I just wanna see if I got this straight, so correct me if I'm wrong. Ok, so we have this family comming into this huge hotel to take care of it while it's shut down during winter. The father is a failed writer. The kid has ESP (Extra Sensorial Perception, mind powers such as telepathy, clairvoyance, telechinesis and so on...) and so does the black guy. Along the movie, I began questioning wether perhaps the father also has ESP. Let's take his side of the story. He come to the hotel to finally do some writting away from the distractions of the city. He hears what happened to the last family who took the job. For the following days, he finds himself still uninspired to write. The days go by and still not one page... As if that wasn't enought, the wife starts bitching about their son, about being lonely, about everything. That stress, plus his fear of being in that ghostly hotel all by himself gets him into seing things, imagining characters (like my Marcus...). Among them, the murderous father of the former family. As the days progress, still no inspiration. Frustration builds up and he begins seeing more of that guy. The buttler. He starts to identify with him. All the while, the kid starts getting all sorts of weird impressions about the place and about what he heard. So both of them have all this energy in them. My guess is, by the time the buttles convinces the father to butcher his own family, all that energy starts materializing things and making things happen. Like when the buttler opens the door for the father, freeing him. Or all the other things that the mother sees in the end of the movie. Even that last photograph, where it's clear that the father has come to such a level of identification, that he believes he is the buttler.
Got any other views on this?
By the way, Kubrick's photography and sript are excellent! I hear they trashed the movie on this new version that came out recently... I don't even feel like watching.
By the way, I just had to do this:
All work and no play make Pan a dull boy.
All work and no play make Pan a dull boy.
All work and no play make Pan a dull boy.
All work and no play make Pan a dull boy.
All work and no play make Pan a dull boy.
All work and no play make Pan a dull boy.