Early in The Shining, Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson), with a rictus grin on his face, refers to his wife Wendy (Shelley Duvall) as a “ghost story and horror film addict.” He might as well be alluding to the appetite of the film’s audience and priming them for a movie that both plays into and subverts expectations of the genre. The American psyche’s innate lust for violence and terror is a key theme in this notoriously free-wheeling Stephen King adaptation set in a haunted hotel built on an Indian burial ground high in the Rockies, where the Torrances, with toddler son Danny (Danny Lloyd) in tow, come to care-take for a winter. As Jack submits to demons that are both specific to him and part of a larger cycle of patriarchal savagery on those same grounds, Kubrick weaves a dense web of visual and sonic motifs whose far-reaching implications continue to be argued over today.