The Shining

By Stanley Kubrick
 General
• Produced in 1980 in the USA
• Directed by Stanley Kubrick (Full metal Jacket, Dr. Strangelove, A Clockwork Orange)
• Also did screenplay along with Diane Johnson
• Adapted from a novel by Stephen King

• Starring Jack Nicholson, Shelley Duval, Danny Lloyd, Scatman Crothers.

 Plot
• Jack Terrance (Nicholson) Gets job as caretaker for hotel during winter, up in
mountains. Previous caretaker killed family from cabin fever.
• Son is told by hotel cook he has telepathy, “The shining”.
• Son see’s visions of things that happened previously in hotel.
• Jack Terrance is driven mad, Told by ghost of old caretaker to “correct” his family.
Sets out to murder, wife and child, with axe.
• Hotel cook receives visions from son, heads to hotel to investigate, walks inside
and jack kills him.
• Son screams, Jack follows him outside into maze. Son tricks jack and heads out of
maze, jack gets lost in maze and dies from the cold.
• Camera is now on a picture with Jack (same age)at the front labelled 1921. (film
set around 1970) Suggesting some sort of ghostly time warp.
• Sound
– Played at parts, that would be completely normal,
but with music seem freaky.

• Depicting areas concerned with events in the rest of

the film (Maze)(Children’s vision)
• Stanley Kubrick decided that having the hedge animals come alive (as they do in the book) was unworkable
due to restrictions in special effects, so he opted for a hedge maze instead.
• When first released, the film had an alternate ending: after the shot of Jack's body, the film dissolves to a
scene of policemen outside the hotel. It then cuts to a scene in a hospital, where Wendy is resting in a bed
and Danny is playing in a waiting room. Ullman arrives and tells her that they have been unable to locate
her husband's body anywhere on the property. On his way out, Ullman gives Danny a ball - the same one
that mysteriously rolled into a hallway earlier in the film, before Danny was attacked in room 237. Ullman
laughs and walks away and the film dissolves to the move through the corridors towards the photo. Stanley
Kubrick had the scene removed a week after the film was released.
• There were so many changes to the script during shooting that Jack Nicholson claimed he stopped reading
it. He would read only the new pages that were given to him each day.
• Stanley Kubrick, known for his compulsiveness and numerous retakes, got the difficult shot of blood
pouring from the elevators in only three takes. This would be remarkable if it weren't for the fact that the
shot took nine days to set up; every time the doors opened and the blood poured out, Kubrick would say,
"It doesn't look like blood." In the end, the shot took approximately a year to get right.