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‘The Shining’ is a 1980 psychological horror film produced and directed by Stanley Kubrick. The film is based on Stephen King's 1977 novel of the same name and stars Jack Nicholson, Shelley Duvall, Scatman Crothers, and Danny Lloyd. 40 years since the initial release of ‘The Shining’ in 1980, it’s still a part of mainstream culture, but what exactly happened behind the scenes that made this film into the phenomena that it is today?
During the French New Wave, a theory called ‘auteur theory’ arose from Cahiers du Cinema, a French film journal. Auteur theory argues that a film reflects the director’s artistic vision; so, a film directed by a given filmmaker will have recognizable, recurring themes and visual cues that show a consistent artistic identity throughout that director’s filmography. Stanley Kubrick is an embodiment of this exact theory. Kubrick’s hyper specific style meant that he could use his successful brand of directing to create scenes that were breaking cinematic boundaries and subverting what audiences had come to expect from the famed director.
Kubrick almost always avoided the use of blood, so the scenes with an abundance of blood are both visually striking and all the more terrifying for their rarity. This is made obvious during this particular scene in ‘The Shining’. Kubrick's long-time assistant, Leon Vitali, revealed in an interview just how the shot was managed. “We spent weeks and weeks and weeks trying to get the quality and of the blood as natural as it could be. The consistency was also quite important, because we were pouring out hundreds of gallons of the stuff. And then, of course, there were the mechanics of it, because if you have that much pressure inside something like an elevator, it’s going to blow if you’re not careful ... I tell you, it worked in a way we never thought it would work”. However, Stanley Kubrick, known for his compulsiveness and numerous retakes, got the difficult in only three takes. This would be unremarkable 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.
Auteur theory comes into play again when Kubrick utilizes his most notorious trademark, the Kubrick stare. The Kubrick stare is really quite simple to pull off. You simply do the following: tilt head down and look up beneath eyebrows. This generally signifies that the character is angry, deranged or that the person they’re looking at is really, really screwed. We can see this technique being used throughout Kubrick’s discography, however, one of the arguably most iconic instances of this is Jack Nicholson’s rendition in ‘The Shining’. This brings us to another example of why ‘The Shining’ has the cult following it does today: the performances and the dark stories behind them.
Shelley Duvall was being traumatized by Kubrick, who antagonized his actors in order to give the film what he perceived to be its psychological horror, and the director frequently kept her isolated, cut many of Wendy’s lines and forced her to perform the iconic ‘baseball bat’ scene an exhausting 127 times. The scene entered the Guinness Book of Records as the most takes ever for a scene with spoken dialogue, and her shaking hands and red, puffy, eyes are the result of genuine crying. Kubrick refused to encourage or praise Shelley the entire time – it was a standing order on set. Duvall suffered so much that she suffered hair loss on set.
Because of this, and many other reasons, King has openly expressed his distaste for the film saying to the New York Times: “Let’s put it this way, I dislike the film… Love Kubrick as a filmmaker, but I just felt that he didn’t have the chops for this particular thing. I don’t like the arc that Jack Nicholson runs as Jack Torrance. Because it isn’t really an arc, it’s a flat line. He’s crazy from the jump”. King also said in an interview with BBC: “Shelley Duvall as Wendy is really one of the most misogynistic characters ever put on film. She’s basically just there to scream and be stupid, and that’s not the woman that I wrote about”.
From a fire breaking out and destroying most of the set to Kubrick’s secretary having to type one phrase onto hundreds of pieces of paper (and then having to repeat that 4 more times in different languages), the making of ‘The Shining’ was tedious and excruciating, but arguably worth it to create the masterpiece of the film that it is today.
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