The color red appears in almost every shot of The Shining
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?
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
In 1980, while promoting his film The Shining, Stanley Kubrick gave a rare interpretation of one of his movie endings — in this case the 1921 photo at the end of the film that suggested that Jack Torrance (played by Jack Nicholson) had been part of the Overlook Hotel for decades. “The ballroom photograph at the very end,” Kubrick said, “suggests the reincarnation of Jack.”
This year, Kubrick is experiencing a reincarnation of his own. The enigmatic director is resurfacing on big screens and small:
In November, the film Doctor Sleep, an adaptation of Stephen King’s sequel-novel to The Shining, hits theaters — along with some of Kubrick’s most iconic images from his controversial interpretation of King’s first book.
Kubrick enjoyed a resurgence on the internet this summer, as the Apollo 11 mission celebrated its 50th anniversary and conspiracy theorists resurfaced en masse to suggest that Kubrick staged a fake moon landing and admitted as much in subtle clues from The Shining.
The film Ready Play One — which Indiewire called “Steven Spielberg’s Epic Tribute to Stanley Kubrick” — enjoyed a healthy run on video shelves. The film, which featured detailed Shining scene reenactments, spent two weeks at No. 1 for video sales and collected more than $31 million.
Kubrick, Walt Disney and Stan Lee were inducted this year into Hollywood’s Visual Effects Society Hall of Fame for their “profound impact on the field of visual effects.”
The director acts as the centerpiece for The HollywoodBowles’ latest book, The Last Novel of Jack Torrance. (In a shameless bit of self-promotion, the ghosts of the Overlook gave the book an enthusiastic severed-thumbs-up.)
Of all the reincarnations, Sleep has to be the most intriguing. While the studio and author have said that Sleep is a faithful adaption of King’s book, the movie clearly borrows from Kubrick’s masterpiece (which King famously hated, and produced a TV miniseries in response). Speaking to reporters earlier this summer, director Mike Flanagan explained the tightrope act of blending two classics, along with his nerves about bringing up the film to King.
“When it came to trying to crack the adaptation, I went back to the book first,” said Flanagan, who previously directed the well-received King adaptation Gerald’s Game. “The big conversation that we had to have was about whether or not we could still do a faithful adaptation of the novel as King had laid it out while inhabiting the universe that Kubrick had created. And that was a conversation that we had to have with Stephen King, to kick the whole thing off, and if that conversation hadn’t gone the way it went, we wouldn’t have done the film.
“Stephen King’s opinions about the Kubrick adaptation are famous, and complicated, and complicated to the point where, if you’ve read (Doctor Sleep), you know that he actively and intentionally ignored everything that Kubrick had changed about his novel, and kind of defiantly said, ‘Nope, this completely exists outside the Kubrick universe.’” Flanagan said. “We really needed to try to bring those worlds back together again. We had to go to King and explain how… and in particular how to get into the vision of the Overlook that Kubrick had created. And our pitches to Stephen went over surprisingly well, and we came out of the conversation with not only his blessing to do what we ended up doing, but his encouragement.”
But it came with an emotional cost, the director explained. “This project has had for me the two most nerve-wracking moments of my entire career,” Flanagan said. “The first was sending the first draft of the script to Stephen King, and that was utterly terrifying, but he thankfully really loved it. And the second was at the end, very recently, of this post-production process, when the film was sent to Stephen to watch and also to the Kubrick estate. Both went very well, and that was always the hope going in, was that if there was some universe in which Stephen King and the Stanley estate could both love this movie, that is the dream. Threading that needle has been the source of every ulcer we’ve had for the last two years.”
Set 40 years after the events of The Shining, Doctor Sleep stars Ewan McGregor as the grown-up Danny Torrance who encounters a teenager named Abra (Kyliegh Curran) with her own powerful extrasensory gift, known as the “shine.” Rebecca Ferguson plays Rose the Hat, the leader of a group called The True Knot, who feed off the shine of innocents in their quest for immortality. The film opens Nov. 8.
And don’t forget about the book! Operators are standing by, and supplies are limited: As of deadline, there were only a gazillion copies remaining!
I’ve never been one for conspiracy theories. But I think I’ve stumbled upon one.
Steven Spielberg was Stanley Kubrick’s prized protege. They talked often, visited each other’s sets, even teamed up to make the underrated film, A.I. Spielberg has always been an immense talent, but let’s face it: Having Stan the Man as your corner cut man is like a writer having Salinger as a writing tutor. If you don’t take advantage of the teachings, you don’t deserve school.
I’ve been doing an inordinate amount of research into Sir Kubrick of late, and discovered a little YouTube nugget of an interview with Spielberg. In it, he sheepishly admitted he did not care for The Shining when he first saw it, and (very) reluctantly told Stanley as much when Kubrick asked his impressions. Only after watching the Jack Nicholson movie a few times, Spielberg spilled in the clip, did he recognize the movie’s genius and, more importantly, its subterfuge.
The Shining, an adaptation of a Stephen King horror movie, is not the haunted house flick audiences (and King) were expecting. I remember Dad’s disappointment when we left the theater. More than 46% of the nation’s critics at the biggest papers in the country gave it a thumbs-down.
Over time, though, its reputation has risen like a zombie with the munchies. Instead of a haunted house story, critics and historians posthumously realized, The Shining is a haunted human story, touching on domestic abuse, alcoholism, even the genocide of the American Indian. The American Film Institute recently named it one of the 30 most thrilling movies in the past century. The AFI also named Jack Nicholson’s Jack Torrance among the top 25 cinematic villains of all-time. What the AFI failed to note is that Poltergeist, the Disney-fied horror film ostensibly made for kids and families, was secretly a dark homage to Stanley from Spielberg, who wrote and produced the movie.
Try it as I accidentally did: Play The Shining theme over any three minutes of Poltergeist, and you’ll see that the whimsical score and sitcom lighting were simply a ploy to get it a PG rating. But when played with a traditional horror score, the movie feels entirely different — and the images are sheer Kubrickian. Here’s a sample. At 1:20, you’ll swear Stanley rose from the dead for the editing booth:
Now for something less theoretical, FactSlaps:
Chinese princess Xin Zhui’s body, who died in 163 BCE, is so well preserved that her skin is still soft her arms and legs can bend, and her internal organs are still intact.
Camels gave humans the common cold.
Science knows more about coffee, wine and tomatoes than it does about breast milk.
Hugh Jackman was a party clown before being famous.
More people watch online video game play than major cable networks and subscription entertainment services.
The Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest structure, stands 2,716 feet tall. It has 24,000 windows, contains 393,000 cubic yards of concrete and took 22 million man hours to build.
World renowned cellist Yo Yo Ma once left his 266 year old cello, worth $2.5 million, in the back of a NYC taxi. It was returned to him in time for his evening concert.
