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Watch: What Makes 'The Shining' So Incredibly Disturbing?

Just in time for halloween, this video essay examines the role of structure in the shining's creepy delights. .

There are plenty of scary movies, but The Shining  is in a class all its own. Other than  Psycho , which is, arguably, more of a thriller than a horror movie, no film in the genre has inspired more analysis and fandom than Stanley Kubrick 's 1980 adaptation of Stephen King's novel. As Michael Tucker of Lessons from the Screenplay puts it in his new video essay, "Other movies may have moments that make me jump more, or keep me in more suspense about the characters’ survival, but  The Shining disturbs me." And according to his analysis, the reason has a lot to do with the structure of the film itself.

Kubrick was not a fan of releasing screenplays, once  saying that  "a screenplay isn’t meant to be read, it’s to be realized on film." According to interviews with Kubrick's collaborator in adaptation, the novelist Diane Johnson , the director's approach "was to think in terms of time segments in relation to the totality of the film." To wit, The Shining is comprised of ten sections, with each one marked by a title card (or intertitle). At the beginning of the film, these titles serve their traditional cinematic function, viz. to orient us in time. The card below comes four weeks after the Torrance family moves in to The Overlook: 

As the film progresses, though, and segments decrease in length, so does the distance between the title cards. This increased velocity adds suspense, of course, because the audience knows that  something  is coming. What is unique (at least among mainstream films) is the way the cards shed any pretense of temporal orientation, morphing into an incoherent pattern of random days, and, finally, moments in time. These lack a relationship to outside time that an audience could use to place itself in the film's "world." 

Kubrick's inversion (and subversion) of time and the title card was  something he had done before —though for different reasons and effects—in his previous film,  Barry Lyndon.  Here, it has the effect of being disorientating and disturbing; with an incredibly simple technique, Kubrick makes it seem as though the film   itself  is "quietly going insane," words he  once used to describe  the film's story.

This works so well because film audiences have been trained by decades of film grammar to trust the "objective" elements of narrative (e.g., the opening of the first  Star Wars ). By pulling the rug out from underneath the audience, as it were, Kubrick ups the menace without doing anything flashy, and this can have the effect of making the audience feel something while  not knowing why . 

 "The point is that the frightening part of the story isn't what is going to happen, it's how it's going to happen."

Additionally, Tucker notes the ways in which traditional structural tropes of the genre are ignored from the film's beginning, like how the "mystery" of the film is revealed in the first half hour (oh, and listen for the "Shone" effect at :05 seconds, which is not creepy, at all, in any way): 

As Tucker puts it, "The point is that the frightening part of the story isn't what is going to happen, it's how it's going to happen." The film relies, therefore, on the notion of creepiness , a concept defined in a study  which Tucker cites as, "anxiety aroused by the ambiguity of whether there is something to fear or not and/or by the ambiguity of the precise nature of the threat." This pervasive sense of dread is  everywhere  in  The Shining.  To cite one of the most obvious examples, in a genre usually shrouded in shadow,  The Shining  takes place, for the majority of its running time, in well-lit rooms. The dread we feel from knowing something is coming, combined with the seemingly benign mise-en-scène, is a locus of creepiness.

Tucker also points to the infamous Grady twins, who appear "at a distance that makes it difficult to read their faces..." I will note that, in the "Game Room" scene, they smile and giggle to each other, but Tucker is correct in his assertion that, overall, their ambiguity of intent is very creepy, indeed.

This essay is a valuable addition to the plethora of commentary on this film. Perhaps the best way to sum up Tucker's approach to the film's secrets and their structural foundations can be found in the Diane Johnson quote he includes, a description of how she and Kubrick approached the script: “It must be plausible, use no cheap tricks, have no holes in the plot, no failures of motivation...it must be completely scary.”

Source: Lessons from the Screenplay

What are Parallel Storylines in Film and TV?

Sometimes, you have to get your idea across in two stories instead of one..

I binge-rewatched Game of Thrones last month and marveled at just how many stories were crammed into every season. The intercutting between characters kept every episode enthralling and exciting. I was genuinely amazed at all the parallel storylines they were able to maintain throughout the series' run.

So today, I wanted to go over the idea of these parallel stories. We'll dive into the definition, look at examples, and try to help you visualize how you can put this stuff into your own script.

Let's dive in.

Parallel Storylines Definition

The Departed

Warner Bros. Pictures

Parallel storylines, also known as parallel narratives or plots, are a captivating storytelling technique where a film or television show juggles two (or more) distinct narratives.

These narratives can unfold simultaneously or be interwoven throughout the story, ultimately enriching the overall plot and thematic depth.

Tropes of Parallel Storylines

Pulp Fiction

Imagine a masterfully woven tapestry. Each thread, unique in color and texture, contributes to the final breathtaking image. Similarly, parallel storylines, each with its own characters, conflicts, and resolutions, come together to create a richer and more engaging viewing experience.

There are several ways filmmakers and television showrunners utilize parallel storylines. Here's a look at some popular tropes:

• Mirroring Themes : Two storylines, seemingly disparate on the surface, explore the same central theme from different angles. For instance, The Godfather follows the Corleone family's descent into violence, paralleled by the idealistic young lawyer Kay slowly becoming disillusioned with the world.
• Contrasting Lives : Juxtaposing vastly different realities can highlight social commentary or character development . In Parasite , the wealthy Park family lives blissfully unaware of the struggles of the Kim family dwelling in their hidden basement apartment.
• Converging Paths: Initially separate narratives eventually collide in a dramatic climax. Pulp Fiction famously features a non-linear narrative with seemingly unrelated stories ultimately converging in a diner.
• Cause and Effect: One storyline's events directly impact the other, creating a sense of urgency and interconnectedness. Breaking Bad brilliantly portrays the ripple effects of Walter White's descent into the drug trade on his family and the DEA's relentless pursuit.

Ways to Insert a Parallel Story into Your Script

Breaking Bad

These kinds of screenplays are fun to write. They're basically mandatory in TV, and they can help you write a dual protagonist in film.

So when you sit down to do it - take this stuff into consideration:

• Intercutting : Scenes from each narrative are rapidly alternated, building tension and suspense. The Departed masterfully utilizes this technique to keep viewers guessing about the undercover cop and mob mole within each other's organizations.
• Chapter Structure : Some TV shows dedicate entire episodes to separate storylines, allowing for deeper exploration of each plot. Westworld utilizes this approach to explore the perspectives of both the human guests and the sentient android hosts within the futuristic park.
• Relevance : The parallel story should never feel like a distraction. Ensure it has a strong thematic or plot-related connection to your primary storyline.
• Balance : Pay careful attention to the amount of time dedicated to each storyline. You don't want the parallel story to overshadow the main plotline or feel underdeveloped.
• Transitions : Employ smooth transitions between storylines. This can be achieved through visual cues, thematic links, or clever intercutting.
• Payoff : The convergence or connection between parallel stories should reveal something significant or create a strong emotional impact, justifying the use of this narrative technique.
• Voiceover : Characters from different narratives can provide internal monologues, offering unique insights and adding depth to the overall story. The Aviator employs this technique to delve into the complex mind of Howard Hughes through narration by his various associates.
• Outline Both Stories: Plan out the main beats of both your primary plot and your parallel story. This will help ensure they work in tandem and connect at the right points.
• Color-Coding: Use different colored highlighters or text to distinguish your storylines when writing and revising. This will aid in maintaining clarity.
• Test with Readers : Get feedback on whether the parallel story feels smoothly integrated and enhances the overall narrative.

Examples of Parallel Storylines

The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power

Prime Video

The world of cinema and television is brimming with examples that showcase the power of parallel storylines. I went through and picked some of my favorites.

I think these examples actually help me understand the balance you need in the narrative to support these kinds of stories.

• Pulp Fiction : Quentin Tarantino's classic intertwines the seemingly independent stories of hitmen, a boxer, a gangster's wife, and diner robbers. The non-linear approach and converging narratives create a thrilling web of violence, dark humor, and unexpected connections.
• The Godfather: The film chronicles Michael Corleone's transformation into the ruthless head of the mafia, while simultaneously depicting his idealistic sister Kay's disillusionment with her family's criminal world. This contrast highlights the corrupting nature of power and the tragic loss of innocence.
• Amores Perros : This Mexican film intertwines three stories connected by a single car accident. The parallel narratives explore themes of love, loss, and the harsh realities of life in Mexico City, painting a gritty yet emotionally resonant portrait.
• Babel : Featuring interconnected stories set in Morocco, Japan, Mexico, and the US, Babel explores the impact of a single gunshot on people from vastly different backgrounds. It emphasizes themes of miscommunication, prejudice, and the profound consequences of seemingly small actions in a global world.
• Parasite : This dark comedy thriller juxtaposes the lives of the wealthy Park family with those of the struggling Kim family, who con their way into the mansion. The contrasting storylines expose social inequality and the desperation it can create, leading to a shocking and unforgettable finale.
• Lost : This sci-fi mystery series follows plane crash survivors on a strange island. Parallel storylines jump between their present-day struggles, flashbacks to their past lives, and the mysterious events happening on the island, culminating in revelations about the island's mystical nature.
• The Wire: Each season of this acclaimed series explores a different facet of Baltimore, Maryland. Parallel storylines often involve the police, drug dealers, politicians, the media, and the school system, showcasing the interconnectedness of societal problems and the complexities of urban life.
• Orange Is the New Black: This dramedy takes place within a women's prison. Individual storylines often focus on a different inmate, with flashbacks revealing their past experiences that led to incarceration. The show delves deeply into various inmates' stories, showcasing themes of diversity, injustice, and the power of human connection within dire circumstances.
• Better Call Saul: This Breaking Bad spin-off follows lawyer Jimmy McGill’s transformation into the unscrupulous Saul Goodman. It interweaves his pre-Saul life with his post-Breaking Bad existence, creating a fascinating character arc with multiple dimensions.
• Westworld : This sci-fi drama utilizes shifting timelines and narrative perspectives. One storyline follows the guests' experiences within the futuristic theme park, while another focuses on the android hosts' sentience and rebellion. The show raises questions about consciousness, reality, and the dangers of unchecked ambition.

