Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining has been referenced in everything from Toy Story to this year’s The Substance. We look at why it’s such a touchstone for storytellers.
The Substance, writer-director Carolie Fergeat’s bloody firehose of feminine rage, is unabashed in its affection for other films, not least the work of David Cronenberg and Stanley Kubrick. The latter director’s 1980 horror The Shining, in particular, was an evident touchstone for Fergeat and her collaborators; with its one-point perspective cinematography and stark sets, the similarities between the design of The Substance and the Overlook Hotel in Kubrick’s film are easy to spot.
Fergeat’s body horror is therefore the latest in a long string of movies, TV shows and videogames that have drawn inspiration from Kubrick’s chiller. The film’s geometric carpet has been referenced and alluded to in so many other works, from Pixar’s Toy Story to Roland Emmerich’s Moonfall, in fact, that its appearance has almost threatened to become a cliche.
The question is: why? Why has The Shining – a film that wasn’t especially well received in 1980 – become so influential? Who do so many other filmmakers and artists draw from it in their own work?
The simple answer, perhaps, is that the sheer level of work, craft and money that went into designing the Overlook simply hadn’t been seen before in a horror movie of its type. Kubrick’s stature in the late 1970s, when he began work on The Shining, was such that he was able to command the kind of budget and resources that would have eluded most other filmmakers before or afterwards.
Thanks to the critical and financial success of such earlier horror movies as Rosemary’s Baby, The Omen and The Exorcist, the genre was also a fashionable genre among respected directors by the end of the 70s, and so it made sense that Kubrick became interested in trying his hand at the genre – particularly given the muted performance of his previous film, period drama Barry Lyndon (1975).
In adapting Stephen King’s novel The Shining, published in 1977, Kubrick and co-writer Diane Johnson pared certain plot details away, but the essentials remain broadly the same in their rendering. Frustrated would-be author Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) takes on a caretaker role at the Overlook Hotel in Colorado, hoping to spend the months of wintry seclusion to finish his manuscript. To the growing horror of Jack’s wife Wendy (Shelley Duvall) and young son Danny (Danny Lloyd), a malevolent force in the hotel has its own agenda.
Like the book, Kubrick’s The Shining is therefore a modern update of the classic haunted house subgenre. What was – and remains – unusual about Kubrick’s movie is how much he and his collaborators put into creating its setting. Although loosely modelled on the Ahwahnee Hotel in Yosemite, the Overlook was a vast, elaborate set built at Elstree Studios in the UK (though some second unit work was shot in the US).
Art director Roy Walker spent several weeks scouting real-world hotels across the United States, details from which ultimately went into his designs for the Overlook. The result is a fascinating patchwork of styles, all of which create the impression of a building that has been remodelled and overhauled repeatedly since its construction in the early 20th century. The 1920s opulence of its ballroom gives way to the Native American stylings of its grand lobby, which in turn are contrasted by the stark, gaudy modernism of its corridors and bedrooms.
The now-iconic geometric carpet, with its interlocking hexagons, was designed by David Hicks, and its pattern ties into the maze motif devised by Kubrick. King’s novel included a sequence where animal-shaped hedges came to life; partly due to technical constraints, Kubrick replaced these with a garden maze. As other writers have already pointed out, the Overlook is itself a maze, with corridors that lead nowhere and what should theoretically be internal walls containing windows with natural light streaming through.
Those spatial anomalies could have been a side effect of Walker and his team of set builders trying to cram as many locations as possible onto their Elstree sound stages, though several critics have suggested the design was intentional. It’s a theory backed up by Jan Harlan, Kubrick’s brother in law and The Shining’s executive producer; “The set was very deliberately built to be offbeat and off the track, so that the huge ballroom would never actually fit inside,” he told The Guardian in 2012. “The audience is deliberately made not to know where they’re going.”
