Stanley Kubrick's Horror Film: The Shining

Stanley Kubrick (1928 to 1999) was the American director of The Shining, 2001: A Space Odyssey and Dr. Strangelove, who worked from England.

Quick Specs

Born	July 26, 1928, New York City (born in Manhattan, raised in the Bronx)
Died	March 7, 1999, at home in Hertfordshire, England, of a heart attack in his sleep, aged 70
First career	Look magazine staff photographer, from 17
Feature films	Thirteen as director, 1953 to 1999
Key films	Paths of Glory (1957); Dr. Strangelove (1964); 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968); A Clockwork Orange (1971); Barry Lyndon (1975); The Shining (1980); Full Metal Jacket (1987); Eyes Wide Shut (1999)
Horror	The Shining (1980), his only horror film
Oscars	Thirteen nominations, one win, Best Visual Effects for 2001: A Space Odyssey
Base	England from the early 1960s; Childwickbury Manor, Hertfordshire
Marriage	Christiane Harlan, his third wife, until his death

Who He Was

Stanley Kubrick was born on July 26, 1928, in Manhattan, New York City, and raised in the Bronx.

He was a photographer before he was a filmmaker. Still in high school, he sold a photograph to Look magazine: a newsboy’s face on the day President Franklin D. Roosevelt died, in April 1945. He became a Look staff photographer at 17. Four years of professional photojournalism came before his first film. The eye was trained before the camera moved.

He was also a chess player. As a teenager he played obsessively, and in his own account he later hustled games for money in Washington Square, becoming a strong club-level player. Chess is the standard biographical key to his method, and the playing itself is the fact.

His third marriage, to Christiane Harlan, whom he met through Paths of Glory (1957), lasted until his death. From the early 1960s he lived and worked in England. The move was about control, taxes and privacy, and every film from Lolita onward was made from his English base. He eventually settled at Childwickbury Manor in Hertfordshire, which served as both home and production office. He lived privately, but he was not a recluse in any hermit sense: he ran large productions from that house for decades.

He died on March 7, 1999, at home in Hertfordshire, of a heart attack in his sleep. He was 70. It was days after he had screened the finished Eyes Wide Shut for its stars and its studio.

The Work, and What He Did in It

The shorts and the disowned debut came first, from 1951 to 1953. Day of the Fight (1951) was a boxing short spun out of his Look photography. Then came Fear and Desire (1953), his first feature, made at 24. He later judged it amateurish and tried to withdraw it from circulation, buying up and suppressing prints where he could. The control that defines the career began as embarrassment management.

The Killing (1956) and Paths of Glory (1957) were the arrival. The racetrack-heist film’s fractured timeline announced the formal intelligence. In Paths of Glory, Kirk Douglas plays a French officer defending men condemned by their own generals, and the film was kept out of French cinemas for nearly two decades under official pressure. By 29 he had made one of the decade’s defining genre films and one of its defining anti-war films.

Spartacus (1960) was the hired job. He took over a troubled Kirk Douglas production and delivered a hit he did not control and never counted among his own in spirit. It is the exception that proves the rule. After Spartacus, he never again worked without final cut in substance.

Lolita (1962) and Dr. Strangelove (1964) came from his English base. After the Nabokov adaptation came the thermonuclear comedy, with Peter Sellers in three roles: Group Captain Mandrake, President Muffley and Dr. Strangelove. Sellers was to have played a fourth, Major Kong, until an ankle injury and the Texas accent defeated him, and Slim Pickens inherited the ride on the bomb.

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), co-written with Arthur C. Clarke, was the summit of the sixties. He made it at 39. He rebuilt science-fiction cinema around procedure, silence and effects photography, and he took home his only Oscar, for the film’s visual effects. Initial reviews were divided to hostile, and the film’s standing inverted within a decade.

A Clockwork Orange (1971), from Anthony Burgess, carries a story that is almost always told wrong. It was not banned by the British censors. The BBFC passed it. After press coverage linked it to alleged copycat violence, and after threats against Kubrick and his family, Kubrick himself asked Warner Bros. to withdraw it from UK distribution in 1973. It stayed unavailable in Britain for the remaining twenty-six years of his life, and it was re-released in 2000, after his death.

Barry Lyndon (1975) put Thackeray in candlelight. It was shot in part with Zeiss f/0.7 lenses developed for NASA, adapted to photograph scenes lit only by candles. The commercial indifference it met is the context for what came next: he chose a Stephen King bestseller.

The Shining (1980) is the horror centrepiece, and his only horror feature. It is one horror film in thirteen. What he did on it is specific.

