Summary
The film opens on several aerial shots of a car driving through twisting Colorado mountain peaks, followed by an aerial view of the looming Overlook Hotel. The car turns out to be owned by Jack Torrance, who has driven for three and a half hours to arrive at the hotel for a job interview with its manager, Stuart Ullman. Jack is interviewing for a job as the hotel's caretaker during its closure for the winter season.
Back at Jack's home in Boulder, Colorado, his wife, Wendy, and son, Danny, eat lunch and watch cartoons. Danny asks his mother if they are really going to live in a hotel for the winter. Wendy responds that she thinks it will be a lot of fun. Danny seems ambivalent and says that he doesn't have many friends to play with in Boulder anyway. Wendy then addresses Danny's imaginary friend, Tony, if he wants to go to the hotel, to which Tony replies that he does not.
During the course of Jack's interview, we learn that he used to be a schoolteacher and now calls himself a writer. Mr. Ullman explains that the hotel closes in the winter because the road leading there becomes impassible in all the snow. For that reason, the caretaker has to remain in the hotel all winter, an experience that Mr. Ullman warns can be "mentally isolating." Jack responds that he is looking for five months of peace to write, and that he expects his family will love it.
Mr. Ullman presses further, explaining that he is obligated to tell Jack that in 1970, the caretaker, Charles Grady, suffered a mental breakdown and killed his family with an axe. Ullman says that the story "gives some people second thoughts about the job." Jack is not shaken by the story but says that his wife, a "confirmed ghost story and horror film addict" will be fascinated by it.
Back in Boulder, Danny is talking to Tony and gazing into his bathroom mirror. He asks Tony if he thinks Jack will get the job, and Tony replies that he already did, and that Jack is going to call Wendy in a few minutes to tell her the good news. Sure enough, Wendy receives a call from Jack explaining that he got the job and will be home late because he has to fill out some paperwork.
Danny asks Tony to explain why Tony doesn't want to go live in the hotel, and Danny's eyes widen. He enters a kind of trance in which he sees images of blood rushing out from an elevator bank, followed by an image of two twin girls in blue dresses. Finally, he sees an image of himself screaming in a different setting.
Danny faints, and a doctor arrives. She asks him what he remembers about the episode, and Danny explains that the last thing he remembers is talking to Tony. The doctor asks who Tony is, and Danny answers that Tony is "the little boy that lives in [his] mouth." The doctor asks if Tony ever tells Danny to do things, and Danny goes silent.
In the living room, Wendy talks privately with the doctor, who says that there is nothing physically wrong with Danny and that his episode was like autohypnosis. The doctor asks when Tony arrived, and Wendy explains that Danny began talking to him when he started nursery school, where he had trouble adjusting.
She also mentions that Danny was injured once, and the doctor presses her about it. Wendy explains bashfully that Jack once came home late from work and pulled Danny's arm in a fit of rage. After this incident, however, Jack became sober and told Wendy that if he ever touched alcohol again, she could leave him.
Analysis
The lengthy credit sequence at the opening of The Shining is renowned for its power to build dread and suspense around the isolated, dangerous setting of the film. Cruising through the mountain passes towards the gargantuan Overlook Hotel, Jack resembles the protagonist of a fairy tale approaching the infamous monster's castle. Jack Torrance's car appears always on the brink of careening off the treacherous mountain roads, but it is the camera movement especially that contributes to a sense of looming danger. Kubrick's aerial shots here do not follow the car in a linear, naturalistic way, but rather as if it were fastened to a bird; the camera swoops back and forth, in turns following and diverging from the road. This lends the opening sequence a sense of supernatural surveillance, since the camera seems to shoot from an eagle-eye perspective, and to move as an autonomous creature would move. This swooping camera, however, disappears once we enter the Overlook Hotel, where the camera will adopt the opposite approach by becoming anchored to characters like Danny, moving through the hotel as he moves.
The opening scenes in The Shining are also bursting with foreshadowing, as is common in classic horror films. Of course, the most conspicuous of this foreshadowing is Mr. Ullman's warning that the former caretaker of the hotel went mad one winter and murdered his family with an axe, as we get the sense even then that the hotel's dark past might overcome Jack. Indeed, Jack receives this news with alarming calm and even assures Ullman that his wife will be "fascinated" by the story, as she is a "confirmed ghost story and horror film addict." Even seemingly inconsequential lines of dialogue, such as Wendy's assertion that living in the Overlook Hotel will be "a lot of fun," are charged with foreshadowing and irony, as they give the audience the sense that the family has no idea what they are in for—little does Wendy know, it will in fact be a nightmare.
Foreshadowing in this chapter is not delivered exclusively through dialogue, however. It also comes in the form of imagery, most importantly while Danny experiences the visions that we will later come to understand as "shining." When Danny asks Tony why he doesn't want to live at the hotel, Tony shows him two important images: the elevator with blood pouring from it and the Grady twins. These images will constitute the meat of the terror that Danny experiences at the hotel, but here they are devoid of context. In this way, Kubrick gives Danny (and the viewer) pieces of a terrifying puzzle, promising that it will be solved by the end of the film.
This chapter also functions as an expository sequence, providing the viewer with most of the information that will be necessary to understand the action that follows. We learn that the rest of the film will revolve around the Torrances' winter stay at the hotel, that Jack is unemployed, and that he wants the time and space to write, all in the space of a few scenes. Of course, we also learn that the hotel was the site of a tragedy in which the former caretaker, Charles Grady, killed his family with an axe before committing suicide. Not only do we learn about the hotel, however, we also get a glimpse of the Torrances' life in Boulder, where Danny and his imaginary (and only) friend mentally prepare to leave for the hotel. Crucially, we understand that Danny has a mysterious psychic ability that promises disaster once the family moves to the Overlook Hotel. This last piece of information is delivered via dramatic irony, as Tony predicts that Jack will call Wendy to tell her he got the job; unbeknownst to Wendy, this prophecy is fulfilled in the next scene.
