It says something about Stanley Kubrick’s skill as a director that, of all the perfectly framed, perfectly lit, perfectly staged scenes and shots in The Shining, moments that embed themselves like patient little tumors in the soft spots of your brain, maybe the most profoundly fucking creepy thing in the whole film isn’t two twins holding hands, or an elevator filled with blood, or a man in a bear suit caught mid-fellatio, or a woman transforming instantly in a single edit from siren to pile of sloughed-off skin. No, it’s a little boy riding a Big Wheel around the perimeter of a carpeted dining room. That’s it. A boy, his bike, and the unsettling rhythm of his plastic wheels thumping up onto the carpet, and smacking back down on the hardwood. by Bobby Roberts