Stanley Kubrick’s Gothic Labyrinth

The Shining was forced upon Stanley Kubrick by circumstances. Warner Brothers had lost too much money underwriting his previous film, Barry Lyndon. Based on a nineteenth-century comedy by William Thackeray, it was perceived as highbrow and general audiences kept away. Kubrick needed a movie with popular appeal. Having browsed through several novels sent by the film company, he was taken with a ghost story by the young writer Stephen King. Kubrick had avoided horror films to date, refusing offers of The Exorcist and its sequel. This time he was attracted to the plot construction, so he took on The Shining.

The story followed Jack Torrance, a blocked writer and recovering alcoholic who has been hired as the off-season caretaker at a resort hotel in the Colorado Rockies. He is accompanied by his wife Wendy and their five-year-old son Danny, who has psychic abilities. The hotel has a history: a woman committed suicide there, three mobsters were murdered, and a winter caretaker succumbed to cabin fever, killing his wife and children then taking his own life. As weeks pass and the hotel is isolated by snowfalls, the Torrances are visited by chilling hallucinations. Danny glimpses the murders years before, and becomes withdrawn. Jack is haunted by malevolent figures from the hotel’s past who tempt him to drink again. As well, topiary creatures in the garden outside, a fire hose and the creaky elevator come to life and threaten the family. Tensions mount until Jack, possessed by an evil spirit, goes on a rampage intending to murder his terrified wife and child. But the hotel’s antiquated boiler explodes, with the resort and Jack being consumed in a blazing pyre.

Kubrick had no intention of working with Stephen King. He didn’t think much of King’s writing.[1] The novel of The Shining was encumbered with needless flashbacks, and the prose was weak. There was no grace in the handling of words, no tastiness to the style. The author’s figural language was sometimes clunky. At one point Jack Torrance has terror in the “back of his throat like a taste of gone-over cherries”, for example; and, driving in his car, the character Dick Hallorann “squeezed the accelerator like the breast of a much-loved woman”.[2] King’s punctuation and italics were the stuff of comic strips, as in “(???WHAT PARTY???)” and “(????WHAT MASKS????).” And the mostly basic thoughts of his uncouth characters had abrupt literary flashes. Lines from T.S. Eliot and others rush through their minds; even Danny, who is still to learn reading, has quotations from Edgar Allan Poe pop into his pre-school head.

But Kubrick was primarily averse to the clichés of a genre which smacked of Roger Corman’s horror flicks and the British Hammer productions, those stagy vehicles for Vincent Price and Peter Cushing. He would use no menacing shadows, no fiery infernos, no pouncing creatures. King’s novel may have rated number eight on the US best-seller list, but Kubrick disliked a treatment already prepared by the author.[3] So Stephen King was out.

Stanley Kubrick’s choice of co-author for the screenplay conveys much about his thinking. When shooting Barry Lyndon he had read The Shadow Knows, a story of a woman who fears she is being stalked. The first-person narrative kept up the suspense by shifting between a conviction that the woman was being menaced, and doubts that she was imagining things. It was the fourth novel of Diane Johnson, a mid-career writer and sometime critic for the New York Review of Books. Kubrick telephoned Johnson to discuss her book. There followed a sequence of phone calls in which, having been clear that he did not want to film her novel, he sounded her out. “They were literary conversations,” Johnson recalled. “He talked like a writer and I enjoyed them.” Learning that she was a tenured academic who lectured in nineteenth-century British literature at the University of California, Kubrick probed her on works including Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho and Matthew Lewis’s The Monk.

The Kubricks invited Johnson and her cardiologist husband to dinner when they were visiting Britain. They met in the restaurant at the London Hilton. Kubrick explained over the meal that he was planning to film The Shining and he proposed that Johnson write with him a contemporary screenplay in the high Gothic tradition. She was left in no doubt that Stephen King was out of the frame. Kubrick would use the story’s structure while avoiding the customary trappings of commercial horror movies.

 

Diane Johnson returned to Britain to shape the script in late 1977 and a daily routine commenced. She was driven each morning in a chauffeured orange Mercedes to the Kubricks’ house at Childwick Bury in Hertfordshire. The author and the director each had separately worked up an outline, so they sat at a table in Kubrick’s book-lined workroom where they compared treatments and analysed every scene. Then they merged the versions into one embryonic screenplay and began developing.

