Gender Hyperbole and the Uncanny in the Horror Film
Gender Hyperbole and the Uncanny in the Horror Film
The Shining
This chapter examines Stanley Kubrick's film, The Shining (1980), based on Stephen King's eponymous novel (1977). Applying the Freudian concept of the “uncanny” to Jack Nicholson's performance the film, it suggests how genre and star performance generate horror in the aporias of cultural gender. Rather than the ambivalence of the fantastic premised on difference, the chapter emphasizes the uncanniness of hyperbole grounded in repetition. Thus, The Shining draws out from Nicholson's self-parodying performance a hyperbolic rendition of masculinity: a doubling that makes the gender norm itself a source of a horror, doubled again through haptic star-audience contact.
Keywords: horror films, The Shining, Jack Nicholson, uncanny, cultural gender, hyperbole, gender
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