™ & © WARNER BROS. ENTERTAINMENT INC. (s22). Courtesy of Vivian Kubrick
Produced in collaboration with the Kubrick Estate, this short film explores how the director created the physical space of The Shining.
Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining” is a film with a unique worldview. In short, it may be the most fascinating horror movie of all time…it is do not have scaredThe most fascinating horror movies of all time teeth Psycho is scary because it’s a movie best watched for yourself. Let me be clear: I know that The Shining is widely considered a terrifying movie, but I saw it on its opening day, May 23, 1980. I’ve seen it a dozen times since then, and while the atmosphere and mystery of the movie have only grown for me, and I’ve come to find it uniquely fascinating, I’ve had the same problems I’ve had since my first viewing.
In The Shining, we see a huge metaphysical puzzle from the dark side: a ghost story. The ghosts emerge from the Overlook Hotel and interweave with the madness of Jack Torrance, an aspiring novelist played by Jack Nicholson. He unravels through a writer’s block, anger, the alcohol that causes it, and various things that merge into a psycho-mystical conspiracy, including the ghosts of the Overlook, especially the caretaker. He tries to influence Jack, and Jack essentially becomes him. That’s why at the end we see Jack in an old photo from the 1920s. The movie is about the immortality of murder, very creepy and elusive, in a terrifying and omnipotent way.
But when Jack Torrance’s id is released from its cage, what we see is not elusive. It is the most brutal, explicit, and in-your-face image of murderous violence in the history of cinema. Jack Nicholson swings an axe like a madman, trying to kill his wife and young son. When The Shining came out, we were already in the middle of the slasher movie era. And while I’m not a fan of the “Halloween” or “Friday the 13th” genres like a lot of other people, I think a lot of those movies are actually scarier than The Shining. Nicholson wielding an axe like a mad lumberjack? Sorry, but there’s no mystery there. The Shining is beautifully crafted in its surroundings, but the climax is loaded with (for me) a huge amount of sinister banality.
And yet, that’s why “Shine On” is to me the “Shining” documentary. It’s a rare archival film made in collaboration with the Kubrick Estate, and it’s a click away on YouTube. What you see here isn’t a deep dive into the mysteries of “The Shining”‘s universe, like Rodney Ascher’s heady “Room 237.” Written and directed by Paul King and narrated by Michael Sheen in a voice of dulcet awe, “Shine On” is a featurette dedicated to the physical production of “The Shining,” the film’s sets, some of which still remain in the form of industrial rooms that doubled as filming locations for the film. So “Shine On” is, shell From “The Shining.”
But that shell is what is most unsettling about The Shining. When the documentary mentioned that The Shining was filmed almost entirely at Elstree Studios in Hertfordshire, England, I realized how deeply this cinematic experience had touched my subconscious. And my reptilian brain responded: “What? Wasn’t it filmed at the Stanley Hotel in the Rockies?” (The hotel on which the Overlook was based.) Of course, I knew Kubrick hadn’t left England in decades, and I knew he was good at building elaborate sets that were worlds unto themselves (the spaceships in 2001: A Space Odyssey, the bombed-out city of Hue in Full Metal Jacket; Kubrick used the ruins of a gasworks outside London for the set). But my sense memory told me that the Overlook — with its psychedelic, labyrinthine carpeting, cream walls and ceilings, and cavernous lobby with chandeliers and staircases — was too solid and imposing for a mere set. It took a double look to really sink in that Kubrick had created it all.
“The Shining” makes more dramatic use of ceilings than perhaps any film since “Citizen Kane” (the ultimate way to make a set not look like a set), and the vastness of the Overlook is one of Kubrick’s neatest tricks: considering that the film has only three core characters, its vastness is telling: Unreasonable Build your set this It’s too big to contain its characters and ghost story, and the insanity of Kubrick’s obsessive over-scaling becomes another link in the chain of cinematic insanity.
As Shine On explains, the set took up all of Elstree Studios: an entire soundstage, or the space of six airplane hangars. That’s a lot of space, considering Kubrick took just under a year to shoot The Shining. But it still wasn’t enough space. Most of the original sets are gone, but there are still a few old, stuffy back rooms at Elstree that remain. became Focusing on the sets, particularly the Overlook Hotel’s enormous kitchen and pantry, and a nondescript office that Kubrick filled with real kitchen equipment, utensils, and real cans and boxes of food, Shine On centers around three veterans of The Shining’s cinematography: executive producer Jan Harlan, art director Leslie Tomkins, and Kubrick’s eldest daughter, Katarina Kubrick, whom he invited to work on the set when she was 25. They wander through the old kitchen and mirror parts of it against the film, creating the eerie effect of making everything in The Shining seem ghostly.
I’ve seen it before, but there’s one shot that always amazes me: Kubrick lying on his back on the pantry door, holding the lens and framing Nicholson’s face from the ground, saying, “Well, that’s not bad.” You realize that one of the most iconic film shots of the last half century was something that Kubrick created on the spot, because he somethingWe also see Shelley Duvall panic in the kitchen during filming, a rare sight as this is the actual take that was used in the film. Shine On has evidence and testimony to support the claim that the atmosphere on the set of The Shining was generally harmonious, but you can believe that or you can believe that Duvall sometimes thought she might be having a nervous breakdown.
Though short, “Shine On” joins other Kubrick documentaries such as “Kubrick by Kubrick,” “Stanley Kubrick’s Box” and the fascinating and essential “Filmworkers” as small pieces of the puzzle of who Kubrick was and how he made his films. Perhaps more than any other major cinematic artist, he built They were like giant ships in a bottle. And “The Shining” was the most elaborate of them all. It’s a story about a haunted house, but in Kubrick’s way, the movie itself is a haunted house. The epic scale and concreteness of the sets tell us that the mystery hidden here is as grand as God. It’s invisible, but it’s everywhere. This may be the coolest idea ever planted in a horror movie. If it had been as scary as it was cool, “The Shining” would have been a real masterpiece, not just the ultimate high-end horror antique.
