Haunted Houses, Haunted Minds

Stephen King’s The Shining (1977) is one of the most popular horror novels of all time. It tells the story of a family snowed in at a haunted hotel. The father, Jack Torrance, dreams of literary success and succumbs to the evil ghosts and supernatural forces of the hotel, eventually attacking his own family. This chapter argues that the central conflicts of the novel have their roots in human nature, reflecting evolutionarily recurrent adaptive problems of balancing conflicting evolved motives, most crucially motives for dominance versus motives for prosociality, and of surviving the hostile forces of nature. Moreover, the supernatural elements of the novel resonate with evolved cognitive dispositions for magical thinking and metaphysical dualism. The Shining effectively evokes and explores biologically salient conflicts and fears, offering a compellingly hard-nosed but ultimately optimistic perspective on those conflicts and fears.