Amman — The 19 years separating The Shining from The Blair Witch Project represent more than a period in horror cinema history; they reveal profound changes in how fear is constructed on screen. In The Shining, Stanley Kubrick builds horror with strict geometric precision, turning hotel corridors into a suffocating psychological maze.
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In Night of the Living Dead, the house becomes a fragile refuge under siege by the dead, while fear exposes the vulnerability of human relationships as much as it reveals the threat posed by monsters. Meanwhile, Bram Stoker’s Dracula evokes a Gothic world in which desire and death intertwine, with shadows, colours and set design becoming part of the language of seduction and terror. By the time of The Blair Witch Project, fear abandons elaborate decoration and carefully controlled construction, appearing instead to emerge by chance from a shaky handheld camera in a forest that refuses to reveal its secrets.
The four films differ in their visual and sound techniques, yet they converge on one question: How can cinema make us afraid of what we see and of what the image cannot show?
These approaches come together in four films selected by the Royal Film Commission Jordan for its programme “Horror Movie Nights (1980–1999)”, which begins this evening and runs until Wednesday, with screenings at 7 p.m. at Rainbow Theatre in First Circle, Jabal Amman. Admission is free.
The films raise a cinematic question that goes beyond the presence of monsters and blood: How can a director turn a familiar place into a source of threat? And how can light, which is supposed to reveal the truth, become a tool for creating anxiety, while shadows give the imagination a power that extends beyond what appears on screen?
Horror cinema: When the image itself becomes frightening
Horror cinema relies on more than frightening surprises. It builds tension that makes viewers fear what might happen before it does. This is achieved through the arrangement of elements within the frame, the relationship between characters and their surroundings, camera movement, lighting, editing and sound design.
Setting is one of horror’s most powerful elements. Confined spaces can create a sense of suffocation, but vast spaces can be equally terrifying when people lose their bearings or struggle to understand their surroundings. Darkness, too, does more than conceal a monster; it gives viewers’ imaginations room to create their own threats.
Light does not necessarily represent safety. Bright lighting can expose the vulnerability of characters, while dim lighting can make familiar objects appear strange. Through the relationship between what is visible and what remains hidden, different forms of horror emerge, ranging from psychological horror and survival horror to Gothic horror and found-footage films.
The Shining (1980): The hotel that frightens you in broad daylight
In The Shining, adapted from Stephen King’s novel, writer Jack Torrance arrives with his wife and son at the isolated Overlook Hotel during winter. His psychological crisis begins to intertwine with the hotel’s mysterious history and supernatural occurrences.
Stanley Kubrick’s distinctive approach begins with his rejection of the traditional image of a haunted place. The corridors are wide, the halls luxurious and the lighting remarkably clear. Yet viewers feel no sense of security. On the contrary, the open spaces become a psychological maze, with their vastness reinforcing human isolation and helplessness.
Kubrick uses symmetrical compositions and frontal shots with deep perspective, making the hotel appear excessively orderly, as though its architecture conceals a mysterious system beyond the characters’ understanding. The camera, mounted on a system that allows it to glide smoothly behind young Danny as he moves through the corridors, seems like an invisible eye watching him.
Sound also plays a decisive role. The alternation between the rattle of Danny’s tricycle wheels on hard floors and their silence on carpet creates a tense rhythm without requiring any immediate danger to appear. Experimental music and silence work together to generate fear through anticipation.
The film’s strength lies in transforming psychological breakdown and domestic violence into a spatial experience. However, Kubrick’s visual detachment and deliberate emotional distance from the characters may limit viewers’ ability to empathise with them. This is existential horror that comes not from darkness, but from the feeling that the place knows more about its inhabitants than they know about themselves.
Night of the Living Dead (1990): The house as a machine of entrapment
In Night of the Living Dead, Tom Savini remakes George Romero’s 1968 film, following a group of strangers who barricade themselves inside a rural house to escape corpses that have returned to life. But the real threat is not limited to the dead surrounding the house; disagreements among the survivors become another danger to their chances of survival.
Unlike the vast spaces in Kubrick’s work, Savini builds horror by narrowing the room available for movement. Doors, windows and staircases are not merely set pieces; they are defensive boundaries that gradually deteriorate. Every attempt to seal an entrance or reinforce a barrier underscores how fragile the house’s protection really is.
