THE HAUNTED (THE SHINING)

It is regarded to this day as one of the high watermarks of Stanley Kubrick's career.

'The Shining' appeared in cinemas in 1980 -five years after the underwhelming critical and commercial response to his Irish period drama, 'Barry Lyndon'.

An adaptation of a Stephen King novel set in Colorado, it is regarded as one of the most influential horror movies of all time.

However its production was far from smooth.

Kubrick had at various stages considered Robert de Niro, Robin Williams and Harrison Ford for the role of the troubled writer Jack Torrance but Jack Nicholson was his first choice.

King was not so sure, however, believing Nicholson's Academy Award winning performance in Milos Forman's 'One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest' meant that audiences would be less shocked by his character's descent into madness.

He had preferred a more conventional actor like Jon Voight, Michael Moriarty or Christopher Reeve in the role andwas also fiercely critical of Shelley Duvall's performance as Torrance's wife Wendy (more on that later).

Kubrick's refusal to travel outside of England meant much of the interior was shot at Elstree Studios in Hertfordshire.

Several stages were utilised to enable him to shoot the movie in chronological order and the set for the Overlook Hotel was one of the biggest to be ever constructed in Elstree and included a life size recreation of its exterior.

However a fire on the set in 1979 delayed production.

The film went over schedule, forcing Steven Spielberg to change his for 'Raiders of the Lost Ark' which was due to move into Elstree but moved to North Africa instead. 

When the cameras rolled, 'The Shining' was an arduous shoot.

It took over a year for Kubrick and his cinematographer John Alcott to complete principal photography and there were huge tensions on the set between Kubrick and Shelley Duvall, exacerbated by the director's perfectionism.

Emotionally fraught scenes were shot over and over again and the script was constantly being rewritten - also to the irritation of Nicholson.

Scatman Crothers, who plays Dick Halloran in the film, and Danny Lloyd, who plays the Torrances' young son Danny, had to endure 147 takes of a sequence where they gave a heart to heart.

Joe Turkel, who played Lloyd the barman, revealed that his clothes were soaked in sweat after it took 13 hours to shoot a scene with Nicholson which took six weeks to rehearse.

Duvall would later recall the mental fatigue she felt because she was being asked to constantly sob and scream to the point of exhaustion.

"Jack Nicholson's character had to be crazy and angry all the time," she told the film critic Roger Ebert in an interview in December 1980.

"And in my character, I had to cry 12 hours a day, all day long, the last nine months straight, five or six days a week.

"I was there a year and a month and there must be something to Primal Scream therapy because after the day was over and I'd cried for my 12 hours... After all that work, hardly anyone criticised my performance in it, even to mention it, it seemed like.  

"The reviews were all about Kubrick, like I wasn't there."

King, who has harboured deep reservations about Kubrick's adaptation, found the depiction of Wendy particularly hard to take, describing it as mysoginistic.

"I mean, Wendy Torrance is just presented as this sort of screaming dish rag," he told Rolling Stone in 2014.

He later told the BBC Duvall's character was "just there to scream and be stupid and that's not the woman that I wrote about."

Duvall was so stressed that she became ill and her hair started to fall out.

A documentary by Kubrick's daughter Vivian also showed the actress lying on the floor in exhaustion but also saw the director screaming at her for missing a cue.

But as we prepare for 'Doctor Sleep',  Mike Flanagan's long awaited sequel to 'The Shining', how does Kubrick's original stand up 39 years later?

The plot of 'The Shining' is pretty straightforward.

Nicholson's struggling writer Jack Torrance and his family relocate from Boulder to The Overlook Hotel in the heart of the Rockies after he takes on a job as a caretaker while it closes down over the winter.

However the Overlook has a grim history, with the revelation that a previous employee Charles Grady went mad and murdered his wife and two young daughters with an axe.

Torrance's young son Danny has already had a scary premonition about the hotel and during a tour of the kitchens with his mother, he is surprised when he is telepathically asked by the head chef Dick Halloran to join him for ice cream.

Halloran reveals to Danny he has the same telepathic powers which he calls "the shining" and he warns the boy that the hotel may invoke some memories, some of them scary.

Danny is also warned to steer clear of Room 237.

While Jack struggles to write a book and his wife Wendy tends to the upkeep of the empty hotel, Danny plays in the corridors - cycling in his cart or playing with cars.

However he starts to experience scary visions of a flood of blood gushing out of the elevator or of Grady's young daughters beckoning him to play with them.

Jack also becomes increasingly unsettled - unable to sleep and write, he also experiences visions including visits to a bar populated by the spirits of Turkel's barman Lloyd and Philip Stone's Delbert Grady.

As Jack's behaviour becomes increasingly tetchy and erratic, Wendy begins to grow more concerned about her and Danny's safety.

Thirty nine years later, 'The Shining' remains an impressively unsettling movie, drawing its power from its frequent flights into fantasy.

Kubrick's meticulous planning and attention to detail ensures that many images are seared into the memories of viewers long after seeing the film.

Who can forget the iconic shots of the Grady girls in the corridors of the Overlook? Or the flood of blood? Or the axe through the bathroom door? Or the Nosferatu style images of Jack as he shuffles through the snow in the maze.

He is greatly assisted by his cinematographer John Alcott in this regard, the production and art and set direction teamd and by composers Wendy Carlos and Rachel Elkind's disturbing score.

However some elements grate.

Nicholson gives an entertaining performance that is so over the top that he effectively becomes a pantomime villain.

But you are left wondering whether Jack Torrance's decent into madness might have had much more impact if, as King maintained, it had been a more conventional actor in the role like Harrison Ford, Jon Voight or Dustin Hoffman.

It is hard to disagree with King's criticism of the portrayal of Wendy who is poorly served and reduced to the role of a quivering doormat.

Kubrick and fellow screenwriter Diane Johnson's mysoginistic treatment of Wendy means she spends much of the time being shouted at by Jack or sobbing.

It is the biggest flaw in an otherwise brilliantly executed film and in this wake of Ripley, Sarah Conner and Imperator Furiosa it seems very much a product of the old Hollywood.

But 39 years on, thanks to Kubrick's knowledge of how to create memorably eerie imagery and ramp up the psychological horror, 'The Shining' remains a landmark film which we will still be analysing for years to come.

('The Shining' opened in UK and Irish cinemas on October 2, 1980)