Why Use Parallel Storylines in Your Writing?

So, why do filmmakers and showrunners choose this structural paradigm ? Here are some key benefits:

• Character Development: Parallel storylines allow viewers to connect with a wider range of characters, fostering empathy and understanding of diverse perspectives.
• Heightened Suspense : Jumping back and forth between narratives can build anticipation and keep viewers engaged, eager to see how the stories will connect.
• Richer Thematic Exploration : By contrasting or mirroring themes across storylines, writers can deliver a more nuanced and impactful message.
• Surprise and Revelation : The convergence or culmination of parallel narratives can create powerful moments of surprise, revelation, and emotional payoff.

However, weaving parallel storylines effectively can be challenging.

Pacing, clarity of connections, and ensuring each narrative remains engaging are all crucial aspects that require skillful execution.

Parallel storylines are a powerful storytelling tool that can elevate a film or television show to new heights.

By weaving together distinct narratives, creators can create a richer tapestry of characters , themes , and emotions, leaving viewers captivated and pondering the interconnectedness of the stories long after the credits roll.

Let me know what you think in the comments.

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A Dramaturgical Analysis of The Shining

The Shining is a glaring example of a film that has led to countless interpretations, favoured by its complex and enigmatic nature, sometimes leading to interpretive deliriums – as confirmed by the documentary film Room 237 (Rodney Ascher, 2012). It is our belief that, since the themes are intrinsic to the dramaturgy of the narrative film, the thematic interpretation is valid if it grounds itself in solid dramaturgical analysis, something that even many good studies of the film lack. In this article we offer a basic dramaturgical analysis of The Shining (in both its versions – 144’ and 119’) using a method which follows authors such as Syd Field, Christopher Vogler, and Dara Marks: we deal with both the narrative world, i.e., the characters, their relations, and the environment in which they act, and the narrative structure. This analysis aims at offering a new basis for reconsidering the thematic interpretations proposed until now, in order to test the validity of the implicit and symptomatic meanings 1 which have been made about Kubrick’s film.

In spite of being an enjoyable horror film that evokes myths and fables, The Shining does not present a rigorously canonical dramatic framework. Nevertheless, the three-act structure 2 is respected: the first act starts at the beginning and ends when Danny enters the Colorado Lounge with bruises on his neck; the second act starts when Jack enters the Gold Room in anger and ends when Grady releases him from the pantry; the third act occupies the remaining part of the film until the closing credits start. At the same time, the 12 stages and most of the archetypes of the hero’s journey as theorised by Vogler 3 are traceable in The Shining , albeit being peculiarly distributed between Jack and Danny. 4

The narrative world and the first act

The protagonist of The Shining – hence, the Hero – is Jack Torrance, since the majority of sequences describe his actions which determine for the most part the development of the plot. On a pragmatic level, Jack’s desire concerns completing his tasks, namely writing his novel, being the caretaker, and – in the third act – killing his family and Hallorann. On a psychological level, Jack’s fatal flaw pertains both to the fear of failure and – particularly in the 144’ version – to alcoholism. Thus, his need consists of achieving fulfilment, something he attempts to do in a morbid way at the expense of his family. Finally, on a relational level, he has to face his wife and his son, who seem to be an obstacle to all his tasks, and the ghosts as well – symbols of evil, power, and immortality – who want him to be part of their world. 5 Obviously, the three levels intertwine: in order to avoid the dreaded failure, Jack desires both to write the novel (though he has no inspiration) and to make a good impression on his employers. The former aim dissolves during the second act, while the latter, proper to the Ordinary World, deviates gradually to its correlative in the Special World – i.e., Jack’s duty of evil caretaker, which entails killing his family and maybe achieving immortality, as we will learn eventually. At any rate, as a character Jack has an overall fairty-tale-like quality, since the intent of the film is to emphasize his allegorical quality rather than narrating an all-around psychological development.

In the first act we have a situation of apparent balance for Jack and his family. His manifest goal or desire (writing a novel), meshes well with the offered circumstances (spending five months of peace and quiet in the isolated hotel). His wife seems to be enthusiastic about the prospect as well. Jack is not even worried about the tragedy that occurred in 1970 – but of course this functions as an omen/foreshadowing for the audience. Danny feels lonely since he has nobody to play with, and he is reluctant about going to the hotel, but he can’t oppose the project. The boy is a young Hero who looks for a sense of satisfaction.

What is unusual about The Shining is also the fact that we have a threshold crossing of sorts inside the first act, when the protagonist and his family settle in the Overlook Hotel. The hotel is a special world for them, thus they have to explore it; in a sense, Jack’s adventure is that of being the caretaker of the Overlook Hotel. However, there is no actual problem yet, but only the potentiality of it because of (1) premonitions due to the tragedy of 1970 and to the images conveyed by Danny’s shining, and (2) uncanny events such as Jack staring at the hedge maze model (followed by an ambiguous high-angle shot of the model) or in the distance with a vacant stare, his use of the words “forever and ever” like the ghostly Grady twins do, and his abhorrent nightmare of murdering his wife and child. Moreover, we will discover later that the actual adventure for Jack is not that of being the caretaker of the ordinary Overlook, but rather the caretaker of the special Overlook, which does not entail running the boiler and the like so much as killing his family. Furthermore, when Jack calls Wendy to tell her that he got the job we have a sort of Call to Adventure for the family – or, in Field’s terms, an inciting incident for Danny – but this is not the adventure proper in a dramatic sense.

The Overlook Hotel is the place that houses the Torrance family for most of the narrative. It is a majestic and luxurious isolated place, with a grisly past: “On the one hand, [the isolation] serves, once again ironically, as the reverse side of communication, in a film which is all about communication, albeit extrasensory (the shining); on the other hand, it makes the Overlook Hotel […] a self-sufficient microcosmos […], a symbolic and absolute space, a home and a familiar place par excellence, where the destruction of the family is carried out.” 6 The Overlook was built on a Native American burial ground, and Native American motifs have been absorbed in the hotel in the guise of Navajo rugs on the walls and floors. This suggests that the Overlook and its ghosts are symbols of archetypical and sempiternal psychosocial issues. Moreover, the film is full of references to myths, fables, and horror literature 7 : the hotel, a haunted house of sorts, seems like “a ghost ship” to Wendy; Jack huffs and puffs like the Big Bad Wolf when he attacks his wife in the bathroom; likewise, during the tour in the kitchen – which she describes as “an enormous maze” – Wendy evokes Tom Thumb (and hence Hansel and Gretel) by stating “I feel I’ll have to leave a trail of breadcrumbs every time I come in.” This reference serves also as a setup 8 – or, a foreshadowing – both for the climax of the third act, which evokes Theseus and the Minotaur, and for the recurrent spatiotemporal disorientation that occurs in the film. Of course, Danny’s relationship with his parents recalls the Oedipal complex as well.

Jack does not have a strong inciting incident, although something similar happens when he scolds Wendy in the Colorado Lounge, asking her not to disturb him while he is working, and when – in the following short sequence – he is seen staring outside the window while Wendy and Danny are playing in the snow. We start worrying that he may be suffering from cabin fever – and, in the 144’ version, that he may become physically aggressive once again. We also have another proof that Wendy is psychologically fragile, since she is submissive to her husband. In the 144’ version, this is already perceivable when she timorously tells the paediatrician about Jack’s alcoholism and the incident that arose consequently (Jack injured Danny). Nevertheless, in the second and third act she will react strongly to her husband’s aggressions.

Jack’s nightmare of killing his family may be compared to a Call to Adventure, since it is the first explicit sign of murderous thoughts – which are going to be construed as the new desire during the adventure. Therefore, we also have the Refusal of the Call from Jack, because he recounts the nightmare in a hurtful and worried way. The Refusal of the Call is traceable in Danny as well. Differently from his parents, he does not seem to be willing to go to the Overlook, because his imaginary friend Tony does not want to. Tony, the personification of Danny’s shining, represents the Herald, the one who declares the beginning of the adventure. As a matter of fact, Tony’s communication is followed by the first manifestation of uncanny images of the Overlook Hotel, and happens in the same sequence in which Jack calls to inform that he took the job.