Realistic lighting supports this approach. Light from the lamps inside the rooms makes the events feel like a tangible siege, without relying excessively on expressive shadows. Shots that bring characters together in confined spaces heighten the sense of escalating conflict, while the editing links the external threat to the divisions within the group.
Savini draws on his experience with makeup and practical effects to give the dead decaying bodies that make the threat physically immediate. At the same time, Barbara is given a more active role than in the original film, reflecting changes in the portrayal of women in horror cinema.
Although the film is less daring in its reinvention of the genre than Romero’s original, it succeeds in turning the house into a laboratory for the collapse of human solidarity. The fear lies not only in the possibility of the dead breaking through the walls, but also in the living’s inability to agree before those walls fall.
Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992): When the shadow separates from its owner
In Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Francis Ford Coppola offers a Gothic interpretation of Bram Stoker’s novel, in which the vampire travels from Transylvania to England, driven by memories of love and loss and a desire for immortality. The monster’s story merges with an emotional tragedy, bringing horror into close contact with sensual attraction.
Coppola does not pursue realism. Instead, he deliberately constructs an ornate visual world. Towering castles, lavish rooms, heavy curtains and rich, deep colours combine to make the Gothic setting an extension of the characters’ desires and fears.
Shadow becomes an independent narrative element, particularly when Dracula’s shadow moves in ways that do not correspond to the movements of his body. Lighting thus moves beyond its traditional function, becoming a means of portraying evil as a force that transcends the physical limits of the creature.
Cinematographer Michael Ballhaus relies on sharp contrasts between light and darkness, using illumination that evokes torches and flames. Coppola also revives old cinematic trick techniques, giving the images a theatrical, dreamlike quality. Eiko Ishioka’s costumes and the makeup help shape the characters’ identities and transformations rather than merely decorate the scenes.
This visual excess, however, is both a strength and a weakness: the lavish imagery sometimes threatens to overshadow the dramatic structure. Nevertheless, the film remains an example of Gothic horror’s ability to unite beauty and grotesqueness, seduction and menace, making the monster as captivating as it is frightening.
The Blair Witch Project (1999): The forest that becomes a prison
In The Blair Witch Project, three students venture into the forests of Maryland to make a documentary about a local legend. They lose their way as mysterious events begin to unfold around them. Directors Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez tell the story through recordings that appear to have been found after the filmmakers disappeared.
Here, the traditional relationship between camera and setting is reversed. The forest is open and seemingly limitless, yet it becomes a psychological prison as the trees begin to look alike and the characters lose their sense of direction. The more the space expands, the less control the characters feel they have.
The directors abandon polished cinematic lighting and rely on the limited light sources carried by the characters. In night scenes, the camera reveals only small fragments of the surroundings, while darkness swallows the rest of the image.
The shaky camera becomes part of the psychological experience. Viewers know no more than the people filming and cannot always distinguish between genuine danger and the panic generated by their own imaginations. Sounds coming from off-screen, branches scraping against one another and distant screams become more powerful than the monster’s actual appearance.
The film’s boldness lies in treating limited information and visual austerity as artistic tools rather than production shortcomings. Nevertheless, its improvisational style, repetition and shaky footage can make the experience exhausting for viewers accustomed to conventional narrative pacing.
This is fear of the unknown in its most abstract form: the monster does not need to appear, because what we cannot see may be more terrifying than anything the image can show.
From controlled lighting to a panicked image
The four films reveal the diversity of visual horror techniques during the final two decades of the 20th century. Kubrick controls the geometry of space to create fear through excessive order. Savini turns the house into a fragile fortress that exposes the collapse of collective solidarity. Coppola uses shadows and colours as a language of seduction and brutality. Myrick and Sánchez, meanwhile, abandon polished imagery and give disorientation itself a directorial function.
These are not successive stages in which one approach replaces another, but different responses to the same question: How does cinema make viewers fear what they see or what it cannot show?
Perhaps the answer is that the most effective settings for horror are not necessarily the darkest or most confined. A brightly lit hotel can become a maze, an occupied house a trap, a lavish castle a home to desire and death, and an open forest a prison without walls. Ultimately, true horror begins when a familiar place loses its meaning and the image itself becomes something to doubt.
Resource: Al-Ghad. Reporting: Isra Al-Radaideh
