SOURCE: “Family Life and Leisure Culture in The Shining,” in Film Criticism, Vol. VII, No. 1, Fall, 1982, pp. 4-13.

In the following essay, Snyder views The Shining as a satire of American middle-class values.

The Essential American is hard, isolated, stoic and a killer.

—D. H. Lawrence¹

A recent variation in the horror movie genre has been a series of films about middle class life in America in which the source of potential hazard is middle class life. Of course, middle class values have been impugned in every period of film (sometimes brutally, as in Alice Adams), but the notion of that life as tantamount to the world of horror has been mushrooming. This tendency suggests a growing sense in Americans that something almost too nebulous to define is gnawing at our vital organs. In film, this network of anxieties is often realized in terms of the troubling insatiateness...