distancing

Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining turns 40 years old this week. Despite being the filmmaker’s late-in-life stab at commercialism after the failure of Barry Lyndon, his single attempt at horror remains one of the most artful, and hauntingly confounding, chillers ever produced. It turned Stephen King’s traditional haunted hotel yarn into a metaphysical nightmare of… well, just about anything you want. As Rodney Ascher’s Room 237 documentary explored, there are Kubrick conspiracy theorists who will tell you The Shining is about everything from white guilt over the generational mass murder of American Indians (plausible) to a confession of Kubrick’s complicity in…