4 Reasons Why The Shining Is A Christmas Movie

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4 Reasons Why The Shining Is A Christmas Movie

While director Stanley Kubrick’s Stephen King adaptation The Shining is widely recognized as a horror classic, it is rarely seen for its secondary genre — The Shining is a Christmas movie.

While The Shining is a lot darker and scarier than most festive offerings, as a story of a family forced to work together to survive a harsh winter, it is ideal Christmas viewing. 

This may or may not be intentional on the part of the writer and director Stanley Kubrick, but The Shining nevertheless shares a lot of the elements that make holiday movies so beloved and, as such, can be added to the pantheon of classic Christmas horrors.

Christmas means something different to everyone, which is why movies like Die Hard and Black Christmas get thrown into wild debates over whether they can be considered holiday fare based on their content. 

The Shining falls into the same category, and like Die Hard, there are some clear indicators that show The Shining is a Christmas movie. 

Details like the setting, the costuming, and even the overall narrative hint that it's a holiday film, meant to be watched with the likes of A Christmas Story and Elf all the same. 

Here's every bit of proof to close the debate on whether The Shining is a Christmas movie:

1) The Shining’s Snowy Winter Setting
Not only does the Overlook spend the entirety of The Shining blanketed in snow, but the only reason Jack gets a job there is because the haunted hotel needs a winter caretaker.

2) The Shining Is A Family Story
When King saw Kubrick’s movie, he was famously annoyed by the changes made to his novel The Shining, and the alterations in Kubrick’s version of the story serve to make the movie more of a dark spin on standard festive film tropes.

3) The Costume Design Is Christmassy
The Shining takes place over the Christmas holidays in the dead of winter, meaning there are a lot of Christmas sweaters in the film. It probably wasn't intentional on Stanley Kubrick's part, but the wardrobe in The Shining definitely adds to the theory that the horror flick is a holiday film.

4) Huge family row ending with someone putting an axe through the door.
The thrust of The Shining’s plot, stuck with his family in freezing winter, a put-upon dad struggles to keep it together, is a standard Christmas movie setup. The Shining acts as a subversion of traditional Christmas movies and, as a result, can be listed alongside the many other classic Christmas horror movies as a festive scare-fest. 

Be it a Christmas film or not, the Shinning is a Masterpiece of a film.

Very important safety notice:
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