This is probably the best haunted house movie ever made because it pays such little respect to tradition, while also being mucho eerie. There are no special effects in which lamps get tossed across the room by evil spirits. No walls shake. It’s like director Stanley Kubrick made a list of every haunted house movie cliche and then decided to avoid all of them. Most of the ghosts here seem like real people. Some of them are even polite and none of them tells all that they know.
There are three pivotal characters in this story of a family who become caretakers of a creepy isolated hotel during the winter off-season: husband Jack Nicholson, wife Shelley Duvall and their young son Danny Lloyd, who seems to have psychic episodes that he processes as messages from an imaginary friend. All three of these people would have very different versions about what happens after Nicholson goes out of his mind and starts trying to hack up his family during a record-breaking blizzard—and we’re never sure who’s right. Kubrick, ultra-meticulous, famous for filming dozens and dozens of takes of every shot, no matter how minor, is careful to keep things ambiguous here. This is the kind of film that invites analysis. Talking about it afterwards is half of the experience. Think about this film enough and you can make whole characters cease to exist and take on roles as figments of another character’s imagination. Just look at Jack Nicholson’s crazy smile. Do you trust anything that guy sees or says?