Kubrick’s The Shining haunts King and horror cinema in equal measure.
It’s always quiet at Kubrick’s Overlook Hotel, even when it’s loud. A cavernous silence, thick and charged, hangs over every room like the deep snow on the building’s roof; typewriter keys striking like hammers in a mausoleum. The air feels gilded and upholstered in the same tarnished threadbare luxury as the hotel’s furniture: soft to the touch, brittle and decayed underneath. But you can’t approach Kubrick’s The Shining without acknowledging its divergence from the source text and its heretical reputation in the eyes of its author.
Kubrick doesn’t adapt King’s novel so much as abduct it and torment the author by cutting off and returning its narrative digits one at a time. He pares away much of the sentiment and character beats, polishing what remains to a mirror finish of surgical steel. What was once a firelit ghost story about cycles of abuse and the fight for redemption becomes something colder, detached and deconstructive: a precision-crafted analysis of the architecture of insanity.
On the page, Jack Torrance is a man struggling not to become a monster. King’s protagonist is a recovering alcoholic, full of self-loathing, trying to keep his family and his sanity intact while under enormous and increasingly sinister pressure. His story is tragically heroic precisely because he fails. Nicholson’s Torrance, by contrast, feels like a man who’s been waiting for the green light to cut loose. From the moment he appears on screen, there’s a baleful glint in his eye; a slant to his grin that suggests he’s already mentally rehearsing his unravelling. It’s a magnetic performance, no question, but it’s entirely dissonant with the character as King wrote him. In Kubrick and Nicholson’s hands, Jack Torrance’s descent into madness becomes not a tragic fall, but an inevitable reveal: he was always like this. The hotel doesn’t corrupt Jack; it recruits him.
It’s in that character pivot that Kubrick’s The Shining changes the trajectory of the whole story and earns much of Stephen King’s enmity. King poured his own fears and experiences into Torrance, tracing an alternative route of his own life but for the grace of God and under Kubrick the cold certainty of Jack’s inherent instability infuses the whole film. The Overlook doesn’t just covet Danny’s psychic power, it wants his father too, to help it relive its own grotesque history. King’s ghosts are angry, vengeful things. Kubrick’s are aloof, moving with the slow, chilly patience of chess grandmasters. Lloyd the bartender doesn’t seduce; he serves. Grady doesn’t tempt; he inducts. The Overlook isn’t a haunted house, it’s a museum of malice, setting out to make the Torrance family its latest exhibits.
Wendy, too, is reconfigured from the novel. Gone is the proactive, protective, and quietly resilient figure who pieces what’s actually going on in the Overlook early. Kubrick’s Wendy is a different creature altogether: mousey, anxious, and increasingly desperate. Duvall plays her with raw vulnerability, but the script makes her reactive, and Kubrick’s directorial technique further destabilises her, taking the strong maternal figure and twisting into a shrill, passive presence, to better serve this hotel’s narrative of submission. Kubrick makes her less a co-survivor and more a barometer of how bad things have become, wearing her down along with the audience, forcing her to match Nicholson’s crescendo with tear-streaked hysteria. She isn’t heroic, but she is authentic. Her trauma feels real because it often was.
Danny remains the clearest echo of the novel’s intent, though even he is diminished somewhat, demoted to supporting cast in what has become diegetically and metatextually the Jack show. In King’s version, Danny is the main protagonist; the emotional core and the narrative hinge, the reason for the haunting and the hope for escape. In Kubrick’s film, Danny still sees more, knows more, resists more than anyone else, but the focus has shifted elsewhere and he’s more a McGuffin to be fought over, a moppet for the monsters to go after while they’re waiting for Jack to fully commit.
The thing is, for all King’s justified opprobrium, Kubrick’s take on The Shining is an undeniable masterpiece on its own merits. Divorced from King’s source novel, as a horror movie it’s a near-perfect blend of meticulous filmmaking style and technique and subject matter, branding its iconography indelibly on the genre forever more. It may not be Stephen King’s The Shining but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t shine just as brightly, especially in the one character that has no dialogue at all: the Overlook Hotel itself. The film ultimately belongs to the Overlook; everyone else is just fuel for the boiler. Danny’s escape may be the film’s one true victory, but Kubrick can’t quite let it feel triumphant. Danny gets away, yes. But the hotel ultimately wins. It always wins.
Production design does much of the film’s talking. The hotel’s geography is famously impossible, its layout a subconscious trap. Corridors contradict themselves. Rooms shift location. Windows appear where they shouldn’t. The maze isn’t just in the garden; it’s built into the bones of the hotel. The Overlook is not just unsettling because it’s haunted. It’s haunted because it refuses to make sense and within that impossible space, Kubrick moves the camera like it has a shining all of its own.
