, walks over to Jack, and starts kissing him, she then suddenly turns into an old ugly corpse. The graphics of this women as a corpse is very realistic for this time period of movie making. Also, I would like to agree with Ryan when he writes about how big of a role music plays and how powerful the art of music is in films. In "The Shining" the music is mostly always playing in an ominous tone shooting chills throughout your entire body. The music can turn a scene or an image in the film that isn't neccissarily scary into a seat gripping experience. Also, the camera angle can make or break a scene, so to speak. An example of this is when "Danny" is ridding his tricycle through the hotel, the music is very ominous at this point while the camera angle is right behind Danny giving a sense of reality. The angle of the camera makes you feel like you are right behind danny following him not knowing what he is going to encounter but feeling its going to be bad because of the ominous music tone. The picture I chose was an image at the very end of the movie which shows "Jack" in a crowd of people from the hotel many years before. The reason I have this image up is because I was unsure of its significance. Was Jack a ghost all along, did he turn into one who will haunt the hotel from now on, I don't know. This is a subject that I would like to discuss in class.

-  Coulter