Both Jack and Danny have a Mentor; however, only the boy meets his own Mentor in the first act, as in the canon. Danny’s Mentor is Hallorann, an ex hero who is now old and wants to offer his wisdom and his experience to the new generation. Hallorann finds out that Danny has his own power, the shining, and thus gives him some advice: he explains that bad things happen and leave traces, though implying that these are innocuous (as when someone burns toast); he reassures him that the things he sees through the shining are just like pictures in a book. However, he forbids him from entering room 237. Danny is the first to make contact with the evil forces of the hotel. As a sort of Hero, the boy must learn how to use his power in a self-conscious manner.

Danny’s entrance in room 237 is presented as his first real Crossing of the First Threshold, because he accesses the forbidden place, which really is a Special World. Notice that Krzysztof Penderecki’s composition The Awakening of Jacob used here was already heard during the boy’s first vision and will be heard again when Jack goes in room 237. The first plot point follows: Danny enters the Colorado Lounge with bruises on his neck after his father wakes up from his nightmare. Now we have an actual, pragmatic problem: someone hurt the boy, thus there is the possibility of being physically injured inside the hotel. Once again, Jack’s and Danny’s paths interweave: while the boy is in the Special World of room 237, his father has a nightmare; after Danny leaves room 237, Jack enters the Special World.

The second act

In the following sequence Jack goes to the Gold Room (for the first time in the 119’ version, for the second in the 144’ one). This is the Crossing of the First Threshold for Jack, since he enters the Special World inside the Overlook Hotel. The second act has begun. Penderecki’s De Natura Sonoris no. 2 , which started in the previous scene (while Danny walks inside the Colorado Lounge), is heard here and will be used once again at the beginning of the third act and at the apparent end of the third act (when Jack dies in the hedge maze).

In the Gold Room Jack meets Lloyd – the first ghost he sees – who acts as a Threshold Guardian. Moreover, Lloyd is the first Ally encountered by Jack in the Special World (Grady will follow). Thus, two parties are starting to be defined: on the one hand, Jack and obscure characters of the Special World, pertaining to the true adventure; on the other hand, Danny, Wendy and Hallorann. Lloyd strengthens Jack’s will, therefore acting as an Enemy of Danny’s. In this case the Threshold Guardian is clearly an objective correlative of an obscure part of Jack’s mind. In the 119’ version, the alcoholism problem is absent: the liquor that Jack asks Lloyd for and then drinks seems to be desired only in order to dampen his anger, with no other implications. In the 144’ we know about Jack’s former alcoholism, therefore the fact he drinks the liquor reinforces the idea of crossing the threshold on the psychological level. At any rate, this subplot is not developed, so that in both versions the liquor primarily represents a magical potion that sanctions Jack’s evil pact with Lloyd (and the Overlook through him) and therefore allows him to start the adventure in the Special World.

Overall, the ghosts who appear to Jack incarnate the Shapeshifters: they are seemingly innocuous but actually subjugate him to the hotel. The most literal Shapeshifter is the woman in room 237, who first appears as a young and attractive lady but then morphs into a repulsive decaying hag – which is herself double as it were, since we see her alternately laughing sardonically and walking toward Jack, and expressionless, emerging from the bathtub (Danny’s vision?) thanks to crosscutting. At the same time, the archetype of the Shadow can be found: it stands for the fury of the evil side, the danger which tacitly lies beneath the surface. In The Shining the Shadow is twofold. First there is the Overlook Hotel, which tries to take advantage of Jack in order to eliminate his family. Then there is Jack himself as Danny’s antagonist, representing what the boy may become if he does not accomplish his own journey.

The first Test for Jack in the Special World is the temptation of drinking liquor. This is stronger in the 144’ version, since we know about Jack’s alcoholism. The second Test is the sexual one, which occurs in room 237, when Jack encounters the shapeshifting woman. Afterwards, Jack quarrels with Wendy about his needs, and then he has a sort of Approach to the Inmost Cave. He goes back to the Gold Room, where a party is taking place: Jack is greeted, he receives liquor at no charge, and he meets his Mentor Delbert Grady. Grady is a Shapeshifter as well, because he is introduced as a jovial waiter in a ’20s-style party but then reveals himself as the unsettling 1970 caretaker. In the red bathroom, Grady subtly instructs Jack about his adventure, preparing him for the central ordeal.

The midpoint – i.e., the “point of no return” 9 – occurs during the confrontation between Jack and Wendy in the Colorado Lounge, after she reads the typewritten text. It is confirmed that Jack’s personality has changed: after having disabled the radio (and – as we will learn later – the snowcat), he seems to be willing to hurt his wife. The metaphorical gate behind his back is definitely close. 10 Jack undergoes an Ordeal: all at once, he faces his wife (now an antagonist) on a pragmatic level, and his fears and flaws in psychological terms – pertaining to the working contract, the writing project, and the relationship with his family. He seems to be failing completely, since the novel is actually the repetition of the same sentence (“All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy”), his wife wants to think things over because she does not understand his needs, and she knocks him out and down the stairs with the baseball bat, thus preventing him from completing his tasks. Therefore, as in the best midpoints, the scene contains the symbolic death of the protagonist, who will then be left powerless and lame, locked inside the pantry.

Here, Jack undergoes a rebirth of sorts: he fully regains consciousness and makes Wendy become aware of his evil actions (regarding the radio and the snowcat). Then, while still inside the pantry, Jack receives the greatest Reward yet: Grady gives him another chance to do his job and releases him from the pantry. This is the clearest physical interaction between a ghost and ordinary reality in the film, and Jack’s escape is the second plot point of the film. From now on, the protagonist deals with his desire in the most extreme and irreversible way, since he does not come back to his senses. In other words, Jack definitely misses the chance to satisfy his real need .

The third act

In a sense, Jack takes the Road Back to the Ordinary World, as in the hero’s journey. Both in the first and in the third act he has no relationship with the ghosts; after escaping the pantry, he relates only to his family and to Hallorann. At the same time, the Special World invades the Ordinary World, since the ghosts become visible to Wendy as well – presumably because Jack is doing exactly what the hotel wanted him to do. Hallorann is killed by Jack, who now seems to be the strongest character despite having sustained injuries (the blow to the head and sprained ankle), while Danny is shell-shocked, hiding inside a cupboard after escaping the janitorial quarters’ bahtroom. But then, following Hallorann’s murder, Danny runs and makes his father follow him in the maze. Here, the stage of the Resurrection takes place. In a decisive confrontation, Jack tries to kill his gifted son. However, he does not succeed: Danny entraps him in the maze by erasing his footprints – i.e., the only possible clues in order to find the way out. While he kills his father by trapping him in the maze and letting him die of hypothermia, Danny is “resurrected” since he survives his most dangerous and almost certain meeting with death at the hands of a stronger opponent.

At the end of the hero’s journey there is the Return with the Elixir. This event is subtly implied in The Shining , and it is unclear whether it happens or not. After we see Jack frozen to death, we find him “frozen” in a 1921 photograph. This twist at the end suggests a reincarnation that can be compared to the elixir, being the implied reward for Jack’s special adventure in the Overlook Hotel. However, interpretation is unavoidable: Will the evil cycle repeat itself in the future like it did in the past? Or did Danny manage to stop the cycle of violence from repeating forever and ever? In the first case, Jack – i.e., this instantiation of the caretaker – has obtained the elixir, and will return; in the second case, he has missed the chance to get it and is forever trapped in the limbo of an irretrievable past.

Our study is intended as just a first step towards an all-encompassing dramaturgical analysis of The Shining. More research is needed in order to thoroughly examine the psychology of the characters, the progression of narrative events, the film’s relationship with the horror genre, the role of its stylistic patterning (both visual and aural) in the narrational process, and the implicit and symptomatic meanings that may be constructed. In this regard, being sophisticated and cryptic, the film has widely incited scholarly interpretation, focused on psychology (the Oedipal complex, the uncanny), philosophy (the matter of time, the nature of evil), history (the massacre of Native Americans, the Holocaust), anthropology (the coeval US culture, matters of capitalism and Western societal organization), and transtextual aspects (the reworking of tropes taken from myths, fables, and horror fiction, the film’s role in Kubrick’s poetics). 11 We hope that our analysis will offer a well-founded starting point from which to test the validity of the interpretative literature on The Shining as well as to further develop it.

