Join, Fred White, our IAH resident film expert and critic to discuss one his personal favorite films, The Shining.  

Fred notes that “While being very effectively scary, The Shining (1980), adapted from Stephen King's novel, is Stanley Kubrick's thinking person's horror movie. Trapping us in a snowed in, disorientingly huge, claustrophobic mountain resort, the film's tension relentlessly builds and builds as Jack Nicholson, hired to live alone with his small family as the hotel's caretaker, goes progressively, homicidally mad. Featuring arguably Nicholson's career-best perfomance as an insanely blocked writer, as well as equally superb performances by Shelley Duvall as his increasingly anxious wife, Danny Lloyd as his small son traumatized by second sight, and the unforgettable Scatman Crothers as the hotel janitor, the film is a typical Kubrick masterpiece in which every single detail has been disturbingly perfectly, relentlessly conceived and brought off. Ending in a giant, frozen hedge maze, The Shining traps the viewer in a terrifying maze of its own, seemingly with no exit."

Join us for what promises to be a lively and perhaps hauntingly memorable discussion and to help get in the Halloween spirit!

About Fred White and his passion for movies:

“I've been a movie buff since I was eight or so and used to ride my bike to our neighborhood theater in Atlanta on Saturday, staying there from noon to 6PM, to watch a double feature, with a news reel, a couple of weekly "serials," and some other "shorts." As an adult, I was lucky enough to be able to teach film, as well as literature, for forty years in Baltimore at Goucher College. For example, for years I taught a course on the films of Stanley Kubrick and their literary sources. I team-taught an interdisciplinary honors course with a Japanese history professor called "Japan in Film," a survey of Japanese history from the 1930s to the 1990s using nothing but Japanese films as texts. And when I taught composition classes, I had the students view, discuss, and write about the films of the Coen Brothers.”