This was perhaps my fifth or sixth viewing of Stanley Kubrick’s haunting vision of Stephen King’s classic tale of a hotel caretaker gone cuckoo, The Shining. This viewing was every bit as chilling as my previous. The film is so well edited and timed, especially for something from the horror genre. Kubrick’s ability to create tension is one of a kind. It starts from the opening curtain with the revolutionary long shots of the Colorado mountainside and continues through to the use of off screen space in the later parts of the film. Kubrick also employs different lighting techniques to accentuate his film. In class we discussed the redness of not only the scenery but the red light that often floods the lens. The film also is very well focused, especially the long open shots inside the hotel. I think of Jack throwing the tennis ball and the boy riding around on the tricycle. Kubrick truly has a knack for keeping tracking shots in line and well focused. Even in stationary shots Kubrick’s uses different angles to add tension and drama. I think of when Jack is in the freezer and the camera is on the ground angled up towards him. The scene that most impresses me is when the young boy sees the door to room two-thirty-seven open and Kubrick uses a mirror to show that the room is most certainly not empty. Although we never see the boy enter the room we can infer by Kubrick’s cinematography that he does enter and encounters some evil inside. This is a crucial point because the film is able to tell a story without language, only image and sound. My previous sentence got me thinking though, is cinematography not a form of language? Just by how a camera is angled we can tell a lot about the story a film is telling. Perhaps the difficulty in understanding language is that too often we believe it to be only the spoken language and not the signs we see in other aspects of communication.