It’s been 45 years since The Shining came out, we’ve had countless horror movies since with insanely high kill counts and absolutely shocking imagery, I should be numb to a story where — spoilers for a cinematic classic — only two people die, and one because the doofus couldn’t find his way out of a hedge maze. And yet this movie is frightening in a way that’s really hard to pin down…how did Stanley Kubrick manage to make shots of a hallway creepy? Well, by making those hallways feel not just scary, but more specifically, Uncanny.

These days, “Uncanny” is a concept used most often in discourse about robots and computer animation. The Uncanny Valley, I know you’ve heard of it, or at least you know the feeling it evokes — The abject horror of this kid from The Polar Express, good god, get h

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