Hypnotic movie

He definitely gets the musical quality of film, John McTiernan talks about this in his Die Hard commentary.

Kubrick, like Lynch, is able to tap into deep rhythms. There’s a slow lulling pace to his films that draws you in. Music helps, and he seems to cut to whoever is talking in a turn-taking style, rather than focus on the listener.

The opening helicopter shots are strangely surreal and dreamy, seducing you into the world.

Kubrick, like Lynch, is able to tap into deep rhythms. There’s a slow lulling pace to his films that draws you in. Music helps, and he seems to cut to whoever is talking in a turn-taking style, rather than focus on the listener.

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In The Shining, I think this quality plays out quite strikingly in NIcholson's three dialogues with three men(two of them imaginary): Ullman the hotel manager; Lloyd the Bartender and (especially) Grady the Butler. These are long, slow scenes in which the men all talk too slowly...but it is mesmerizing, hypnotic indeed.

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The opening helicopter shots are strangely surreal and dreamy, seducing you into the world.

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Something about how the lens distorts the scenery, and of course the classical music(also used in A Clockwork Orange) which here is given an eeerie "scream" effect as well.

I've always felt that the two movies that best created "arenas for terror" were Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho(a shabby modern motel with a creepy Gothic mansion behind it) and The Shining(an empty 1,000 room hotel, snowbound with no escape.) Hitchcock used a "tight backlot shot" to show the protagonist driving up to the motel and house in the dark; The Shining uses very expensive helicopter footage, from high above in broad daylight, to "present" the isolation of The Overlook Hotel. BOTH movies really set the stage for their terrors perfectly. Both settings were also "in the middle of nowwhere, far from civilization and help."