Kubrick and Johnson were in agreement that the novel was at points corny, and needed heavy revision. Hours were spent discussing a variety of connected intellectual subjects, taking books from the surrounding shelves to check their ideas, talking some more, then making notes and revising their draft treatment. They would break off in the afternoon so Kubrick could handle production matters for The Shining including the set, casting, costumes and music. Johnson was asked her opinion on these details, as were members of the Kubrick family (“Oh, daddy, no one dresses like that”).[4] Johnson recalls that the director was also at times thinking ahead about making films on the Vietnam War (Full Metal Jacket) and an Arthur Schnitzler novella (Eyes Wide Shut). She usually stayed on for dinner with the Kubricks and to see private screenings of movies—horror films, Jack Nicholson vehicles, cinema classics, new releases. Then she went back to her London flat to read and think.

The collaboration was close. “We really did write it together,” Johnson told Kubrick’s biographer, John Baxter:

 

We would sit down and talk about a scene, then I would go away and write the dialogue. Right from scratch we would discuss theories of horror … I really had the sense he was working through all that for himself for the first time. We got books out of the library, people like Freud. Books about what is scary, and why we feel so scared of this book, etcetera. Bruno Bettelheim’s The Uses of Enchantment, about the importance of fairy tales, was a useful source. So were Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre, and the stories of Edgar Allan Poe. Family hate seemed quite important. We decided that in the case of The Shining this was a central element.[5]

 

The pair pressed further, probing the foundations for Gothic unease: “It was typical of Kubrick to want an explanation for the nature of horror, wanting to understand the underlying psychological mechanism,” Diane Johnson explains.[6] Throughout she had a free hand. She used it to propose some of the film’s most disturbing elements.[7] Kubrick was appreciative. He wanted to make an authentic Gothic fiction and, gauging their script against literary works, relentlessly cut material he judged flawed from the dwindling remains of Stephen King’s horror story.

The psychological complexity of the screenplay Kubrick and Johnson were shaping very much mirrored the nature of the Gothic genre. Mental instability was always synonymous with Romanticism and the Gothic, being prominent in the tales and poems of Coleridge, Poe, Le Fanu, Stoker and Lovecraft among others. Such authors had suggested an ambiguous overlap between heightened perceptions, mystical states, mental possession by a supernatural force, crazed hallucinations, and traumatic shock arising from an encounter with evil. From The Woman in White to The Cabinet of Dr Caligari characters may be confined in an asylum, or treated as if their reason is in doubt, or, in the most disturbing works, the reader enters the mind of an individual not knowing if the events are true or symptoms of delusion. And sanity in the Gothic tale is often gendered, with women vulnerable to mental disturbance.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Henry James had taken these themes to startling extremes with their fin de siècle stories, respectively “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892) and “The Turn of the Screw” (1898). Gilman’s first-person narrative centres on a woman who has been confined to bed in a country mansion—a cure imposed by her physician husband for “a slight hysterical tendency”. After weeks of isolation the reluctant patient imagines a “strange formless sort of figure” may be lurking within the patterned wallpaper in her now locked room. Gradually her mind fractures, and she believes the creature sneaks out of the yellow design at times. The story ends when the illusory being has taken possession of the now demented narrator.

James penned a ghost story with a similar psychological twist. “The Turn of the Screw” is told by a governess barely out of her teens who, sent to care for two orphans on a lonely estate, becomes aware that spectres are watching. After talking with the housekeeper, she is convinced they are the ghosts of the previous governess and a manservant. The narrator leaps to the conclusion that the two were romantically involved, and their spirits are intent upon corrupting the youngsters. But even as the children test her patience, we are increasingly unsure whether the phantoms are real, or figments of the narrator’s neurotic, sexually-repressed mind. Might she be misconstruing naughty acts by isolated and lonely youngsters?

These definitive stories supplied the foundation for Shirley Jackson’s 1959 novel The Haunting of Hill House, a skilfully crafted model of psychological insight merged with Gothic unease—and an overt source for Kubrick and Johnson’s treatment. Jackson’s novel was closer in mood to the late Victorian supernatural story than to modern American horror writing, for it contained not the slightest trace of gory sensationalism. Jackson’s tale was anathema to pulp fiction.

