From Closing Day’s proximity to Halloween, to the off handed comment that Wendy’s a horror movie addict, Kubrick plays into what we expect things to happen in terms of a “horror movie”, but Kubrick labeled The Shining as “A Film of Modern Horror”.
The ghosts, the planting of the story of an occurrence that happened 10 years prior, the faustian bargain of Jack “selling his soul for a glass of beer”— all of these things are tropes of classic horror and none of them are what they seem.
In this image · No.5
Having a previous (not the last one, but A caretaker) caretaker kill his wife and family as we’ve been receiving such clear symbols of “things are going to go wrong” is a classic trope in horror films. If you want to watch a film that has a similar vein but w/o any of the semiotic subtext, watch the original 1979 Amityville Horror Story with James Brolin.