• See David Bordwell, Making Meaning: Inference and Rhetoric in the Interpretation of Cinema , (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989. ↩
• See Syd Field, Screenplay: The Foundation of Screenwriting , (New York: Random House, 2007). ↩
• Christopher Vogler, The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers , (Studio City, CA: Michael Wiese Productions, 2007). The stages are: Ordinary World; Call to Adventure; Refusal of the Call; Meeting with the Mentor; Crossing the First Threshold (to the Special World); Tests, Allies, Enemies; Approach to the Inmost Cave; Ordeal; Reward; The Road Back; Resurrection; Return with the Elixir. The archetypes are Hero, Mentor, Threshold Guardian, Herald, Shapeshifter, Shadow, Ally, Trickster. ↩
• The only archetype we were not able to find in The Shining is that of the Trickster. However, the character of Stuart Ullman somehow recalls a Trickster, because (1) he remains lighthearted even when he recounts the murderous story of Charles Grady, and (2) he brings Jack Torrance down to Earth speaking about the cruelty of winters, the sense of isolation, and the cabin fever. ↩
• For a methodological framework see Dara Marks, Inside Story: The Power of the Transformational Arc , (Studio City, CA: Three Mountain Press, 2007); John Truby, The Anatomy of Story: 22 Steps to Becoming a Master Storyteller , (New York: Faber and Faber, 2007). ↩
• Giorgio Cremonini, Stanley Kubrick. Shining , (Turin: Lindau, 1999), pp. 42-43, our translation. Kubrick himself noticed this irony: Stanley Kubrick: Interview by Michel Ciment , in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining : Studies in the Horror Film , Danel Olson, ed. (Lakewood, CO: Centipede Press, 2015), p. 481. ↩
• Ruggero Eugeni, Invito al cinema di Kubrick , (Milan: Mursia, 2010), pp. 101-102; Catriona McAvoy, “The Uncanny, The Gothic and The Loner: Intertextuality in the Adaptation Process of The Shining ,” Adaptation 8.3 (2015), pp. 345-360 ↩
• See Robert McKee, Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting , (New York: Regan Books, 1997, pp. 238-239) ↩
• Luca Bandirali and Enrico Terrone, Il sistema sceneggiatura. Scrivere e descrivere i film , (Turin: Lindau, 2009), p. 169, our translation. ↩
• Bandirali and Terrone, Il sistema sceneggiatura , p. 125. ↩
• In addition to the aforementioned sources pertaining to The Shining , see Vincent Jaunas, “Inside the interpretative maze of The Shining (1980). The search for meaning in crisis,” Essais 4 (2018), pp. 79-88; Matthew Merced, “How Narcissistic Injury May Contribute to Reactive Violence: A Case Example Using Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining ,” International Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies 14.1 (2017), pp. 81-96; Roger Luckhurst, The Shining , (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); Michele Guerra, Il meccanismo indifferente: La concezione della storia nel cinema di Stanley Kubrick , (Rome: Aracne, 2007), pp. 119-147; Geoffrey Cocks, The Wolf at the Door: Stanley Kubrick, History, & the Holocaust , (New York: Peter Lang, 2004); Michel Ciment, Kubrick: The Definitive Edition , (London: Faber & Faber, 2001), pp. 135-147; Juhani Pallasmaa, Monster in the Maze. Stanley Kubrick: «The Shining» , in Id., The Architecture of Image: Existential Space in Cinema , (Helsinki: Rakennustieto, 2001). ↩

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Do people talk this way about real tragedies? Will his wife be absolutely fascinated? Does he ever tell her about it? Jack, wife Wendy ( Shelley Duvall ) and son Danny (Danny Lloyd) move into the vast hotel just as workers are shutting it down for the winter; the chef, Dick Hallorann ( Scatman Crothers ) gives them a tour, with emphasis on the food storage locker ("You folks can eat up here a whole year and never have the same menu twice"). Then they're alone, and a routine begins: Jack sits at a typewriter in the great hall, pounding relentlessly at his typewriter, while Wendy and Danny put together a version of everyday life that includes breakfast cereal, toys and a lot of TV. There is no sense that the three function together as a loving family.

Danny: Is he reliable? He has an imaginary friend named Tony, who speaks in a lower register of Danny's voice. In a brief conversation before the family is left alone, Hallorann warns Danny to stay clear of Room 237, where the violence took place, and he tells Danny they share the "shining," the psychic gift of reading minds and seeing the past and future. Danny tells Dick that Tony doesn't want him to discuss such things. Who is Tony? "A little boy who lives in my mouth."

Tony seems to be Danny's device for channeling psychic input, including a shocking vision of blood spilling from around the closed doors of the hotel elevators. Danny also sees two little girls dressed in matching outfits; although we know there was a two-year age difference in the murdered children, both girls look curiously old. If Danny is a reliable witness, he is witness to specialized visions of his own that may not correspond to what is actually happening in the hotel.

That leaves Wendy, who for most of the movie has that matter-of-fact banality that Shelley Duvall also conveyed in Altman's " 3 Women ." She is a companion and playmate for Danny, and tries to cheer Jack until he tells her, suddenly and obscenely, to stop interrupting his work. Much later, she discovers the reality of that work, in one of the movie's shocking revelations. She is reliable at that moment, I believe, and again toward the end when she bolts Jack into the food locker after he turns violent.

But there is a deleted scene from "The Shining" (1980) that casts Wendy's reliability in a curious light. Near the end of the film, on a frigid night, Jack chases Danny into the labyrinth on the hotel grounds. His son escapes, and Jack, already wounded by a baseball bat, staggers, falls and is seen the next day, dead, his face frozen into a ghastly grin. He is looking up at us from under lowered brows, in an angle Kubrick uses again and again in his work. Here is the deletion, reported by the critic Tim Dirks: "A two-minute explanatory epilogue was cut shortly after the film's premiere. It was a hospital scene with Wendy talking to the hotel manager; she is told that searchers were unable to locate her husband's body."

If Jack did indeed freeze to death in the labyrinth, of course his body was found -- and sooner rather than later, since Dick Hallorann alerted the forest rangers to serious trouble at the hotel. If Jack's body was not found, what happened to it? Was it never there? Was it absorbed into the past, and does that explain Jack's presence in that final photograph of a group of hotel partygoers in 1921? Did Jack's violent pursuit of his wife and child exist entirely in Wendy's imagination, or Danny's, or theirs?

The one observer who seems trustworthy at all times is Dick Hallorann, but his usefulness ends soon after his midwinter return to the hotel. That leaves us with a closed-room mystery: In a snowbound hotel, three people descend into versions of madness or psychic terror, and we cannot depend on any of them for an objective view of what happens. It is this elusive open-endedness that makes Kubrick's film so strangely disturbing.

Yes, it is possible to understand some of the scenes of hallucination. When Jack thinks he is seeing other people, there is always a mirror present; he may be talking with himself. When Danny sees the little girls and the rivers of blood, he may be channeling the past tragedy. When Wendy thinks her husband has gone mad, she may be correct, even though her perception of what happens may be skewed by psychic input from her son, who was deeply scarred by his father's brutality a few years earlier. But what if there is no body at the end?

Kubrick was wise to remove that epilogue. It pulled one rug too many out from under the story. At some level, it is necessary for us to believe the three members of the Torrance family are actually residents in the hotel during that winter, whatever happens or whatever they think happens.

Those who have read Stephen King's original novel report that Kubrick dumped many plot elements and adapted the rest to his uses. Kubrick is telling a story with ghosts (the two girls, the former caretaker and a bartender), but it isn't a "ghost story," because the ghosts may not be present in any sense at all except as visions experienced by Jack or Danny.

The movie is not about ghosts but about madness and the energies it sets loose in an isolated situation primed to magnify them. Jack is an alcoholic and child abuser who has reportedly not had a drink for five months but is anything but a "recovering alcoholic." When he imagines he drinks with the imaginary bartender, he is as drunk as if he were really drinking, and the imaginary booze triggers all his alcoholic demons, including an erotic vision that turns into a nightmare. We believe Hallorann when he senses Danny has psychic powers, but it's clear Danny is not their master; as he picks up his father's madness and the story of the murdered girls, he conflates it into his fears of another attack by Jack. Wendy, who is terrified by her enraged husband, perhaps also receives versions of this psychic output. They all lose reality together. Yes, there are events we believe: Jack's manuscript, Jack locked in the food storage room, Jack escaping, and the famous "Here's Johnny!" as he hatchets his way through the door. But there is no way, within the film, to be sure with any confidence exactly what happens, or precisely how, or really why.

Kubrick delivers this uncertainty in a film where the actors themselves vibrate with unease. There is one take involving Scatman Crothers that Kubrick famously repeated 160 times. Was that "perfectionism," or was it a mind game designed to convince the actors they were trapped in the hotel with another madman, their director? Did Kubrick sense that their dismay would be absorbed into their performances?

"How was it, working with Kubrick?" I asked Duvall 10 years after the experience.

"Almost unbearable," she said. "Going through day after day of excruciating work, Jack Nicholson's character had to be crazy and angry all the time. And my character had to cry 12 hours a day, all day long, the last nine months straight, five or six days a week. I was there a year and a month. After all that work, hardly anyone even criticized my performance in it, even to mention it, it seemed like. The reviews were all about Kubrick, like I wasn't there."

Like she wasn't there.

Also in Ebert's Great Movies series at rogerebert.com: Kubrick's " Paths of Glory ," " Dr. Strangelove " and "2001: A Space Odyssey."

Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.

