How Suspense Was Created In The Shining

The film starts off with a small yellow car driving through a large range of mountains and countryside with no one else in site, then the car containing the small family arrives at a big hotel set in a secluded location on a mountain, that gets snowed in during the winter time while no one else stays there. When Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson), his wife Wendy (Shelley Duvall) and their son Danny (Danny Lloyd) arrive at the hotel in the small yellow car it seems that they are a happy and caring family towards one another but as the summer starts to turn to winter the audience sees a big difference in the main character Jack Torrance by the way he starts to act towards his family.

The character Jack Torrance is a caretaker for the hotel over the winter period so that nothing happens to the hotel but as the audience very early on in the film finds out the previous caretaker had killed his family and himself in the hotel due to going mental with the lack of people around him for so long. We start to see that the son Danny and his so called power "Shining" get more powerful as the weeks go by, the son rides his trike around the hotel and he starts to see more and more graphic events that had supposedly happened to the other family. Danny see the two girls standing in the hallway with blood on them indicating to the audience that they are dead, the build up with the little boy riding around on his trike becomes greater each time by the way the camera is place at his eye level and just behind him so that the audience can try to feel what he is feeling and this creates a great deal of suspense in the movie.

Jack Torrance finally "Cracks Up" in the film when his wife accuses him of hitting their son and leaving bruises on him, the suspense in my point of view comes from when Wendy looks at what he has been typing throughout the months and finds that he has been typing the same sentence over and over again "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy" this creates suspense from my point of view, because it shows that for a while now that Jack has been going insane in the hotel also when Jack finds Wendy looking at the pieces of paper there is a lot of suspense there because its as if he does not care about why she has a baseball bat in her hand and the way the music bring the suspense into the scene is used very well, that is how a lot of suspense is created in the film "The Shining".