Five Things
You Probably Didn't Notice
in
The Shining

by Michael Dare

When Stephen King saw the film version of Carrie, he couldn’t help but notice that the single most terrifying moment - the one that made all audiences jump - wasn’t even in his book. After Carrie’s death and the climactic destruction of the high school, director Brian DePalma added a little epilogue where one of Carrie’s chums visits her grave. Just as she bends down to place some roses, a hand comes shooting out of the gravel and grabs her arm. A second later she wakes up in bed, screaming. The epilogue was a nightmare. The end.

A cheap shot? Yep. Effective? You bet, and a perfect example of the Ultimate Scare Tactic in film: build an atmosphere of tension, release it, and just as the audience gets relaxed and is sure that nothing else is going to happen, hit them with the real punchline. Close Encounters of the Third Kind, The Omen, Alien, Deliverance, and Jaws are but a few of the films that exploit this technique, and they’re all worth studying. It works so well that Stephen King has incorporated the Ultimate Scare Tactic into his novel writing. It’s in The Shining, one of the most frightening books ever written, and a perfect property for film, that he first succeeded in brilliantly combining cinematic and novelistic scare tactics. Any director could have shot it exactly as written and come up with a terrifying film of phantasmagorical proportions.

Of course Stanley Kubrick is not just any director, and The Shining might appear to be his most ambiguous work. By asking more questions than it answers, the film entices you into its world just as the Overlook Hotel lures Jack Torrence into its maze. Alien makes less sense the more you think about it, but the closer you look at The Shining, the more the pieces fit, the more hidden meanings reveal themselves.

Most horror films aren’t very suspenseful on second viewing; you know where all the surprises are. But in refusing to rely on any of the cinematic shock effects currently in vogue, Kubrick has made a film that gets more frightening every time you see it. This, combined with the fact that he twisted King’s sardonic tale of possession into a comment on American television, makes The Shining a perfect home video horror show.

Take the scene where Wendy Torrence (Shelley Duvall) is crouching in the corner of the bathroom as an ax comes crashing through the door. Any filmmaker on earth could have guaranteed a scream from the audience with that scene by using the old Ultimate Scare Tactic: Build the suspense until Wendy finds sanctuary in the bathroom; have her relax a moment till both she and the audience feel safe; then suddenly, without warning, have an ax come crashing through the door. Surprise! Everybody jumps. Big deal.

But Kubrick is not after any cheap rush of adrenaline. In his version, we see Jack Torrence outside with the ax. He takes a mighty swing. Cut to the inside of the bathroom where the ax comes crashing through the door. Wendy screams, but the audience doesn’t because they knew it was coming.

In this same way, Kubrick deliberately undermines all the most frightening moments in the book. He’s still trying to scare you, but not the way it’s usually done. Jack Torrence is trying to kill his wife with an ax. Isn’t that frightening enough? Isn’t violence terrifying all by itself? Kubrick feels no need to cheat you by not showing what’s on the other side of the door.

To Kubrick, Ozzie and Harriet is the ultimate snow job, and a man, woman and child trapped alone together is the most horrifying prospect imaginable. Since no one was expecting The Shining to be, among other things, an incisive commentary on the effects of television on the nuclear family, most viewers who saw it in theaters were disappointed. Kubrick seemed to deliberately change things from the book for no other reason than to irritate Stephen King fans. He also inserted images like the blood in the elevator or the final picture on the wall. If you search the book looking for an explanation, you won’t find one.

The Shining is chock full of details you couldn’t possibly notice on first viewing, things that might appear to be mistakes. So once again, here’s a film that’s much better examined closely at home. Rent it or buy it, and watch for the following items you probably didn’t notice the first time through.

1. During Jack’s opening drive up to the Overlook, there’s the slight sound on the soundtrack of Danny’s tricycle going over the floor of the Hotel.

2. During the second drive to the Overlook, Jack, Wendy, and Danny Torrence get into a discussion about the Donner Party. Wendy tries to protect her child from hearing this sordid tale of cannibalism, but Danny says he already heard about it on TV. Jack finds this amusing and says "See, it’s all right. He heard about it on the TV." Later, Wendy clubs Jack over the head with a baseball bat and drags him into a storeroom. He finds himself locked in a room full of nothing but nationally advertised products. When he escapes, he speaks in lines out of television. ("Honey, I’m home!" and "Here’s Johnny.") He’s on a murderous rampage, but it’s all right - you’ve heard it all on TV.


