Introduction: the Comic Sense of Horror

In the midst of filming The Shining, Stanley Kubrick faced a crisis both aesthetic and philosophical. A staunch non-believer, Kubrick began to wonder why stories of ghostly possession should horrify the jaded audiences of a more or less secularised culture. If anything, the presence of ghosts, malevolent or not, should instil us with hope, assuaging our anxieties about impending mortality and providing spiritual meaning in a nihilistic age. Kubrick probably worried that his usual highbrow audience, too sophisticated for fairy tales, would see the content of The Shining as laughable, despite its mannered, haute stylistics and grave, unwaveringly straight-faced presentation. Certainly, the original storyline by Stephen King, a devout believer, would seem silly to rationalists unwilling to suspend disbelief. Beyond the particularities of a single film, our scepticism broadens: if ghosts exist, why would they haunt houses or burial grounds rather than roam free? Must ghosts observe socially constructed geographical boundaries? And why should a roaming spirit, freed from its bodily prison, inject itself into the petty affairs of humanity when it presumably exists as a new, supra-human consciousness? Of course, the arbitrary conventions of generic horror – and of religious dogma – were never meant to withstand the force of logic. To foster the most extreme forms of belief, spiritual dogmas must be so irrational as to require miraculous leaps of faith by those who believe they are specially chosen to make such leaps. Horror films that exploit and adapt established conventions of supernatural belief thus stumble into a kind of burlesque, reverently treating the most arbitrary (and ridiculous) aspects of irrational faith.

In the cold light of scepticism (not to mention epistemology), The Shining should scare us less than some of life's more mundane travails, such as overcoming cancer, initiating a divorce, or amortising a mortgage. The Shining unnerves mainly for Kubrick's objectivised sense of the surreal and the Freudian uncanny, not for its intellectually dubious subject matter. Yet Kubrick's fears were partly unfounded: the very experience of watching a ghost story is always simultaneously horrific and absurd. Typically, audiences naively identify with spooked characters while also critically positioning themselves above risible narratives that call for absurdly irrational belief.