The Overlook’s supernatural quality is contrasted by the stark realism of its lighting. Although shot on a murky soundstage, Kubrick had vast floodlights set up outside the windows which emulated the cold look of winter sun. (Approximately one year into The Shining’s inordinately long shoot, the set caught fire; it’s possible that the heat from these huge lights was the culprit. In the aftermath, Kubrick was photographed in front of the charred debris, grinning.)
Fused with John Alcott’s Steadicam cinematography, The Shining’s production design gave the Overlook real presence. The gliding camera movements and Kubrick’s trademark use of perspective create the impression that the hotel is itself alive – a kind of sentient labyrinth that ensnares and toys with its victims.
Some of The Shining’s most disturbing moments occur in bathrooms, and it’s here that lighting and colour are used to truly powerful effect. There’s Jack’s encounter with the spectral woman in room 237; his fateful conversation with Grady (“You have always been the caretaker…”), and Wendy’s refuge from Jack’s axe in the third act.
In the first of those, the queasy avocado oranges and avocado greens heighten Jack’s ghostly vision. The red walls and pristine white ceiling in the ballroom bathroom point to the bloodshed to come; note how Kubrick frames Jack so that the back wall looks like a crimson sea. It suggests that he’s up to his neck in blood.
When The Shining emerged in 1980, its unconventional approach to horror appeared to work against it. Several high-profile critics reacted with disappointment, while Stephen King was vocally irked by how the film diverged from his book. It took time – and multiple viewings – for The Shining’s full effect, so much of which relies on observing its visual detail, to take hold. By the 2000s, Kubrick’s film had begun to be regarded as a classic – and moreover, the subject of unusually intense scrutiny and theorising by fans and critics.
Rodney Ascher’s 2012 documentary Room 237 provided an insight into the various theories and interpretations surrounding The Shining, though even these only scratch the surface. To this day, YouTube is awash with videos that pick the film apart, with even minor continuity errors – possibly caused by that huge on-set fire in 1979 – sometimes cited as flimsy supporting evidence.
Obsession, it seems, surrounds The Shining – perhaps because it’s a film that was itself made with an obsessive attention to detail. Where most horror movies are made in a matter of weeks, The Shining was shot over the course of a year, its actors subjected to multiple takes and – particularly in poor Shelley Duvall’s case – gruelling treatment. Meanwhile, countless hours were spent on set design and construction, with every bit of carpet, wall hanging, picture and bathroom fixture considered and placed with care.
One of the most-distinctive-looking horror films ever made, it’s perhaps unsurprising that so many other filmmakers have referenced The Shining – either as a simple in-joke left for fellow film fans, or as an attempt to recapture some of its prowling, eerie quality. If you’re a filmmaker looking to turn a location into an extension of your protagonist’s mental state, or even a quasi-sentient villain in its own right, then Kubrick’s film is a logical touchstone.
Then again, The Shining doesn’t exist in a creative bubble. With its unsettling camerawork and dreamlike hotel setting, the film’s antecedent may well have been Alan Resnais’ Last Year In Marienbad in 1961. The tone and style of the two are remarkably similar, as critics have long noted – even if Resnais’ French New Wave film isn’t strictly speaking horror.
As The Substance director Carolie Fergeat so elegantly put it, The Shining’s emergence as a reference point for filmmakers is all part of the ongoing back-and-forth dialogue between generations of artists, whether it’s Pixar animators or Fergeat herself.
“All those movies, filmmakers have seen the work of other filmmakers who’ve digested what they’ve seen and what other filmmakers did,” Fargeat told Letterboxd. “I love the fact that there is some kind of common creativity somewhere that each one redigests in its own way, with its own world and its own theme. I truly believe that we are, in the end, the result of what we watch, what we read, what we’re exposed to, and all of this lives with us… We are growing ourselves, feeding ourselves from all those influences, whether they are conscious or unconscious.”
The Shining, in all likelihood, will continue to burrow into the imaginations of filmmakers and artists for years to come.
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