Her plot hung on the character of Eleanor Vance, a thirty-two-year-old spinster who has sacrificed her youth to an invalid mother. When the tale begins the embittered matriarch is dead and Miss Vance now serves as home-help for her sister’s family. Hope of escaping her friendless tedium has appeared in an invitation from a scholar to join a small party which will spend summer in the countryside at an old New England mansion called Hill House.

What Miss Vance does not know is that Dr John Montague, an anthropologist, aspires to prove there really are haunted houses. The group he wanted to assemble consisted of individuals who appear to have bona fide psychic abilities, although most he contacted would not play along—apart, that is, from the unsuspecting Miss Vance, who had been harassed by a poltergeist in childhood. She innocently heads off to Hill House, which has a grim reputation. “No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality,” the book begins. “Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within …”

The novel is carefully orchestrated understatement. Not a word is ill-considered. Much of the narrative flows between the unremarkable routine in the house and Miss Vance’s buzzing thoughts, because she has an extremely active imagination. This introduces the puzzle of the book. When inexplicable events occur it is unclear whether they are caused by a malign presence, or if her mind is playing tricks. Is Hill House really calling to Miss Vance telepathically? Has the spirit of her unfeeling mother settled there?

Stanley Kubrick and Diane Johnson merged the plot structure of The Shining with the psychological framework of The Haunting of Hill House and its Gothic sources. Instead of having events driven by an evil power within the resort hotel, stress was placed on the mental state of a central character. Johnson recently explained:

 

To what extent supernatural forces existed and to what extent these were psychological projections was something we discussed at length, finally deciding that the ghosts and magical apparitions at the Overlook Hotel were both, that the supernatural was somehow generated by human psychology …[8]

 

There was a key difference. Gilman, James and Jackson had used a vulnerable isolated female protagonist—a signature Gothic theme since the 1790s novels of Ann Radcliffe—whereas Stephen King’s The Shining focused on the resentful, ill-tempered Jack Torrance, a husband and father. The film would use this shift to a male central character to its advantage.

 

Kubrick was particularly interested in Bruno Bettelheim’s The Uses of Enchantment (1976), a recently published book that was propelling a reappraisal of Romanticism and Gothic literature in academia. Johnson has since explained that she and Kubrick used the controversial study, which employed Freudian analysis to interpret fairy tales, to flesh out their screenplay. In fact, when interviewed by a journalist while shooting the film, Kubrick revealingly said, “One of the things horror stories can do is to show us the archetypes of the unconscious; we can see the dark side without having to confront it directly.”[9]

Bettelheim’s book explored the implications of Sigmund Freud’s little known essay on “The Uncanny”—another source consulted by Johnson and Kubrick. Pondering the meaning of E.T.A. Hoffmann’s story “The Sandman”, Freud had likened folk tales to dreams in that they may be forms of symbolic narrative which reveal psychological drives, repressed tensions and subconscious social and sexual mores. Freud suggested that family relationships were at stake in many traditional tales, invoking a struggle between sons and fathers as implicit in certain Hoffmann stories (“I had the impression that Kubrick was attracted to The Shining because of the father-son thing,” Johnson said[10]). Bettelheim extended the analysis to explore tales of daughters and mothers, daughters and step-mothers, the selection of suitable husbands and wives, and other relationship patterns.

At the centre of The Shining is young Danny’s decision whether to side with Jack, or with Wendy. The child must choose between father and mother. Much is at stake when the youngster selects between a volatile irrational figure and a stable pragmatic figure, for it involves a rejection of the supernatural.

