In 1966, at 38, Stanley Kubrick told a friend he wanted to make “the world’s scariest movie.” The idea may have stemmed from childhood fears. Kubrick wasn’t particularly brave in his youth. His father, Jacques Leonard Kubrick, was a doctor, and young Stanley grew up terrified of medicine. According to his third wife, Christiane, “by the time he was a teenager, he was very fearful of unreal things, as well as real things.”
A decade later, on July 29, 1976, a manuscript by Stephen King arrived in the mail. It was titled “The Shine.” “What intrigued me is the way the author kept the reader guessing about what would happen next,” Kubrick said in 1980. “It struck an extraordinary balance between the psychological and the supernatural.”
Some of the dialogue was “dumb,” Kubrick said, but certain scenes stood out: the ominous interview, Jack Torrance dropping baby Danny in a flashback, and Torrance’s drunk-driving accident. As Kubrick read, he envisioned Jack Nicholson as Torrance. For Wendy, he would choose Shelley Duvall, who had recently won the best-actress award at Cannes for her role in Three Women. He felt she was “mousy and vulnerable” yet “physically eccentric” enough to match Nicholson.
The production was painstaking. The hotel lobby and maze were meticulously built at Elstree Studios, in the U.K., and were modeled on The Ahwahnee hotel, in Yosemite National Park. Exterior shots were filmed at Oregon’s Timberline Lodge early in the morning, before footprints or vehicle tracks could form in the snow. Kubrick’s use of the Steadicam delivered the hauntingly smooth sequences of Danny pedaling his tricycle through the hotel’s corridors, the endless geometric carpet patterns beneath him.
The movie, ultimately titled The Shining, shattered horror conventions. Most of the film unfolds in broad daylight and moves at a deliberate pace. Understatement made it all the more real … and sinister. Remember “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy”?
Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, a two-volume compendium published by Taschen, compiles the groundbreaking work that went into the making of the movie and includes text by the film historian J. W. Rinzler as well as extensive interviews with the cast and crew, including Duvall and the cinematographer John Alcott. Steven Spielberg wrote the foreword.
“By upending every single law of horror gravity, Stanley is communicating to the audience that this film has a whole new playbook,” Spielberg explains. “The rules we thought we knew, the norms established by all the classic horror films that came before do not apply—and therefore we are not safe.” —Elena Clavarino
Elena Clavarino is the Senior Editor at Air Mail