3. Every time Jack talks to certain characters, he’s actually talking to himself. This is most apparent in the scene with the waiter in the bathroom, where he never looks at the waiter. Look closely at the above picture and you’ll see that he is actually staring at himself in the mirror throughout the entire scene. There’s also a mirror behind the bartender, behind the lady in room 237, and on Jack’s side of the door in the storeroom. Be on the lookout for characters who always have windows behind them and tell me what it means.


4. In one scene, Jack notices his wife trying to read over his shoulder while he’s typing. He tears the sheet from the typewriter and throws it on the floor. When Wendy leaves and Jack turns around to begin typing again, there’s a fresh sheet of paper in the typewriter. Kubrick doesn’t make mistakes like that. The Overlook is actually feeding Jack paper.


5. Danny sees bodies of two dead girls at the end of a hallway. We assume it’s a flashback to the twins killed by the waiter. But if Jack has always been the caretaker, as several scenes suggest, we know who really killed them.

UPDATE

Whatever happened to Danny Lloyd,
who played Danny Torrance in The Shining?
He never acted again.
Here's what he looks like now.

(Copyrighted photo courtesy of Chappy Taylor and Danny Lloyd )

Lisa & Louise Burns (the twin Grady Girls)
Taken from VH1's Where Are They Now: Horror Stars.
(Photo courtesy of Chappy Taylor)

Stephen King Remembers Stanley Kubrick

Now that I'm actually LIVING a desert version of The Shining, trapped in a house up a dirt road far from the nearest town, I've come to a new understanding of the film. Watching The Shining out here with my kids is an experience I can only compare to what it would be like to watch 2001: A Space Odyssey from a theater in space.

There was a time when I was paid to think about movies. It was such a pleasure to discover a film that was actually worth thinking about, a film with layers within layers, a film that kept revealing new ideas every time you saw it. The fact that you hear the tricycle during the opening drive up to the Overlook might be my favorite cinematic moment of all time. Man, did that take balls. Something that can't possibly make sense till the second time you see it.

A lot of people have written me about the supposed mistakes in The Shining, like the shadow of the helicopter in the opening or the moving wood in the broken door near the end. All I can say is...Mistakes? You think Stanley Kubrick made mistakes? I think of mistakes as things that are unintentional, where you notice something the director didn't. You think you noticed something in The Shining that Stanley Kubrick himself didn't notice? He had 100s of takes of every single shot and spent more than a year in the editing booth working on them. Why would he leave in mistakes, especially mistakes so easily fixed?

The beauty of a Kubrick film is that you can't blame anyone else. If the wood moves, it's because he decided he wanted it that way. Can you possibly conceive of it as an accident? Do you think Stanley Fucking Kubrick didn't notice that the wood moved? Everything in the film is on purpose. There are no "mistakes."

Why is there a guy in a bear suit on his knees in front of a party guest? What, you've never gotten oral sex from a bear? Don't knock it till you've tried it. As you can see, the man is obviously George Bush, so the man in the mask must be Al Gore.

Why is Jack's picture on the wall in the end? Why is blood is coming out of the elevator? Why is that fetus floating in space at the end of 2001? Why do all the taxi cabs in Eyes Wide Shut have the same license plate?

Same answer to all these questions. They're not real. They're metaphors.

Metaphors in writing can be easier to accept than those in film. When a writer says "She flitted down the street like a butterfly sampling every flower along the way," we accept that she isn't LITERALLY smelling flowers, its a description of her behavior. What she's ACTUALLY doing is talking to friends along the way. We know it's a simile because the word "like" is there, telling us we're going to hear something similar to what happened, not what actually happened. Leave out the "like" and you've got yourself a metaphor. When Romeo says "Juliet is the sun," we are meant to understand that LIKE the sun, a) Juliet lights up a room, or b) she's a giant flaming gasbag. Whether Romeo meant a) or b) is entirely up to you. That's what makes it a metaphor. It's open to interpretation. It means, no more or no less, than what you think it means.

2001: A Space Odyssey ends with one of the greatest metaphors in the history of film. A bunch of celestial bodies align and suddenly there's this fetus floating in space looking down upon the earth. Nobody thinks that's what actually happened. A pregnant woman wasn't floating by in a space ship and her baby wasn't flung into space. It was a metaphor for rebirth. Something is getting born again. Is it an alien? Is it Dave? Or has HAL evolved into a space deity? Is it the past? The present? The future? That's what makes it great. The more possible explanations, the better the metaphor, and the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey could mean just about anything.