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Watch a Video Essay on Free Will in The Shining

Is Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining about free will?

© 1980 Warner Bros. Entertainment

Everyone seems to have their own pet theory about The Shining . As revealed in the documentary Room 237 , some of these theories are a little nutty : It’s about the Holocaust, fans say, or Theseus and the Minotaur, or Stanley Kubrick’s guilt over faking the moon landing. But not every Shining fan has gone batty. See, for example, Drew Morton, who wrote and edited this elegant video essay—via Thumbnails , the new feature on RogerEbert.com—about free will in Kubrick’s adaptation. I’m not sure I buy every last point here—as others have said, the film seems to be a maze designed to forever leave interpreters lost in it—but it’s well supported with other essays, interviews with the crew, and side-by-side shot comparisons juxtaposing the ways Kubrick films Danny and Jack. This last part of Morton’s essay is perhaps the most striking: He argues that the camera in some ways represents the specter of the hotel, chasing Danny and leading Jack. Be forewarned: The essay also doesn’t hesitate to show many of the movie’s most frightening scenes, so the scaredy-cats might want to think twice before returning to the Overlook.

Previously Script Reveals the Lost Ending of The Shining Yes, Super Fans of The Shining Are a Little Nutty Tunnel Vision: Kubrick’s Favorite Composition Gets Its Own Supercut

The Old School Animation Technique that Makes ‘The Shining’ So Scary

Welcome to The Queue — your daily distraction of curated video content sourced from across the web. Today, we’re watching a video essay about the eldritch horrors hidden in Gordon Stainforth’s music editing in The Shining.

Just when you think there’s nothing left to say about Stanley Kubrick ‘s  The Shining , someone comes along and proves you dead wrong.

Indeed, the 1980 Stephen King adaptation continuously proves that it’s never quite ready to divulge all its secrets. Something nefarious and slimy always lurks in the labyrinthian halls of the Overlook Hotel, whispering in vulnerable ears, and teasing violence out of uncanny symmetry.

Then again, such half-heard metaphors are wholly appropriate for a movie bound up in residual hauntings, psychic phenomena, and drunken stupors. Jack Torrance and his family are spending a winter at a remote resort as caretakers. Almost immediately, an unseen force sinks its hooks into Jack’s bubbling temper, escalating his cabin fever into an ax-wielding frenzy.

As the video essay below teases out, one element of  The Shining  is especially responsible for the omnipresent sense of unseen horror: the music. And thanks to the man behind its deployment — music editor Gordon Stainforth — The Shining  transforms the eerie drones of Hungarian composer Béla Bartók  into the avatar for the evils of the Overlook.

“ Mickey Mousing ” is a technique honed in the early days of animation. It describes a synergy between the musical cues, chords, and notes with the motion taking place on-screen. Mickey Mouse throws a punch and a cymbal clangs. Each step from a cartoon cow is punctuated with a drum beat. That kind of thing.

The technique has strong connotations with slapstick and comedy. But in Stainforth’s hands, Bartók’s symmetrical arrangments take on the aspect of a corrupting influence. Inquiring strings become sinister whispers in Jack’s mind. Plodding percussion and deep bass cellos become an unseen manipulator, a puppeteer whose strings we cannot see but can most assuredly hear.

As the below video essay underlines, the fact that Bartók’s music synchs up with the action on-screen is nothing short of a miracle … or something more sinister. Stainforth wasn’t just working with pre-existing compositions, he was attempting to underlay those unaltered musical pieces with, effectively, the final cut of the film.

And yet, as you’ll see — and hear — the music in The Shining  feels baked-in. As if it had always been that way. Forever and ever and ever.

Watch “The Invisible Horror of the Shining”:

Who made this.

This video essay on the invisible horror of The Shining is by k aptainkristian,  a YouTube-based video essay channel that peddles in visual love letters to filmmakers, musicians, and syndicated cartoons. The account is run by Kristian T. Williams, whom you can follow on Twitter  here . You can subscribe to kaptainkristian, and check out their back catalog on YouTube  here .

More videos like this

• For another taste of kaptainkristian ‘s work, here’s their video essay on how the Fleischer brothers pushed the limits of animation to create the definitive Superman .
• And here’s another sample of their work: how director Hayao Miyazaki uses sound to bring animation to life .
• Here’s Masters of Movies  on why  The Shining   and  The Lighthouse   are the perfect cabin fever double bill .
• The ever-insightful CinemaTyler has produced a bananapants amount of Stanley Kubrik content. His essay on how Kubrik adapted the screenplay of  The Shining is one of my favorites.
• Finally, to round things out, here’s a classic on the scariness of The Shining : “ Quietly Going Insane Together ” by Lessons from the Screenplay .

Related Topics: The Queue

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The Shining: How the Film Scares Us with Cinematography and Tension

Long before the blood and ghosts show up, The Shining has us trembling from the tone alone. Here's how Kubrick builds tension.

The Shining (1980) is a horror film directed by Stanley Kubrick and photographed by John Alcott. Depicting the all-American Torrance family's gradual slip into madness as they inhabit an empty hotel for the winter, the movie is one of the most iconic and genuinely disquieting horror films of all time - and while there are plenty of ghastly spectacles throughout, the terror the audience leaves the theater with is a result of Kubrick's command over tone, tension, and the uncanny.

Much has been written about what The Shining "means" - is it an allegory for the genocide of America's indigenous peoples? A metaphor for the Holocaust? Is it a deconstruction of the nuclear family? Of white male rage in a culture that is (slowly) becoming less unequal? Is it nothing more than a descent into madness? There are enough overt thematic indicators to get an idea of what this film is "really" about - the fixation on familial dynamics, wedded with references to American history/iconography reveal Kubrick's interest in the American family (and its inherent horrors) - but any attempt to consolidate its many pieces into a cohesive message is impossible (and a popular activity for fans ).

Whatever secrets lay buried in The Shining 's subtext, they are sought so fervently for one main reason: in formal terms, divorced from any abstract meaning, The Shining is a masterpiece. If it weren't superb on a sensory level, no one would care what it meant. Without relying on jump scares and gore, The Shining raises the heartbeat and makes the mind race with dread: what's coming?

When the horror finally arrives, that dread bursts into a rush of adrenaline. But if it weren't for the two hours preceding it, would Jack Nicholson yelling "Here's Johnny!" be particularly scary? Would the chase through the hedge maze get the adrenaline pumping with such ferocity? Would the image of Jack frozen and scowling be anything but ridiculous? The power of these moments comes from long-building tension. The Shining is (forgive the pun) a shining example of the Slow Burn Horror: a film that makes the audience wait for the scares, based on the principle that the long-lasting tension will make whatever follows more impactful. Remove the build-up from the final act, and the scares are loud, shocking, and a little disturbing - but hardly terrifying. So how does that tension build? How do Kubrick and Alcott make the movie feel scary, even when "nothing" is happening?

Related: The Best Cinematography in Horror Movies From the 1980s

Camera Movement

The Shining is claustrophobic and merciless, portrayed in deliberate and unsettling images. The majority of the story is captured in steady shots, either locked off, slow-moving, or photographed from a distance. This creates the impression of a supernatural presence bearing down on the main characters. Kubrick famously employed the newly developed steadicam tech to follow Danny (the youngest member of the Torrance clan) as he rides his tricycle through the labyrinthine corridors of the hotel. The steadiness of the camera and its relentless pursuit clues the audience into the terror that follows him, either as a literal supernatural force or the horrors that await. With each rounded corner we hold our breath, knowing that something horrible will be there - and when nothing happens, we aren't relieved: we know the worst is yet to come - we cannot relax. This technique is brought to a blood-curdling conclusion when Danny rounds a corner, and he - along with the camera - finally comes to a stop. In front of him, two identical ghost girls wait. This is the first overt moment of horror in the movie, and the camerawork contributes to its effectiveness: after spending so much time creeping towards an unknown destination of doom, the camera comes to a halt, letting us know that we have arrived at something truly horrible.

If the steady tracking shots come to represent a sneaking sense of dread, the calm before the storm, Alcott and Kubrick switch to a raw, hand-held style in the film's final act: once Jack succumbs completely to insanity and attempts to murder his family, everything becomes fast-paced, a controlled chaos in sharp contrast to the unyielding stasis that has come before. This taps into the viewer's primal sensations: when we suspect danger, we become still, and observant. When that danger reveals itself, we run like mad and hope our legs are fast enough to deliver us to safety.

Lighting and Design

Much of the lighting in the film (particularly in the hotel) is idyllic, soft, and rich. The wide frames and elegant exposure give the Overlook Hotel an aura of the sublime. This beauty is in sharp contrast to the horror lurking beneath the surface. Horror icon Jordan Peele has argued that a scary movie is most effective when placed in a beautiful location: when we are somewhere eerie, we expect terrible things. When we are somewhere that feels good , that creates a sense of comfort or serenity, we come to trust that location - and feel doubly betrayed when its evil reveals itself. This touches a deep human fear: we equate beauty with good, and when what is beautiful proves to be malevolent, we are confronted with a taboo idea - everything is bad. Beautiful surfaces harbor evils as great as any tableau of horror or disgust.