Of course, the original motivation for Gothic novels and works of art was to show—from the rationalist standpoint of the Enlightenment—life in a state of feudal ignorance and medieval superstition. Characters are prey to bizarre fears because reason is absent: “the sleep of reason produces monsters”, as Goya famously inscribed in his Gothic etchings Los Capricos. Which was why Ann Radcliffe’s books gave scientific explanations for what her characters construe as supernatural phenomena. This was discarded as the popular form evolved and eager readers revelled in fanciful tales of encounters with the occult (a literary fad Jane Austen satirised in Northanger Abbey). But it is a tension between the pre-modern and modern that later underpinned Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, where all pivots on Catherine Earnshaw’s suppressed feelings for the impulsive, elemental Heathcliff. Nowadays he is cast as a Byronic anti-hero, although when the novel was penned Heathcliff was a shady Gothic figure with a hint of the vampire, a pre-modern man touched by pagan forces.[11]

Did knowledge of this influence Kubrick and Johnson as they reshaped Jack Torrance, eliminating any redeeming qualities from the story’s embittered protagonist, this figure who invokes dark powers?

 

Michel Ciment, one of Kubrick’s more discerning interpreters, has speculated that the director may have been attracted to The Shining by characteristics it shares with his earlier work 2001: A Space Odyssey. Both stories involve people in remote environments who rely on manmade structures to survive, and who are placed at the mercy of hostile “un-human” entities. For Ciment, the Torrance family echoes the Jupiter astronauts; the Overlook Hotel in the Rocky Mountains is a version of the spacecraft crossing the solar system; the malevolent spectres rework the insane computer HAL. Musing over these details, Ciment further suggests The Shining and 2001: A Space Odyssey each trade in a “breach in the recognised order of things”.[12]

Then again, Kubrick repeatedly has his audiences ponder whether the better angels in human nature will hold firm. Much as The Shining traces Torrance giving way to sadistic impulses, A Clockwork Orange had followed the feral Alex who—in spite of a fondness for Beethoven—was incapable of being civilised. Then there was Lolita with Humbert Humbert, an urbane sophisticate who nevertheless preyed upon children without compunction, and Full Metal Jacket would later follow Cowboy who tries, in vain, to stay above the moral abandon of warfare. This concern with human nature was also implicit in 2001: A Space Odyssey, which starts with the first hominid discovering how to kill, and concludes when the detached astronaut Dave Bowman takes the final evolutionary step.

There is a more direct link between The Shining and Kubrick’s previous project. Having just finished a film immersed in the values of the eighteenth century, Barry Lyndon, he turns to a literary genre that emerged from that age: the Gothic. The Overlook Hotel high in its mountain wilderness is an updated version of the horrific castles of Walpole, Reeve and Radcliffe.[13] The alpine resort is even replete with a room holding ghastly secrets. What Kubrick rethinks and refines are Stephen King’s supporting motifs. Gone is the fiery climax of Brontë’s Jane Eyre (where Charlotte Brontë had a fire break out in the attic, killing the insane Mrs Rochester and razing Thornfield Hall to the ground, King has an inferno erupt in the cellar, killing the crazed Jack Torrance and destroying the Overlook Hotel). And Kubrick makes a better use of Poe’s “Masque of the Red Death” with a lavish ballroom scene, as well as vividly invoking the blood-splashed chamber of Perrault’s “Bluebeard” with the hotel’s lift foyer. He even introduces a version of Coleridge’s beautiful/leprous Christabel as the woman in Room 237.[14] The Shining is the carefully fashioned Gothic inverse of an urbane humanist culture.

 

After eleven weeks of concentrated work the screenplay was ready. Kubrick and Johnson had trimmed needless material and thoroughly revised what was inconsistent or weak. The lengthy backstory of the Torrance family was gone. The resentful Jack Torrance was given a more tetchy personality and demoted to a would-be writer. The supporting character Dick Hallorann, the hotel chef who rushed to Wendy and Danny’s aid at the end of King’s novel, was now brutally murdered with an axe by Jack. The hotel’s criminal history was deleted, and the decadent gangsters’ party was pared down to a glimpsed figure in a dog costume. Supernatural episodes that descended into clichéd horror were discarded: the wasps, fire hose, elevator, topiary animals in the garden, and playground ghost all went. So did the book’s hackneyed finish, with its exploding boiler and cleansing fire. “We agreed that blowing up the hotel was banal,” Johnson said. “Things always blow up in horror films.”[15]

