Three scenes, five characters, the single setting of an ordinary suburban house – this classic tale of wishes coming true in a horribly warped fashion retains the power to chill the blood well over a century after it was written. To sustain a feeling of mounting horror over 400 pages is no mean feat, but Maclean manages to mix nostalgia and nightmare by taking tropes from classic 1970s ghost stories and twisting them into a gnarled knot of simmering tension which finally unravels in one of the most terrifying pursuits in literature. Stephen King hated this adaptation of his equally brilliant novel, but generations of cinema-goers feel very different.
The opulent but logic-defying sets which Kubrick constructed in Elstree studios, Hertfordshire, to serve as his all-American Overlook Hotel add to the stifling sense of oppression which finally overwhelms Jack Nicholson, whose possessed performance is even more terrifying than the ghosts that lurk around every corner. Stephen Mallatratt turned Susan Hill’s story of a vengeful spirit into a two-man, one-ghost theatrical tour-de-force, which reduces its audience to jelly with one of the greatest jump-scares of all time. This “mockumentary” remains infamous for the complaints which flooded in from viewers who mistook it for the real thing – and it’s unsurprising given how note-perfectly it sticks to the conventions of early 90s TV, with real-life presenters Michael Parkinson, Sarah Greene and Craig Charles seemingly unaw.