Like the last act's shift in camerawork, the lighting in The Shining becomes increasingly bleak and surreal, culminating in a fluorescent nightmare. When Jack chases Danny through the maze, the snow covered passages reflect harsh and blindingly bright light. This choice also signifies that hidden evil has broken out into the open.

Related: 15 Scariest and Most Important Horror Movies of All Time

Framing and Symmetry

Kubrick's framing is unconventional: while perfect symmetry is generally avoided in film (as it calls attention to itself and breaks the compositional rule of thirds ), Kubrick leans into it, often placing his subjects in the middle of the frame. The audience might not consciously realize it, but this makes us uncomfortable: we sense that something is off. Symmetry is commonly associated with the supernatural (the history behind this association is vague -- one explanation is that the natural is imperfect, while that which exists beyond it - the supernatural - possesses a perfection we cannot grasp). By framing so unusually, Kubrick infuses his images with the weight of relics and religious architecture.

All of these choices are formal, separate from the superb performances or rich subtext - but they create a world that allows the other elements to take on unfathomable meaning. These techniques come together to form one of the most unique horror experiences ever committed to celluloid: long before any supernatural element is introduced, we get the sense that something is deeply wrong , thanks to the meticulousness of the cinematography.

The Shining

By stanley kubrick, the shining essay questions.

How does The Shining address wealth and class?

Although Jack exudes confidence when we meet him during his job interview with Mr. Ullman, his professional insecurities soon shine through, revealing a man who is deeply anxious about his place in the world. We learn, for example, that he used to be a teacher and is now interviewing for a menial maintenance position at the Overlook Hotel. Despite his blue-collar background, Jack aspires to become a successful writer, an ambition that drives his decision to accept the job at the Overlook, since it will give him the time and space to write. This dream aligns Jack—a name already associated with the blue-collar "average Joe"—with the hordes of working-class American men who likewise aspired to write the "great American novel" in the mid-twentieth century, in hopes that they would transcend their class circumstances.

Much of the film's central conflict revolves around Jack as furiously protective of this goal, as he often lashes out at Wendy, whom he perceives as a threat to his lofty ambitions, for disturbing or undermining his writing time. Just before Wendy discovers Jack's typewritten manuscript, which consists of only one sentence manically repeated thousands of times, Jack accuses her of sabotaging him by forcing him to work at menial jobs; just after, he accuses her of failing to understand the meaning of a job contract. Wendy often functions as an archetype of the middle-class, aproned American housewife, and Jack is sensitive to—and resentful of—this throughout the film. When Mr. Ullman gives the Torrances their initial tour of the hotel, Wendy humbly remarks on the Colorado Room, "God, I've never seen anything like this before"; later, she says of the kitchen, "It's the biggest place I've ever seen!" Whereas Mr. Ullman emphasizes the elite nature of the hotel, mentioning the movie stars and presidents who have stayed there, Wendy plays the part of the country bumpkin, marveling at the beauty of the hotel. It is this humble, dumbfounded quality of Wendy's demeanor that irritates Jack, driving him to the brink of insanity later in the film, when he will implicitly blame Wendy for preventing their family from achieving higher social status.

Jack's delusions are often ones of imagined grandeur, allowing him to fantasize about being wealthy and important. For example, when Jack walks into the Gold Room while a lavish party is being thrown, Lloyd greets him as one would a valued regular at the bar, refusing to let Jack pay for his drinks. Moments later, Delbert Grady begs Jack to follow him to the restroom to clean his jacket, treating Jack's casual bomber jacket as if it were an expensive suit jacket like the rest of the men wear at the party. it is precisely these fantastical encounters with the upper crust that motivate Jack to take revenge on a wife and son whom he perceives as embarrassingly lower class.

Who, ultimately, is the film's protagonist? Its antagonist?

The Shining is unique in that it performs a subtle bait and switch regarding its protagonist. At the start of the film, it seems clear that Jack Torrance is the film's protagonist, since he is the first character to which we are introduced. Jack also remains the character with whom the viewer spends the most time late into the film, as we follow his attempts to settle into the creepy Overlook Hotel. For better or worse, Jack is consistently the most active character; he finds a job, moves his family to the hotel, and subsequently embarks on a mission to write. All this makes him the easiest character to follow at the start of the film. Even so, the seeds of his later antagonism are planted in his character even at the film's start, such as his tendency to lose his temper and his insecurity about his professional status.

Later, however, the film subtly transfers the power of the protagonist to Danny. Throughout the film, Danny seems mostly passive, due in part to his young age but also, perhaps, to his involuntary ability to "shine," which afflicts him with traumatic visions that he is unable to escape. This passivity at times appears to undermine Danny's identity as the protagonist. At the same time, Danny is very aware of the danger posed by Jack and the hotel, and even actively confronts it; because of this, Danny is the character through whom a great deal of foreshadowing and plot information is conveyed. For example, Danny elects to explore Room 237 and suffers for it, providing the motivation for Jack to enter the room later, when we are permitted to see what lurks there. As Jack gradually veers towards a role as the film's antagonist, Danny takes on a more active role, attempting to warn Wendy of the imminent danger present and running from Jack. In the end, it is Danny's vigilance that allows him to succeed by tricking Jack into following his footprints deeper into the hedge maze.

How does the film address themes of childhood and play?

Although The Shining contains characters of all ages—including ghosts—many of these characters seek to recover a lost youth. The first of these is Jack, who is perpetually anxious about his role as a father, husband, and provider, and thus lashes out against the pressures on him to grow up. Like Danny, he seems to want to play more than work, resorting to bouncing a tennis ball off the walls of the Colorado Room until he loses it; later, the ghosts of the Grady twins roll this ball to Danny, inviting him to play. The culmination of Jack's madness is expressed through his manifesto, which simply reads, "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy." This marks the start of Jack's violent romp through the hotel, an outlet for his energetic mania, serving a role similar to child's play.

Danny, however, is the primary character who suffers a loss of innocence due to the horrors of the hotel. His visions are the first and primary signal of this loss of innocence,forcing him to witness horrific scenes that would terrify any grown man. Although Danny often attempts seemingly normal childhood activities, such as watching cartoons and playing with his toys, these scenes are often interrupted by either the Grady twins or his father. In fact, the Grady twins embody the concept of stolen youth, as they were robbed of their childhood when their father murdered them. Thus, their frequent invitations to Danny function as threats to his childhood.

What could the color red symbolize in the film?

The color red permeates the memorable aesthetic of The Shining at every turn. Wendy and Danny both wear red the first time we meet them, and Danny continues to do so throughout the film. Later, the bathroom in which Delbert Grady convinces Jack to kill Wendy and Danny is painted entirely red; this room is referenced implicitly when Tony repeats REDRUM ("murder," but also "red room") as if in a trance and eventually writes the same word on his bathroom door with his mother's red lipstick. The color also appears in the patterned carpet on which Danny rides his bike through the hotel. Perhaps the film's most significant iteration of red is Danny's repeated vision of blood pouring out of the hotel's elevator bank.

On a literal level, the color symbolizes the massive bloodshed that defines the hotel as a source of terror, embodied by the image of blood rushing from the elevators. But in the Western cultural imagination, red also has figurative associations with madness, war, love, lust, and the loss of control, all of which are strong presences in The Shining . Indeed, it is precisely because red symbolizes all these elements in the film that we are able to link them to each other; for example, Jack's madness is a product of his complicated feelings of love towards his wife and child, and the war that he declares on them marks a loss of control that defines Jack's final violent romps through the hotel. It is a frenzy defined by its utter lack of reason, depending instead on a heightened state of being, a Dionysian climax embodied by the color red. In this way, red symbolizes not a singular theme, but rather the fusion of all madness, love, and anxiety that we see Jack struggling to control throughout the film.

How does the film comment on the state of the nuclear American family?

At the start of the film, the Torrances appear to be a somewhat idyllic, even classic American family. Wendy, for one, is often portrayed as a sweet, loving housewife and mother, preparing breakfast in bed for her husband and watching cartoons with her son. Jack often functions as an archetypal working-class father, as well, rueful towards his job and wife, and perpetually desperate for a beer ("I would give my goddamn soul for a beer"). Indeed, one of the central tensions of The Shining is that of the resentment that Jack harbors towards Wendy for holding him back from success. He often appears annoyed at her lack of sophistication, as he aspires to join the upper-class elite; for example, when Mr. Ullman gives the Torrances a tour of the hotel, Wendy stands in sharp contrast to Ullman's mention of the jet set, remarking that she has never seen anything as beautiful or big as the Overlook. Later, Jack refers to Wendy as "the old sperm bank," reducing her to her function as a child bearer. As this conflict intensifies, Jack grows more impatient with Wendy's frenzied, desperate demeanor, eventually threatening to kill her and Danny. This hostility derives from madness, of course, but it also suggests common marital tensions carried to the extreme.