Same with the picture on the wall at the end of The Shining. It means what you think it means. It's not literal. There is not ACTUALLY a picture of Jack on the wall. Nobody walking through the Overlook could see it. Only you can see it because Stanley Kubrick is delivering a metaphor. That's what he's best at.

The Shining also starts with a metaphor. You see a car going up a windy mountain road while on the soundtrack you hear eerie music and the sound of Danny's toy car going around the floor of the Overlook. Metaphor. Not really happening unless a) time is warped and people can hear things that haven't happened yet or b) the whole world's a maze, like the hallways of the Overlook, like the hedge maze outside, the only way out is the way you got in. How did Jack get in? If Jack has always been the caretaker, the photo would be one way to show it metaphorically. Add it to the fact that he's also frozen in a maze and what do you get? What does it mean? Whatever you want it to mean. That's what makes it great. Isn't it nice there was once a filmmaker who asked more questions than he gave answers?

Here's an explanation for everything in the film you think is a mistake. Maybe the film itself has a case of "the Shining," where time is out of wack and things are revealed before they happen.

Reworking of The Shining trailer as a family film. (hilarious)

For a complete guide to where everything in The Shining was shot,
go here.

The official site of The Timberline Lodge where exteriors for The Shining were shot.

Stephen King wrote much of The Shining at The Stanley Hotel, and he based the Overlook on it, but don't expect the official site to mention that the hotel is haunted.

For an amazingly thorough FAQ about the making of the film,
go here.

A fascinating interview with Gordon Stainforth, one of the editors of The Shining.

Watch this spectacular movie, featuring a digitized Overlook, and try to figure out what it's an ad for before it ends.

You think The Shining is open to interpretation? Check out this explanation of Eyes Wide Shut. Hoo boy.

This explanation of Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, done in the style of the original film, is thought provoking, insightful, and just plain trippy.

Download the original trailer.

I'm afraid I'm going to have to insist that you look at
The Shining in 30 Seconds Enacted by Bunnies

How can you live without a Shining Cuckoo Clock?

For the Record

The Shining is in the 2005 Edition of the Guinness Book of World Records for "The most retakes for one scene with dialogue." Apparently Stanley Kubrick asked Shelly Duvall for 127 retakes of the scene on the stairs. No wonder she was hysterical.

Taking It a Step Too Far

A portrait of Jack Nicholson is tattooed on someone's arm
during the 14th Tattoo Convention in Berlin November 27, 2004.

