The Shining (1980) is Stanley Kubrick’s psychological horror film, adapted from Stephen King’s 1977 novel. A recovering alcoholic and would-be novelist takes his wife and psychic young son to spend a winter alone at a snowbound mountain hotel, and slowly comes apart there. Jack Nicholson’s performance as Jack Torrance and Kubrick’s gliding Steadicam shots through the Overlook Hotel made the film one of the most quoted, parodied and analyzed horror films ever made, even though it puzzled many critics at first and King himself never warmed to it.
At a glance
| Release date | May 23, 1980 (United States) |
| Director | Stanley Kubrick |
| Writers | Stanley Kubrick and Diane Johnson (screenplay) |
| Based on | The Shining (1977 novel) by Stephen King |
| Starring | Jack Nicholson, Shelley Duvall, Scatman Crothers, Danny Lloyd |
| Runtime | 146 minutes (premiere); 144 minutes (US); 119 minutes (Europe) |
| Rating | R (US) |
| Box office | About $57 million |
| Franchise | Stephen King’s The Shining; sequel Doctor Sleep (2019) |
Plot summary
Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) takes a job as the winter caretaker of the remote Overlook Hotel in the Colorado Rockies, which closes for the season. The manager mentions that an earlier caretaker, Charles Grady, killed his family and himself there a decade before. Jack brings his wife, Wendy (Shelley Duvall), and their young son, Danny (Danny Lloyd), who has premonitions. Before he leaves for the winter, the hotel’s head chef, Dick Hallorann (Scatman Crothers), tells Danny that they share a telepathic gift his grandmother called “shining.” He warns the boy that the hotel “shines” too, and tells him to stay out of Room 237.
As the snow piles up, Jack’s writing stalls and his temper frays, and Danny starts seeing the hotel’s past, including the murdered Grady sisters. Jack drifts toward the hotel’s ghostly ballroom, where a bartender and a waiter named Grady seem very pleased to have him.
Spoiler section: the ending
Wendy finds that Jack’s manuscript is nothing but the line “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy,” typed over and over. She knocks him out with a baseball bat and locks him in the pantry, but someone lets him out, and he comes after his family with an axe. Hallorann flies back from Florida to help and is killed as soon as he arrives. Danny leads his father into the snow-covered hedge maze, retraces his own footprints to escape, and flees with Wendy, while Jack freezes to death in the maze. The last shot pushes in on a 1921 photograph of a Fourth of July ball at the hotel, with Jack smiling in the front row.
Production and behind the scenes
Kubrick was looking for a project that would be commercially successful after Barry Lyndon (1975) disappointed at the U.S. box office. Warner Bros. executive John Calley sent him proofs of King’s novel. Kubrick wrote the screenplay with the novelist Diane Johnson, and his contract let him change the book freely. Principal photography ran from May 1978 to April 1979, almost entirely on soundstages at EMI Elstree Studios in England. The Overlook set, which included a life-size re-creation of the hotel’s exterior, was the largest built at Elstree up to that time. Several interiors were modeled on Yosemite’s Ahwahnee Hotel. Oregon’s Timberline Lodge provided some establishing shots, and the opening aerials were filmed along Going-to-the-Sun Road in Glacier National Park.
The film made pioneering use of the Steadicam. Operator Garrett Brown used it to glide through tight hotel sets and to film the hedge-maze chase. Kubrick’s habit of shooting many takes was hard on the cast, and a behind-the-scenes documentary shows Duvall exhausted on set. Danny Lloyd was protected from the material: he believed he was acting in a drama, not a horror film. The music combines an electronic score by Wendy Carlos and Rachel Elkind with existing modernist works, including pieces by Krzysztof Penderecki.
Release and reception
The Shining opened in the U.S. on the same weekend as The Empire Strikes Back. Playing on only 10 screens, it took $622,337 over the four-day weekend, a higher per-screen average than Empire. About a week into the run, Kubrick cut an epilogue set in a hospital, and the European release was about 25 minutes shorter again. Reviews were mixed. Janet Maslin of The New York Times praised Nicholson and the setting but found the supernatural story frustrating, and Variety accused Kubrick of throwing away what made King’s novel frightening. The film even received nominations for Worst Director and Worst Actress at the first Golden Raspberry Awards. The Razzies withdrew Duvall’s nomination in 2022, citing how Kubrick had treated her during production.
King has said it is the only adaptation of one of his novels that he can “remember hating.” Much of his objection centers on the film’s version of Jack. Critics, however, came around. By 1987 Rolling Stone noted that a reappraisal was under way, and today the film has an 84% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes. AFI ranked it No. 29 on its list of the 100 most thrilling American films, and it was added to the National Film Registry in 2018.
Legacy and influence
The Grady twins in the corridor, “REDRUM” written backward on a door, the elevator flooding with blood, and Jack’s face in the splintered bathroom door are among the most referenced images in horror. AFI named Jack Torrance the 25th greatest screen villain and placed “Here’s Johnny!” at No. 68 on its list of the greatest movie quotes. The hotel’s impossible geography has fueled decades of theories; executive producer Jan Harlan has said the set was built that way on purpose. In 2019, Mike Flanagan’s Doctor Sleep adapted King’s sequel novel while also serving as a sequel to Kubrick’s film.
Trivia
- Nicholson improvised “Heeeere’s Johnny!” from Ed McMahon’s introduction on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. Carson later opened his 18th-anniversary show with the clip.
- King’s Room 217 became Room 237 because Timberline Lodge asked Kubrick not to show a real room number that might scare off guests. Room 217 is now the lodge’s most requested room.
- Guinness once credited the stairway scene, with Wendy swinging the bat, as the most retakes for a single scene, at 127. Lee Unkrich’s history of the film disputes that number, and Guinness later updated the record to 148 takes for the conversation between Danny and Hallorann.
- For foreign-language versions, Kubrick had Jack’s typed pages reshot with local proverbs. The Italian version uses “Il mattino ha l’oro in bocca” (“The morning has gold in its mouth”).
- Ridley Scott used outtakes from the film’s opening aerial footage for the ending of Blade Runner‘s original cut.
- In April 2025 the source of the final photograph was identified: a 1921 Valentine’s Day dance at the Royal Palace Hotel in Kensington, London. Nicholson’s face had been airbrushed over that of a dancer, John Golman.
Related links
- Jack Torrance and Danny Torrance (characters)
- Doctor Sleep (2019 sequel)
- Stanley Kubrick (director) and Diane Johnson (co-writer)
- Jack Nicholson, Shelley Duvall, Scatman Crothers and Danny Lloyd (cast)
- Stephen King (author)
- Other Stephen King films: Misery and It (2017)
- The Exorcist, the Warner Bros. hit Kubrick had turned down