Danny's relationship to his father is likewise rife with textbook anxieties about paternal love. This is particularly evident in the scene in which Danny tries to retrieve his toy fire engine without waking his father. When Danny finds Jack awake and staring blankly out the window, Danny asks Jack if he would ever hurt him or Wendy, to which Jack replies in the negative. Still, Danny is clearly afraid of Jack, likely due to Jack's history of violent temper tantrums. Embedded in this father-son dynamic are classic anxieties about what it means to love a child. It is likewise significant that the final chase of the film is between father and son. In this sequence, Jack is unable to connect to his son physically or emotionally, disoriented by the twists and turns of the maze, which could symbolize the twists and turns involved in raising a child. Importantly, Wendy and Danny explore the maze early in the film and are quite easily able to find their way to its center.

The Shining Questions and Answers

The Question and Answer section for The Shining is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.

Who, ultimately, is the film's protagonist? Its antagonist? And why?

Danny Torrance is the novel's protagonist. Torrance is the heroic character, around whom, the plot revolves.

Jack Torrance is the antagonist, the abusive, alcoholic huband and father, who emotionally and physically abuses his family.

At what point do you think Jack goes truly "bad" in this movie? Was he bad even before he got to the Overlook? Why or why not?

One of the central ambiguities of The Shining is whether Jack goes mad or is possessed by the evils of the hotel. Wendy tells the doctor who comes to see Danny after his first vision about Jack's history of alcoholism and accidental violence...

The Shining 1980 related. What does the appearance of Ullman and the bear costume wearing man indicate when Wendy finds them in one of the Hotel room

The guy in the tuxedo is not Ullman. Following along with the novel, the man in the tuxedo is Horace (or Harry, I can't remember which) Derwent, who was a previous owner of the hotel. A guest of the hotel named Roger had a crush on Derwent. In the...

Study Guide for The Shining

The Shining study guide contains a biography of Stanley Kubrick, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

• About The Shining
• The Shining Summary
• Character List
• Director's Influence

Essays for The Shining

The Shining essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of The Shining by Stanley Kubrick.

• The Possibilities of Mental Illness in the Shining
• Jack’s Crisis: What Role Did Narcissistic Injury and Cultural Circumstance Play in Jack’s Breakdown?
• Exploring the Themes of Familicide and Insanity in The Shining
• Toxic Masculinity in the Films of Stanley Kubrick
• Racial Stereotypes and Cinematic Adaptation: The Shining Critical Analysis

Wikipedia Entries for The Shining

• Introduction

Themes and Analysis

The shining, by stephen king.

'The Shining' is a classic of the horror and psychological fiction genres. It was published in 1977 as Stephen King’s third novel.

About the Book

Written by Emma Baldwin

B.A. in English, B.F.A. in Fine Art, and B.A. in Art Histories from East Carolina University.

Below, readers can explore some of the many important themes and symbols, like “Redrum” and the wasps’ nest, that King used in his classic horror novel, as well as consider important events and King’s writing style.

The Shining Themes 

Family bonds.

When the Torrance family arrives at the Overlook Hotel, their bonds with one another are already shaky. Wendy is depressed and anxious about her future with her husband, and Jack is struggling to maintain his sobriety while also bringing in enough money to support his family. Danny, who loves both of his parents, is also struggling with the stress of a prospective divorce, even though he is only five years old. 

The Overlook Hotel’s disembodied evil uses these divisions to tear the family apart, making it possible for the hotel to further corrupt Jack’s mind and inspire him to turn on his wife and son.

Although the exact nature of the evil in the Overlook Hotel is never entirely revealed, it does make itself known through numerous forms. This includes the moving and violent animal topiaries outside, the ghost of Delbert Grady, the woman in Room 217, and more. These various ghostly figures and entities personify evil in various ways. Grady helps convince Jack that he needs to kill his family, and the animal topiaries attempt to kill or at least deter Dick from returning to the hotel.

Isolation 

Isolation is one of the most central themes in this novel. Without the family’s isolation at the Overlook Hotel and Jack’s isolation from his wife and son, the events of the novel would not have played out as they did. The hotel’s evil depends on divisions in family relationships. Without Jack’s alcoholism and violent tendencies, it is unlikely that the hotel would’ve been able to isolate him as it did. Plus, the fact that the family was totally alone added to the overall danger and suspense of the novel.

Analysis of Key Moments in The Shining  

• Jack accepts the job at the Overlook Hotel as the winter caretaker.
• Jack is told how important it is to remember to check the boiler in the cellar.
• The family moves into the Overlook Hotel and meets Dick Hallorann.
• Danny speaks with Dick about the “shine.”
• Jack gives Danny a supposedly empty wasps nest.
• The wasps attack Danny in the middle of the night.
• Danny gets more visions about “Redrum” from Tony.
• Wendy grows more suspicious about her husband after finding bruises on Danny’s neck.
• Jack throws away a key part of the snowmobile, preventing them from leaving the hotel.
• Danny knows that “Redrum” is going to happen on December 2nd and telepathically contacts Dick for help.
• Jack drinks at the bar and speaks with the ghost of Delbert Grady.
• Wendy finds him drunk and locks him in a pantry.
• Jack escapes, promises to kill his family, and assaults Wendy.
• Danny reminds Jack that he hasn’t checked the boiler and he runs off to do so.
• Dick, Danny, and Wendy escape from the hotel just as it explodes, taking Jack with it.

Style, Tone, and Figurative Language

King uses the omniscient third-person point of view when writing this novel. He shifts between different points of view, including Danny’s, Dick’s, and Jack’s throughout. As is common with Stephen King’s writing, he often uses the free indirect style. This means that the characters take over the narration for a period of time, distorting it through their perspectives and opinions.

Throughout, the tone is perplexing and tense. King reveals crucial information about the hotel and its past residence as the novel progresses. But, at the same time, he manages to maintain the mystery of the building. Readers are kept on their toes throughout as they deal with suspicious and suspenseful content.

Symbolism is one of the most important features of this novel. For example, the word “Redrum” that Danny sees before the family even moves to the hotel.

Analysis of Symbols 

Redrum .

“Redrum” is a word that Danny first sees prior to the family moving to the hotel. He sees it in his mind, written in various mirrors. He doesn’t know what the word means for the majority of the book. It is later revealed that the word is murder spelt backwards. It symbolizes the complete reversal of Jack’s intentions as the novel progresses. He begins with the hope of providing his family with a fresh start and ends up attempting to kill them and destroy the hotel. It also adds to the overall mysterious mood King achieves in the book.

The Wasps’ Nest 

The wasps’ nest that Jack finds and then gives to his son Danny is symbolic of unexpected dangers in the hotel. Danny was thrilled with this unusual gift from his father, but it turns out to be something quite dangerous. In the same way, Danny trusts his father, but this is a misplaced trust. This is clearly seen through Jack’s attempts to kill his wife and son at the end of the novel.

The Boiler 

In classic King fashion, the reader is provided with a great example of foreshadowing in regard to the boiler at the beginning of the novel. Jack is told how important it is to continually check the boiler’s pressure. If he doesn’t, it could explode and take his family and the entire hotel with it. This is exactly what happens at the end of the novel. The boiler is symbolic of Jack’s attachment to reality. At first, he diligently checks it. But, as the novel progresses and he loses his grip on his sanity, he forgets.

What is the theme of The Shining ?

Readers may find several different important themes in Stephen King’s classic horror novel. These include family bonds, fear, isolation, and more. Each is as important as the next. But, the corrupt nature of evil and its ability to destroy families is at the centre of the book.

What do the twins symbolize in The Shining?

In the film, the Grady twins symbolize the possible murder of Wendy Torrance, Danny’s mother. The director, Stanley Kubrick, dressed the twins in outfits that remind the reader of Wendy. They are another foreboding symbol that foreshadows future events. 

Was Jack a ghost in The Shining?

At the end of ‘ The Shining ‘, Jack Torrance dies in an explosion that destroys the hotel. In the film (which changes the book’s original ending), Kubrick includes a scene in which the camera focuses on Jack in a photo from the early 1900s. In some viewers’ minds, this suggests that from the beginning, Jack was a reincarnated version of someone who had previously stayed at the hotel.

About Emma Baldwin

Emma Baldwin, a graduate of East Carolina University, has a deep-rooted passion for literature. She serves as a key contributor to the Book Analysis team with years of experience.

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Baldwin, Emma " The Shining Themes and Analysis 📖 " Book Analysis , https://bookanalysis.com/stephen-king/the-shining/themes-analysis/ . Accessed 2 April 2024.

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Guest Essay

The One Idea That Could Save American Democracy

By Astra Taylor and Leah Hunt-Hendrix

Ms. Taylor and Ms. Hunt-Hendrix are political organizers and the authors of the book “Solidarity: The Past, Present, and Future of a World-Changing Idea.”

These days, we often hear that democracy is on the ballot. And there’s a truth to that: Winning elections is critical, especially as liberal and progressive forces try to fend off radical right-wing movements. But the democratic crisis that our society faces will not be solved by voting alone. We need to do more than defeat Donald Trump and his allies — we need to make cultivating solidarity a national priority.

