the original the shining trailer, which totally gives away the most pivotal scene of the film. oh, and it’s not at all opposite day. (wink wink)

“part one?” you inquire aghastedly. the shining is a work that cannot be captured in one measly snippet of a blog entry, so this week will be a bloody feast of the most shining shining moments (that are on youtube).

let us begin with the original trailer — the way people were first introduced to this brain-fuck of a film. you can see clearly that it immediately taps into the most basic fears of humanity: the fear of weird music (bartokaphobia), the fear of slowly scrolling titles (jorj-lewkasaphobia), and most importantly, the ever-present fear of massive quantities of blood spilling in slow motion out of a 1970s-style orange elevator (wutdafuck?!aphobia).

so the people knew, immediately after witnessing the trailer, that an amazing mountain of horror was soon to drop onto their laps and say “boo” while carving into their intestines with a dull fork. the world was going to change. soon these poor innocents would be living on an earth where jack nicholsons could go from slightly crazy to ballistically crazy in only a brief one hundred and nineteen minutes, where a shelley duvall could act as if she were human instead of being the brain-craving animated corpse that she actually is in reality, where a scatman crothers could live in a blissful wonderland of naked afro’d chicks and still be an almost entirely futile character (come on! he takes the whole goddamn movie to get back to the overlook and then immediately he’s axed in the back?).

truly, nothing would be the same. the year was 1980, and the future was upon us.