The Shining is a 1980 psychological horror film[7] produced and directed by Stanley Kubrick and co-written with novelist Diane Johnson. It is based on Stephen King's 1977 novel of the same name and stars Jack Nicholson, Danny Lloyd, Shelley Duvall, and Scatman Crothers. Nicholson plays Jack Torrance, a writer and recovering alcoholic who accepts a new position as the off-season caretaker of the Overlook Hotel. Lloyd plays his young son Danny, who has psychic abilities ("the shining"), which he learns about from head chef Dick Hallorann (Crothers). Danny's imaginary friend Tony warns him the hotel is haunted before a winter storm leaves the family snowbound in the Colorado Rockies. Jack's sanity deteriorates under the influence of the hotel and the residents, and Danny and his mother Wendy (Duvall) face mortal danger.
Production took place almost exclusively at EMI Elstree Studios, with sets based on real locations. Kubrick often worked with a small crew, which allowed him to do many takes, sometimes to the exhaustion of the actors and staff. The new Steadicam mount was used to shoot several scenes, giving the film an innovative and immersive look and feel.
Frequently cited as one of the best horror films of all time, the film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" in 2018.[8] A sequel titled Doctor Sleep based on King's 2013 novel of the same name was adapted to film and released in 2019.
Jack Torrance takes a winter caretaker position at the remote Overlook Hotel in the Colorado Rocky Mountains, which closes every winter season. After his arrival, manager Stuart Ullman advises Jack that a previous caretaker, Charles Grady, killed his wife, two young daughters and himself in the hotel a decade prior.
In Boulder, Jack's son, Danny, has a premonition and seizure. Jack's wife, Wendy, tells the doctor about a past incident when Jack accidentally dislocated Danny's shoulder during a drunken rage. Jack has been sober ever since. Before leaving for the seasonal break, the Overlook's head chef, Dick Hallorann, informs Danny of a telepathic ability the two share, which he calls "shining". Hallorann tells Danny that the hotel also has a "shine", due to residue from unpleasant past events, and warns him to avoid Room 237.
A month passes and Danny starts having frightening visions, including of the murdered Grady twins. Meanwhile, Jack's mental health deteriorates; he suffers from writer's block, is prone to violent outbursts, and has dreams of killing his family. Danny gets lured to room 237 by unseen forces, and Wendy later finds him with signs of physical trauma. Jack investigates and encounters a female ghost in the room but blames Danny for inflicting the bruises on himself. Jack is enticed back to drinking by the ghostly bartender Lloyd. Ghostly figures, including Delbert Grady, then begin appearing in the Gold Room. Grady informs Jack that Danny has telepathically contacted Hallorann for assistance and says that Jack must "correct" his wife and child.
Wendy finds Jack's manuscript written with nothing but countless repetitions of "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy". When Jack threatens her life, Wendy knocks him unconscious with a baseball bat and locks him in the kitchen pantry, but she and Danny cannot leave, due to Jack having previously sabotaged the hotel's two-way radio and snowcat. Back in their hotel room, Danny says "redrum" repeatedly and writes the word in lipstick on the bathroom door. Wendy sees the word in the mirror and realizes that it is actually "murder" spelled backward.
Jack is freed by Grady and goes after Wendy and Danny with an axe. Danny escapes outside through the bathroom window, and Wendy fights Jack off with a knife when he tries to break through the door. Hallorann, having flown back to Colorado from his Florida vacation to respond to Danny's telepathic SOS, reaches the hotel in another snowcat. His arrival distracts Jack, who ambushes and murders him in the lobby, then pursues Danny into the hedge maze. Wendy runs through the hotel looking for Danny, encountering the hotel's ghosts and a vision of cascading blood similar to Danny's premonition.
In the hedge maze, Danny misleads Jack and hides behind a snowdrift while Jack follows a false trail. Danny and Wendy reunite and leave in Hallorann's snowcat, leaving Jack to freeze to death in the maze.
In the European cut, all of the scenes involving Jackson and Burton were removed but the credits remained unchanged. Dennen is on-screen in all versions of the film, albeit to a limited degree (and with no dialogue) in the European cut.
The actresses who played the ghosts of the murdered Grady daughters, Lisa and Louise Burns, are identical twins.[9] The characters in the book and film script are merely sisters, not twins. In the film's dialogue, Ullman says that he thinks that they were "about eight and ten". Nonetheless, they are frequently referred to in discussions about the film as "the Grady twins".