For years, solidarity’s strongest associations have been with the left and the labor movement — a term invoked at protests and on picket lines. But its roots are much deeper, and its potential implications far more profound, than we typically assume. Though we rarely speak about it as such, solidarity is a concept as fundamental to democracy as its better-known cousins: equality, freedom and justice. Solidarity is simultaneously a bond that holds society together and a force that propels it forward. After all, when people feel connected, they are more willing to work together, to share resources and to have one another’s backs. Solidarity weaves us into a larger and more resilient “we” through the precious and powerful sense that even though we are different, our lives and our fates are connected.

We have both spent years working as organizers and activists . If our experience has taught us anything, it is that a sense of connection and mutualism is rarely spontaneous. It must be nurtured and sustained. Without robust and effective organizations and institutions to cultivate and maintain solidarity, it weakens and democracy falters. We become more atomized and isolated, suspicious and susceptible to misinformation, more disengaged and cynical, and easily pitted against one another.

Democracy’s opponents know this. That’s why they invest huge amounts of energy and resources to sabotage transformative, democratic solidarity and to nurture exclusionary and reactionary forms of group identity. Enraged at a decade of social movements and the long-overdue revival of organized labor, right-wing strategists and their corporate backers have redoubled their efforts to divide and conquer the American public, inflaming group resentments in order to restore traditional social hierarchies and ensure that plutocrats maintain their hold on wealth and power. In white papers, stump speeches and podcasts, conservative ideologues have laid out their vision for capturing the state and using it as a tool to remake our country in their image.

If we do not prioritize solidarity, this dangerous and anti-democratic project will succeed. Far more than just a slogan or hashtag, solidarity can orient us toward a future worth fighting for, providing the basis of a credible and galvanizing plan for democratic renewal. Instead of the 20th-century ideal of a welfare state, we should try to imagine a solidarity state.

We urgently need a countervision of what government can and should be, and how public resources and infrastructure can be deployed to foster social connection and repair the social fabric so that democracy can have a chance not just to limp along, but to flourish. Solidarity, here, is both a goal worth reaching toward and the method of building the power to achieve it. It is both means and ends, the forging of social bonds so that we can become strong enough to shift policy together.

Historically, the question of solidarity has been raised during volatile junctures like the one we are living through. Contemporary conceptions of solidarity first took form after the democratic revolutions of the 18th century and over the course of the Industrial Revolution. As kings were deposed and the church’s role as a moral authority waned, philosophers and citizens wondered how society could cohere without a monarch or god. What could bind people in a secular, pluralistic age?

The 19th-century thinkers who began seriously contemplating and writing about the idea of solidarity often used the image of the human body, where different parts work in tandem. Most famously, the French sociologist Émile Durkheim put solidarity at the center of his inquiry, arguing that as society increased in complexity, social bonds between people would strengthen, each person playing a specialized role while connected to a larger whole. Solidarity and social cohesion, he argued, would be the natural result of increasing social and economic interdependence. But as Durkheim himself would eventually recognize, the industrial economy that he initially imagined would generate solidarity would actually serve to weaken its fragile ties, fostering what he called anomie, the corrosive hopelessness that accompanied growing inequality.

In the United States, solidarity never achieved the same intellectual cachet as in Europe. Since this nation’s founding, the concept has generally been neglected, and the practice actively suppressed and even criminalized. Attempts to forge cross-racial solidarity have met with violent suppression time and again, and labor organizing, effectively outlawed until the New Deal era, still occupies hostile legal ground. Decades of market-friendly policies, promoted by Republicans and Democrats alike, have undermined solidarity in ways both subtle and overt, from encouraging us to see ourselves as individual consumers rather than citizens to fostering individualism and competition over collectivity and cooperation.

As our profit-driven economy has made us more insecure and atomized — and more susceptible to authoritarian appeals — the far right has seized its opportunity. A furious backlash now rises to cut down the shoots of solidarity that sprung up as a result of recent movements pushing for economic, racial, environmental and gender justice. In response, programs that encourage diversity and inclusion are being targeted by billionaire investors, while small acts of solidarity — like helping someone get an abortion or bailing protesters out of jail — have been criminalized.

Awaiting the return of Mr. Trump, the Heritage Foundation has mapped out a plan to remake government and society, using the full power of the state to roll back what it calls “the Great Awokening” and restore a Judeo-Christian, capitalist “culture of life” and “blessedness.” “Woke” has been turned into a pejorative so that the word can be wielded to tarnish and break the solidarity that people have only just begun to experience.

Our vision of a solidarity state offers a pointed rejoinder to this project. Social democrats and socialists have been right to emphasize the need for redistribution and robust public investment in goods and services. We must restructure our economy so that it works for the many and not the few. But unlike conservatives — think, for example, of Margaret Thatcher, the prime minister of Britain who in 1981 said, “Economics are the method; the object is to change the heart and soul” — liberals and leftists have tended to downplay the role of policy in shaping public sensibilities. This is a mistake.

Laws and social programs not only shape material outcomes; they also shape us, informing public perceptions and preferences, and generating what scholars call policy feedback loops. There is no neutral state to aspire to. Policies can either foster solidarity and help repair the divides that separate us or deepen the fissures.

Today, the American welfare state too often does the latter. As sociologists including Suzanne Mettler and Matthew Desmond have detailed, lower-income people tend to be stigmatized for needing assistance, while more-affluent citizens reap a range of benefits that are comparatively invisible, mainly through tax credits and tax breaks. Both arrangements — the highly visible and stigmatized aid to the poor and the more invisible and socially acceptable aid to the affluent — serve to foster resentment and obscure how we are all dependent on the state in various ways.

Instead of treating citizens as passive and isolated recipients of services delivered from on high, a solidarity state would experiment with creative ways of fostering connection and participation at every opportunity for more Americans. What if we had basic guarantees that were universal rather than means-tested programs that distinguish between the deserving and undeserving, stigmatizing some and setting groups apart? What if, following the model of a widely admired program in Canada, the government aided groups of private citizens who want to sponsor and subsidize migrants and refugees? What if public schools, post offices, transit systems, parks, public utilities and jobs programs were explicitly designed to facilitate social connection and solidarity in addition to providing essential support and services?

We’ll get there only if we take up the challenge of building solidarity from wherever we happen to sit. Both means and end, solidarity can be a source of power, built through the day-to-day work of organizing, and our shared purpose. Solidarity is the essential and too often missing ingredient of today’s most important political project: not just saving democracy but creating an egalitarian, multiracial society that can guarantee each of us a dignified life.

Astra Taylor and Leah Hunt-Hendrix are political organizers and the authors of the book “Solidarity: The Past, Present, and Future of a World-Changing Idea.”

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips . And here’s our email: [email protected] .

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Home — Essay Samples — Entertainment — The Shining — Critical Analysis Of Imagery And Themes In The Shining

Critical Analysis of Imagery and Themes in The Shining

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Published: Jun 9, 2021

Words: 666 | Page: 1 | 4 min read

Table of contents

Introduction, genre critique, thematic critique.

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See the moment dozens of festival-goers shone laser pointers at a passenger jet as it flew over a fireworks festival

• Dozens of people shone laser pointers at a passenger jet flying over a fireworks festival in Mexico.
• A video of the incident on TikTok was viewed over 30 million times.
• Shining a laser at an aircraft is illegal in most countries, and punishable by five years in prison in the US.

Shocking footage from a festival in Mexico shows dozens of people shining laser pointers at a passenger jet flying overhead.

The National Pyrotechnic Festival in Tultepec, just north of Mexico City, attracts around 100,000 revelers every year. It lasts for seven days, with the main event taking place on March 8.

A video posted on TikTok shows a plane flying over the festival with two green laser beams pointing at it. More people join in until about a dozen are shining at the jet. A drone is then seen almost completely obscured by dozens of lasers.

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The plane appeared to be on approach to landing at Felipe Ángeles International Airport, the Mexican capital's secondary airport. It isn't clear which airline was operating it.

@ariaestef1 #tultepec #feriainternacionaldelapirotecnia #tultepec2024 #fyp ♬ Le Monde - From Talk to Me - Richard Carter

"When a plane passed by and everyone pointed their laser at it," the caption reads.

The most-liked comment on the video, which has been seen over 30 million times on the app, says: "It's amazing how stupid they are."

Several other comments question the legality of the act.

Pointing a laser at an aircraft is against the law in Mexico, as in most countries. In 2016, another incident made international news after a laser was shone near an Airbus A330 transporting the Pope to Mexico City, The Guardian reported.

In the US, laser incidents have soared in recent years. The Federal Aviation Administration said it received a record 13,000 reports last year from pilots about laser strikes — a 41% increase from 2022.

The regulator also issued a reminder on X about such incidents: "Shining lasers at airplanes and helicopters puts lives at risk. Laser strikes are also a federal crime."

That came after a 29-year-old man was charged with aiming a laser pointer at a Delta Air Lines jet near Buffalo, New York.

Joseph Crapsi could face five years in prison and a $250,000 fine if he's found guilty.

Watch: Is another Fyre Festival really in the works?

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