[1]

The Shining (1980) is a book-to-film adaptation of Stephen Kings popular book of

the same name, with Stanley Kubrick at the helm as director. This film is
generally thought highly of as it as a great movie of the Thriller genre. However,
Stephen King dislikes the film adaptation of his book as it is essentially an edited
version, portraying more of a psychological horror environment as Kubrick
explains events in a different way (or rather leaves no explanation for many,
leaving it to the viewer to question what they are witnessing).
The film begins with Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) at an interview for a job
which entails him and his family house-sitting a hotel during the winter period.
Before being allowed to accept the job however, he is told a story of past events
in which Delbert Grady (Philip Stone) took the same job and, presumably due to
being locked away in the hotel for a number of months, went mad, resulting in
him killing his wife, two daughters and then himself. This doesnt stop Torrance
from taking the job, stating that his family will love it. After a brief period of
being shown the important aspects of the hotel, the family are suddenly alone
and an eerie silence falls upon the Overlook Hotel. After a month of being cooped
up in the hotel together with a blizzard locking them inside, tensions rapidly rise
as both Jack and his son Danny (Danny Lloyd) hallucinate, believing they are
seeing previous residents of the hotel. Danny frequently comes across the two

girls (Louise Burns and Lisa Burns) who were murdered by their dad, Jack has
conversations with the murderous father himself and both have an encounter
with the decaying mother (Billie Gibson and Lia Beldam). Jacks frequent talks
with Delbert Grady about how he should sort out his family resulting in him going
mad, and then chasing his wife and son around the Overlook Hotel with an axe
in-hand. Cleverly, Danny runs deep into the maze, covering his tracks behind
him, causing Jack to get lost and freeze to death, still with a menacing look on
his face.

[2]
The film never seems to go out of its way to cause discomfort in the viewer, but
manages to all the same as its unhurried pace, extended dialogue scenes and
those sudden, sinister inter-titles ("One Month Later", "4pm") contribute to the
insidious unease (Bradshaw, P. 2012). One of the best examples of this being
when Wendy enters the hall in which Jack is typing. She enters slowly, with a
worried look (although she looks this way for the majority of the film), the music
slowly builds up and the viewers anticipation rises with it, only for it to reach its
climax and suddenly drop back into nothing as the husband and wife have a
relatively normal talk. This happens a number of times throughout the film,
causing the viewer to feel as though they can never be truly comfortable while
watching, never knowing whats coming round the corner. This is enforced by the
sudden loud music that plays whenever there is a jump in the timeline.
Kubrick went above and beyond to make the cast, mainly Jack Nicholson and
Shelley Duvall, feel very uncomfortable during filming in an attempt to get the
most authentic reactions from the actors, with Duvall reputedly forced to do no
less than 127 takes of one scene; Nicholson was force fed endless cheese
sandwiches (which he loathes) to generate a sense of inner revulsion (Nathan, I.
2015). The scene which Duvall was forced to perform at least 127 times was
when she was walking backwards up the stairs, swinging a baseball bat towards
Jack Nicholson and, while it does seem excessive to force an actress to repeat

the same movements and dialogue so many times, it resulted in a scene that
feels very genuine as she tiredly swings the bat back and forth, red-faced with
puffy eyes as the stress of the role resulted in her crying for 12 hours a day
(Chapman, T. 2016).

[3]
While the film as a whole is not especially grounded in reality, there is one aspect
that is more noticeable than many of the others and has been the result of many
fan theories: where is the maze? During the entire film, at different intervals, the
maze seems to change place, size and layout. At the very beginning of the film,
as the car approaches the Overlook Hotel, the front of the hotel is shown with a
car park directly out the front doors and then a steep drop into woodlands.
However, later on, not only is there no car park in sight, the space where it
should be is suddenly replaced by a relatively sizeable hedge maze. And, a short
time later, Jack, frustrated and spending all his writing time in the hotel lobby
throwing a tennis ball against the wall, strolls over to a model of the maze. A
POV shot of Jack's overhead gaze tracks in slowly until you notice that the two
tiny figures of Wendy and Danny are wandering at the centre of the shot
(Henderson, E. 2007). At first this seems fine as the model looks to be a
reasonable size but, when the shot changes to be a birds-eye of the physical
maze itself, it is much more expansive, at least double in length and more than
that in width, with the rest of the maze going off-screen in all directions so who
really knows how big it is. On top of the size difference, many fans of the film
have also noticed that the overall layout of the maze is different, and not even
slightly, as both mazes show very different patterns, twists and turns from one
another. The mazes position and differences could, possibly, be a design flaw
or intentional. If it is intentional, what does it symbolise? What does it reveal in
regards to the story and characters?

[4]

Bibliography
Bradshaw, P. (2012) The Shining Review, The Guardian:
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2012/nov/01/the-shining-review

Chapman, T. (2016) Real Horror of The Shining: The Story of Shelley Duvall,
Movie Pilot:
http://moviepilot.com/posts/3930056

Henderson, E. (2007) The Shining, Slant Magazine:

http://www.slantmagazine.com/film/review/the-shining

Nathan, I. (2015) The Shining Review, Empire:

http://www.empireonline.com/movies/shining-2/review/

Illustration List
[1] Mushtaq, A. (2016), Alternate Movie Poster Tuesday: The Shining,
AllThingsMoviePosters:
https://allthingsmovieposters.wordpress.com/tag/the-shining/

[2] Wiki, Overlook Hotel, Stephen King Wiki:

http://stephenking.wikia.com/wiki/Overlook_Hotel

[3] Barber, M. (2015), The Real-Life Shining Hotel is Getting a Real-Life Hedge
Maze, Curbed:
http://ski.curbed.com/2015/5/27/9956936/the-shining-hedge-maze-stanley-hotel

[4] Savage, A. (2015), My Shining Maze Build Notes, Tested:

http://www.tested.com/art/makers/504037-my-shining-maze-build/