The resemblance in the staging of the Grady girls and the "Twins" photograph by Diane Arbus has been noted by Arbus' biographer, Patricia Bosworth,[10] the Kubrick assistant who cast and coached them, Leon Vitali,[11] and by numerous Kubrick critics.[12][13] Although Kubrick both met Arbus personally and studied photography under her during his time as photographer for Look magazine, Kubrick's widow says he did not deliberately model the Grady girls on Arbus' photograph, in spite of widespread attention to the resemblance.[12]
Before making The Shining, Kubrick directed the film Barry Lyndon (1975), a highly visual period film about an Irishman who attempts to make his way into the British aristocracy. Despite its technical achievements, the film was not a box-office success in the United States and was derided by critics for being too long and too slow. Kubrick, disappointed with Barry Lyndon's lack of success, realized he needed to make a film that would be commercially viable as well as artistically fulfilling. Stephen King was told that Kubrick had his staff bring him stacks of horror books as he planted himself in his office to read them all: "Kubrick's secretary heard the sound of each book hitting the wall as the director flung it into a reject pile after reading the first few pages. Finally, one day the secretary noticed it had been a while since she had heard the thud of another writer's work biting the dust. She walked in to check on her boss and found Kubrick deeply engrossed in reading a copy of the manuscript of The Shining".[14]
Speaking about the theme of the film, Kubrick stated that "there's something inherently wrong with the human personality. There's an evil side to it. One of the things that horror stories can do is to show us the archetypes of the unconscious; we can see the dark side without having to confront it directly".[15]
Nicholson was Kubrick's first choice for the role of Jack Torrance; other actors considered included Robert De Niro (who said the film gave him nightmares for a month),[16] Robin Williams, and Harrison Ford, all of whom met with Stephen King's disapproval.[17] Kris Kristofferson was Kubrick's backup choice if Nicholson had declined.[18] King, for his part, disavowed Nicholson because he thought that, since his part in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, the viewer would tend to consider him an unstable individual from the beginning. For this reason, King preferred Jon Voight, Michael Moriarty, or Martin Sheen for the role, who would more faithfully represent the profile of the ordinary individual who is gradually driven to madness.[19][20] In any case, from the beginning the writer was told that the actor for the lead role "was not negotiable."[21][22]
Although Nicholson initially suggested that Jessica Lange would be a better fit for the role of Wendy,[23] Shelley Duvall knew early that she was the one cast for the role (Nicholson would work with Lange on his next movie, The Postman Always Rings Twice). Wendy's character in the film differs from the novel, appearing less capable and more vulnerable. Throughout filming, Kubrick pushed Duvall, she said, "to get the performance out of me that he wanted".[24]
Slim Pickens was offered the role of Dick Hallorann, and told Kubrick that he would take the role only if his scenes in the film were shot in fewer than 100 takes. Kubrick declined, and Scatman Crothers got the part after he had been suggested by Pickens's agent.[25]
The director's initial candidate to play the Torrances' son was Cary Guffey (Close Encounters of the Third Kind), but the young actor's parents refused, claiming that the film was too gruesome for a child. In his search to find the right actor to play Danny, Kubrick sent a husband-and-wife team, Leon (who portrayed Lord Bullingdon in Barry Lyndon) and Kersti Vitali, to Chicago, Denver, and Cincinnati to create an interview pool of 5,000 boys over a six-month period. These cities were chosen since Kubrick was looking for a boy with an accent that fell between Jack Nicholson's and Shelley Duvall's speech patterns, with Nicholson coming from New Jersey and Duvall from Texas.[26] During the filming, the young actor selected, Danny Lloyd, was protected in a special way by Kubrick; the boy believed at all times that he was shooting a drama, not a horror movie. Following his role in the 1982 film Will: G. Gordon Liddy, Lloyd abandoned his acting career.[27][28]
Having chosen King's novel as a basis for his next project, and after a pre-production phase, Kubrick had sets constructed on soundstages at EMI Elstree Studios in Borehamwood, Hertfordshire, England. Some of the interior designs of the Overlook Hotel set were based on those of the Ahwahnee Hotel in Yosemite National Park. To enable him to shoot the scenes in loose chronological order, he used several stages at EMI Elstree Studios in order to make all sets available during the complete duration of production. The set for the Overlook Hotel was at the time the largest ever built at Elstree, including a life-size re-creation of the exterior of the hotel.[29] In February 1979, the Colorado Lounge set at Elstree was badly damaged in a fire, causing a delay in the production.[30][31][32]
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