The Shining became one of the first major studio films to showcase the Steadicam not as a novelty, but as an instrument of dread. Garrett Brown’s invention, barely a few years old, finds its full expressive potential here. Kubrick didn’t just use it to follow characters, he designed the sets to accommodate it, building wider doorways, higher ceilings, and uninterrupted sightlines so the camera could float ghostlike through the Overlook’s impossible geometry, accentuating the disconcerting feeling of subtle wrongness. The tricycle sequences don’t just track Danny, they stalk him.
Kubrick’s use of colour works in much the same way. Red is deployed not just as a signal but as an environment, oppressive and ritualistic. The Gold Room’s crimson bathroom is all symmetry and saturation, transforming Grady’s quiet recruitment into something sacramental. Room 237, with its slick green tiles, feels medically wrong, a sickly cocktail of seduction and decomposition. The iconic bold orange-and-brown geometric carpets pull focus and grate against the eye, unsettling even in empty corridors. It’s a palette built to irritate. Even white, so often a cinematic sanctuary, becomes oppressive and suffocating here: the snow, the staff uniforms, the sterile emptiness of the hotel’s ‘safe’ spaces. Colour doesn’t signify good or evil, it merely reflects the many malevolent moods of the hotel.
The hedge maze pushes this further. Constructed at full scale on the backlot at Elstree, it was lit with nearly three quarters of a million watts of arc lighting to simulate daylight for night shoots. The result: fog-drenched corridors of hedgerow that swallow Jack whole. There’s no jittery handheld camera work here, just slow, searching, clinical pursuit. Even the film’s opening, those aerial shots of Jack’s yellow Beetle curling through mountain roads long before drones made that kind of stabilised shots routine, reinforce the sense of something omniscient but not impartial: the Overlook Hotel is a persistence predator, inexorably closing in on the Torrance family, wearing them down from within.
The sound design in The Shining is as engineered and deliberate as its visual geometry. Kubrick worked with Wendy Carlos and Rachel Elkind to create a soundscape that doesn’t score the action so much as pre-empt it, full of low drones, dissonant strings, and barely audible tones pitched to agitate; music that often feels like it’s listening rather than playing. Its shrieks and groans appearing without cue, detached from any traditional emotional beat and even the mournful processional fanfare of the iconic theme resonates on a primal level. Even silence has weight, Kubrick using it to trap scenes in a vacuum, flattening the air around a moment until even a spoon on China rings like a gunshot. Jack’s typewriter doesn’t clack, it detonates, Danny’s tricycle doesn’t trundle, it rumbles like distant thunder every time it leaves that accursed carpet and hits the Overlook’s storied floorboards.
Naturally, Kubrick’s notorious perfectionism wasn’t limited to the auditory and the visuals. The script evolved constantly, sometimes daily, with Nicholson and Duvall receiving new pages in the morning to be filmed that afternoon, an uncertainty that bleeds into the performances. Duvall looks like she’s being hunted by the script as much as by Jack and she became so stressed during production her hair began falling out. The baseball bat scene alone took 127 takes. The famous axe-through-the-door sequence? Nicholson went through sixty doors. It wasn’t just coverage; it was psychological conditioning.
All of it plays into Kubrick’s overarching vision of a haunted house not as a disruption but as metaphysical machinery. The Overlook endures because everything within it has a function. The guests. The staff. The caretakers. The photographs. Kubrick reworks the supernatural into an almost corporate bureaucracy. It’s what makes the Grady bathroom scene so chilling; not the content, but the tone. Polite. Professional. Institutional. The final image of Jack, frozen and leering, is often mistaken for resolution. It isn’t. It’s just another entry in the ledger. A fresh photo on the wall. A new caretaker ready to be remembered and to recruit the next. Kubrick’s The Shining doesn’t offer catharsis; it offers inhumation rather than closure.
What makes The Shining iconic isn’t just its craft, although it remains one of the most meticulously constructed horror films ever made. It’s that refusal to comfort. The film never reassures you that what you’re seeing is fantasy. It offers few rules and fewer explanations, an ambiguity that has no doubt served to secure its position in pop culture to the point where it’s easily referenced in the likes of Ready Player One and provided the foundation for one of The Simpsons’ finest Treehouse Of Horror entries. King wrote a horror story about the sins of the past catching up with you. Kubrick made a horror film about never being able to leave. Both have their power but only one leaves you wondering, every time you open a hotel door, whether someone has scrawled “Red Rum” in lipstick on the back of the door.
