Original photo by TCD/Prod.DB/ Alamy Stock Photo
You’d be forgiven for failing to notice some of The Shining’s more intricate details, since there’s a good chance you were covering your eyes with your hands the first time you watched it. Those details really do add to the experience of Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 horror classic, however, including the fact that the color red appears in nearly every shot. Some of these appearances are obvious — that famous scene of blood pouring out of the elevator, the red-walled men’s room where Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) freshens up — but many are quite subtle. Did you ever notice that the darts young Danny (Danny Lloyd) plays with are red, for instance, or that a book placed on a table in the opening scene and the dress Wendy (Shelley Duvall) wears are red as well?
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It's a fibKing was actually “deeply disappointed” with the take on his 1977 novel, despite admiring Kubrick. He told “Playboy” in a 1983 interview that “parts of the film are chilling, charged with a relentlessly claustrophobic terror, but others fell flat.”
According to one analysis, the inclusion of the scarlet hue is meant to be a visual nod to Jack’s deteriorating mental condition as the Overlook Hotel takes hold of him. It’s just one reason The Shining has been the target of so much theorizing on the part of academics and fans alike; there’s even a documentary devoted to unpacking ideas about the film, called Room 237. Some of the theories are more outlandish than others — the idea that Kubrick used The Shining to confess to helping NASA fake the moon landing is pretty out-there — while others are just strange enough to feel at home in the Overlook.
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The famous line “______” from “The Shining” was improvised.
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The famous line “Heeere’s Johnny!” from “The Shining” was improvised.
The interior of the Overlook Hotel doesn’t make any sense.
Stanley Kubrick was perhaps the most meticulous filmmaker of all time, with every detail carefully planned and many scenes requiring dozens of takes to get perfect. So while it might seem like a mistake that the Overlook Hotel’s interior is deeply odd — not everything lines up and aspects of it are spatially impossible — that was as deliberate as everything else about the film. “The interiors don’t make sense,” Jan Harlan, one of the film’s executive producers, said in 2012. “Those huge corridors and ballrooms couldn’t fit inside. In fact, nothing makes sense.” The Overlook Hotel was inspired by the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, Colorado, where Stephen King was staying when the idea came to him. Oregon’s Timberline Lodge was used for the exteriors, and interior scenes were filmed just outside of London at Elstree Studios. Yet the hotel in the film is something else entirely — and exists only as a product of Kubrick’s imagination.
Michael Nordine is a writer and editor living in Denver. A native Angeleno, he has two cats and wishes he had more.