He built the Overlook in England. The interiors were built and shot on standing sets at EMI Elstree Studios in Hertfordshire, for the better part of a year. Only the opening and exterior material was American: the Timberline Lodge on Mount Hood, Oregon, supplied the exteriors. Timberline’s management asked that the novel’s Room 217 become Room 237 in the film, fearing guests would avoid the real 217. The novel’s Colorado setting, and the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park that inspired King, are different places again. The film was not shot at either. Three places, a set in England, a lodge in Oregon and a hotel in Colorado, routinely get merged into one, and keeping them apart is the first test of any account of the production.
He rewrote daily. He wrote the screenplay with Diane Johnson, rewriting pages every day. Stephen King wrote the novel (1977); Kubrick and Johnson wrote the film.
He drove the repetition. The takes record is famous, and it has two sides. Guinness World Records credits The Shining with the most retakes of a scene with dialogue, 127 takes, for the scene in which Wendy backs up the stairs swinging a baseball bat at Jack. Gordon Stainforth, the film’s assistant editor, has disputed the figures from inside the production. By his account the staircase scene ran to roughly 45 to 60 takes, and the most-retaken scene of the film was Scatman Crothers’s kitchen exposition scene, at some 75 to 85 takes. Those are Stainforth’s figures against Guinness’s, and neither should be printed alone.
He let the star run hot. He cast the biggest star available, against King’s wishes, and gave him room. Jack Nicholson improvised “Here’s Johnny!” and co-wrote the confrontation in which Wendy finds the manuscript, drawing on his own divorce. The breakaway doors had to be replaced with real ones, because Nicholson, a former volunteer firefighter from his Air National Guard years, swung the axe too well for the fakes.
He cut after release. After the premiere weekend he cut a closing hospital scene, with Wendy recovering and Ullman visiting, from the release version.

The result was a film King disliked, and one of the most analysed horror films ever made. King’s objection is real and specific. He disliked the casting of Nicholson: in his account, Torrance should begin sane, and casting Nicholson signalled madness from the first frame. He also disliked the film’s coldness and its departures from his novel. He later took his contractual path to his own version, the 1997 television miniseries. There was no personal feud. It was a disagreement between two craftsmen, conducted largely in interviews.

Full Metal Jacket (1987) was Vietnam built in England, with the Beckton gasworks in London’s docklands dressed as Huế. R. Lee Ermey, a real drill instructor hired as an adviser, took the drill-instructor role himself.

Eyes Wide Shut (1999) was the last film, and it was finished. After a marathon shoot with Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, he delivered and screened the final cut, and he died days after that screening, in March 1999, before the July release.

He left thirteen feature films as director in forty-six years, from 1953 to 1999, plus the early shorts. No other major director’s filmography is this short or this weighted.

After his death, A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001) reached screens. Kubrick developed it, and Steven Spielberg directed it. It is not a Kubrick film by direction.

Cool Verified Facts

He sold his first photograph to Look magazine while still in high school, and joined its staff at 17.
His only Oscar was for visual effects, for 2001: A Space Odyssey. He was never named Best Director, from thirteen nominations.
He withdrew A Clockwork Orange from British distribution himself, after threats against his family. The censors had passed it.
The Overlook’s interiors were sets at Elstree in Hertfordshire. Only the exteriors came from Oregon.
Room 217 became Room 237 at the request of the Timberline Lodge.
Barry Lyndon used lenses developed for NASA to shoot by candlelight.
Peter Sellers plays three roles in Dr. Strangelove, and was meant to play a fourth.
The Guinness 127-takes record for The Shining is disputed by the film’s own assistant editor.
He tried to suppress his own first feature, Fear and Desire.
He co-wrote The Shining’s screenplay with Diane Johnson; Stephen King wrote only the novel.
He died days after screening the finished Eyes Wide Shut, months before its July release.
A.I. Artificial Intelligence was his project, but Steven Spielberg directed it, in 2001.

Signatures, Habits and Behind the Scenes

Control was his method, and the record’s own facts show it: final cut after Spartacus, daily rewrites on The Shining, a first feature suppressed by its own director, and a masterpiece withdrawn by its own director in one country for twenty-six years. He was a perfectionist, and the record demonstrates it without the word.

Repetition was an instrument, with the dispute attached. The long takes and retakes were deliberate, a way of wearing a performance down to something unplanned. The counts are where legend outruns the log. Stainforth’s correction matters because it is a rare, checkable instance of a Kubrick legend being audited from inside the cutting room.

He had a research appetite. For The Shining, he and Johnson read on psychology and the uncanny. For the unmade Napoleon, he amassed a library and a card index of a whole era. Napoleon, prepared for years and never shot, is the most famous unmade film in his record.

He ran his productions by telephone from Childwickbury, at hours and for lengths that became legend. It is the working shape of a director who stayed in one house and kept whole productions in his hands, and it is the opposite of the recluse shorthand.

The Shining was gruelling for Shelley Duvall, and that much is documented across the record. The stronger claim, that he deliberately broke her down and caused lasting harm, is contested, including by Duvall’s own varying accounts over the years.

Why He Matters

He made exactly one horror film, and it reorganised the genre. The Shining made horror a matter of architecture, duration and sound, the Overlook’s impossible geography, the typewriter’s rhythm and the elevators of blood, rather than shock. It stands as proof that the genre’s tools, in the hands of cinema’s most controlled director, produce one of the least controllable films in the canon. The choice of Nicholson is part of that design. Kubrick cast the actor whose warmth audiences trusted, then spent the whole film, through its architecture, its sound and its endless repetition, withdrawing it, and the film’s fear lives in that slow subtraction rather than in any single scare. King’s objection is part of the same legacy. The genre still argues about whether the film’s coldness is its failure or its genius, and the argument itself is the influence.

For cinema overall, his thirteen features include defining statements of the heist film, the war film, the nuclear satire, the science-fiction film, the period film and the horror film. The culture ratified them slowly. 2001 and Strangelove sit in every canon, and so does The Shining. The single Oscar, for effects, is the Academy’s own anomaly.

The proof kept coming after his death. A.I. reached screens under Spielberg’s direction from Kubrick’s development. Eyes Wide Shut grows in reputation every year. And the archive of his research, the Napoleon materials above all, is exhibited and published as a work in itself.