Stanley Kubrick's only foray into the horror genre was met with a curiously muted response when it was released in 1980. Its slow pace left many viewers cold, as did the nudge-wink craziness of Jack Nicholson as the author who agrees to take care of an isolated hotel – and later, in the worst possible sense, of his own family – during a long Colorado winter. But the film's power, like that of its setting, seems to have grown on audiences over the years, and three decades on it still exerts a fearsome grip.

It's all in the build-up: Kubrick sets the scene for the horror with meticulous care. By the time things start to go wrong, we feel dreadfully intimate with the sprawling Overlook hotel and the menace hidden along its carpeted corridors and in its luridly coloured bedrooms and bathrooms.

This version, newly transferred to digital and screening for the first time in UK cinemas (though we've seen it before on TV), is the extended US cut, longer by 24 minutes. More is shown of the Torrance family's life prior to their arrival, and not all of it is necessary (Kubrick himself apparently favoured the shorter version). One early scene makes explicit what Nicholson's character only hints at later on, when he tells the hotel barman Lloyd that he did once hurt his son but it was an accident, completely unintentional, could've happened to anybody. Past transgressions don't need to be spelled out to clarify that Jack is not a model parent. But the longer running time does increase the sense, both terrible and exhilarating, of being trapped in Kubrick's magnificent, malevolent nightmare, never to escape.