Emoticon Theater Version of The Shining

Stanley Kubrick Bloopers

All the Other Things That Nobody Has Noticed in The Shining      Most horror movies make liberal use of oblique visual composition with crazy camera angles, particularly during climactic or violent scenes. We're well trained to interpret such compositions as unstable and turbulent--perfect for expecting something scary. But Kubrick turns the tradition on its head by showing us disturbing and sometimes violent scenes inside of extremely stable visual compositions. The composition is almost always highly symmetrical, level, and often with aesthetically-pleasing proportions. The viewer expects stability, predictability and safety from such visual queues, which makes the disturbing scenes that much more disturbing--nothing looks right to the viewer, as though what's happening shouldn't be happening where it is. The horror looks literally out of place.      The more clichéd approach is the establishing shot of the cozy suburban house, filled with a happy, nuclear family (TV movies love this setup), but Kubrick's method is far more subtle and devious, so that it's hard to identify initially why certain shots are so unsettling. Regards, Aaron Hathaway HI, I've got one for you, tell me if you've picked it up before. In the gold ballroom right before Grady bumps into Jack a women, in a gold dress mind you, walks into Grady's path which cause him to spill drinks on Jack. What's important is not the fact that it seems that Grady delibGrady walks into Jack but the bloody hand print on the womens bottom. could it be that she was there to make sure Grady walked into Jack, could the blood be a reminder of the dead woman in the bathtub? How should i know. Another something to look for is the number 21 or it's mirror 12. 1921, the year of the picture. most of the names have 12 letters, except for Danny and Wendy who aren't controled by the hotel, the song midnight, the last two scene titles 8am and 4pm 8+4=12, and let's not leave out room 237 2+3+7=...12! Pretty neat, huh? i think there's others i just don't remember off hand, it's late. Well, i hape i've brought up things that you may not have noticed, if not i'm sorry to waist your time.  controlledI'veI've fantastic website..the hotel was built on an american indian burial ground and rugs or draperies of some sort they made are from hanging on some of the walls (the guy giving him a tour tells them) later when Jack is bored he is hurling the tennis ball against one of them repeatedly...waking up the dead ghosts... Chris Scolaro Stuart Ullman's desk has a tin cup of some kind, perhaps a pencil holder, and in it is a small axe!!!  Jerry Ullman and the doctor both had windows behind them in their scenes.  I don't know if you have come up with a solution, but I think they represent the "light of truth" in that in both cases, a truth or hidden knowledge was exposed to the light of day.  Ullman told Jack about the Overlook's history and the doctor discovered Jack was abusive to Danny.  I think this also is important cause these truth scenes were intercut at the same time in the film.  Jason when danny is repeating redrum over and over in his mother's bedroom (his mother is asleep in the bed) he picks up an open tube of lipstick to write redrum on the door (this is when movie goers first learn what redrum means when they see it as murder in the mirror) my questions: 1) what woman would leave an open tube of lipstick on her nightstand? 2) she never wears lipstick. and the color of the lipstick is bright red (or blood red if ya wanna be that way) crasscommercialsim HAS ANYONE EVER NOTICED THAT STUART ULLMAN MENTIONED CHARLES GRADY TO JACK DURING THE INTERVIEW? ISN'T IT DELBERT GRADY? REGARDS,DIANE Hey,     I just watched The Shining yesterday and picked up something.  You'll notice that Jack's favorite drink throughout the film is bourbon.  But, it is not just any bourbon, it is specifically Jack Daniels each time he gets the free drink.  Why is this interesting?  His name is Jack and his son's name is Danny OR Daniel.  Perhaps this speaks to the alcoholism that lives within him and could someday live within his son.  Something to the perils of hereditary alcoholism?  Maybe you already noticed that. Darren Your page is great overall, but there's one major error about the idea of metaphor in film. You purport that metaphor in writing is somehow easier to accept and go on to use an example of a simile, a literary device that is seemingly quite similar but really very different. Metaphor in writing can be just as clear or obtuse as metaphor in film can be.   Evan Parker I just read your post on "The Shining" on dareland.com. Its very interesting, and I agree with most of what you say. However, I disagree that Kubrick intended everything that appears in the movie to be in the movie. The most glaring example would be the helicopter shadow. Now I know you could make a case that it's a symbol of some kind or another, but is it impossible for you to accept that, no matter how many times someone goes over a shot, no matter who they are, they can fail to notice something that simple? The 70's version of "Dawn of the Dead" was directed by George Romero, who was also known for being meticulous and reviewing his shots again and again; and yet, at the film's conclusion, it changes from midnight to noon in the blink of an eye. They get on a helicopter in the dark; when it takes off its midday. Do you also believe THAT was intentional? I might be wrong, but I believe that, no matter who you are, you'll slip up every once in awhile. In addition, I disagree that the photograph on the wall is nothing more than a metaphor, that it isn't actually there: The Overlook obviously has some magical, twisted aura, and the photograph depicts the deceased members of the staff. Doesn't it make sense that, since Jack died at The Overlook too, he'd appear in the photo? Thanks, just thought I'd see what you had to say. Adios, Earl. After Jack is hit with the bat, Wendy drags him into the walk-in pantry.  When Jack finally regains his composure and stumbles towards the door with a bum knee and he knocks a stack of boxes over.  He then goes to pass out for a couple hours and is then awaken by Grady knocking on the door.  When Jack goes to the door the boxes are stacked again.  So are we to believe that Jack, in his crazed state took the time to restack the boxes, highly unlikely.  I have seen this movie many times and finally noticed this after buying the DVD.  Still my favorite horror flick ever!!    Ryan Only one thing. I did notice that Jack always talks to himself, thus everything can be construed as madness. Except for one thing. When Jack is locked in in a way that he cannot exit by himself, a ghost opens the door for him. I was always bothered by this "cheating" incident. Herman The German Got one of your own? Tell me about it.

 
"The mediocre movie explains everything twice and always means exactly what it says. It waves its sincerity aloft like a truce flag. It leaves no questions unanswered. It tells you exactly where you should stand in relation to its characters and its subject matter. It is frequently soothing because it tells you that you are right. Then, too, it can be like an unrelenting host who holds you captive until you finish every last morsel on the plate. But it tends not to stick in the memory because there's nothing there to wonder about."
- Vincent Canby -