As Stanley Kubrick moved forward with a production schedule, Diane Johnson flew back to California to resume teaching. Shooting would start in May 1978. It was timed, and budgeted, to take seventeen weeks. As work progressed the length of the shoot doubled, then tripled. Warner Brothers were exasperated. Then a studio fire broke out and incinerated the entire Colorado Lounge. Only close-ups remained to be shot, but Kubrick insisted the sprawling set be rebuilt, at a cost of $2.5 million. In the event, the principal photography wasn’t completed until April 1979. Filming had taken so long it held up other productions booked for the Elstree Studios, beginning with Stephen Spielberg’s Raiders of the Lost Ark, followed by Warren Beatty’s Reds.[16]

Summer saw Kubrick immersed in the edit at his home. Dark in mood, if not illumination, the film he was shaping was claustrophobic and disturbing. The director’s blending of story with imagery was erudite, mature, and wore the Gothic tradition with poise.

As expected of a Kubrick film the cinematography was carried out with precision—after all he had begun working life as a photojournalist at Look magazine. And there were touches symptomatic of his sensibility. The Grady twins are modelled on a renowned photograph by his old friend Diane Arbus; the design of the men’s toilet recalls the space station lounge in 2001: A Space Odyssey; he repeatedly used his signature symmetrical shots with figures looking into rooms or halls. Overarching all is a measured use of camera angles, and the visual rhythms the director crafted in the cutting-room, which would instil a mounting dread in the audience.

Kubrick’s The Shining starts with aerial photography from a helicopter. The opening shot of a tiny tree-covered island on a mirror-smooth lake emphasises the remoteness of this sublime mountainous region. The camera follows a yellow VW Beetle driving along a deserted highway as the introductory credits run. The road slopes upward, and leads the viewer into forests in autumn colours and thinning foliage, then rocky slopes with light snow.

The car appears puny in the awe-inspiring immensity of pine forests and alpine peaks. Indeed, the scenery evokes Mary Shelley’s descriptive passages in Frankenstein of snowy wildernesses as places of potential paranormal encounter. The eeriness of this setting is conveyed by screeches of unease on an ominous soundtrack.

Then we reach the Overlook Hotel, which mimics a Bavarian schloss atop its mountain waste, while inside the décor is an updated version of Gothic. Historical times are suggested without resorting to stereotype. In place of decaying medieval interiors, the architecture is twenties Frank Lloyd Wright—old-style American modernity—tastefully mated with native American rugs and memorabilia.[17] And in place of dingy oil paintings there are clusters of black-and-white photographs.

The first scenes in the hotel fix a sense of isolation. Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) tells the staff he made good time, taking three and a half hours to drive here. The subsequent conversations underline the fact that there are no neighbours, no community that can be leaned on. This is an outpost. There is also no authority offering protection, no stoic lawman: the forest ranger, a homely person in a distant office, remains a voice over the radio.

Much is conveyed in passing details.[18] Jack is told of a former caretaker who succumbed to cabin fever and murdered his family. Then in the Torrances’ car, on the drive to the Overlook Hotel, young Danny (Danny Lloyd) wants to chat about the “Donner party”, pioneers in covered wagons who resorted to cannibalism when snowbound further west. Once at their destination the manager mentions to Wendy (Shelley Duvall) that the resort was built on a native burial ground, prompting Indian attacks during construction. And the television news runs in the background as Wendy cooks supper, carrying reports of a murderer given a life sentence and a woman disappearing on a hunting trip with her husband.

The film avoids graphic imagery and gory sensationalism when haunting scenes are introduced. If Kubrick inserts an early flash of unsettling things—a lift foyer flooding with blood in slow motion, identical twins in a homely hall, Danny’s face screaming in darkness—horror is not forced. There is no menace. And as apparitions go, the Grady girls, Lloyd the barman, and Grady the waiter are commonplace and ordinary (in keeping with Freud’s view of “the uncanny”). The director builds tension through ambiguity and suggestion, especially with his unsettling musical score, letting viewers’ imaginations supply the apprehension. Besides, these “ghosts” are surely more delusions than apparitions. Where Jack perceives Lloyd in a well-stocked hotel bar, Wendy sees an empty room.

Probably the chief departure from Stephen King’s book involved the hotel fittings that sprang to life. Kubrick and Johnson left them out, although the pair were stumped over what to do about the garden. Then it sprang into the director’s mind to put in it a large hedge maze.

 

Kubrick’s realisation of the Overlook Hotel points openly to a cryptic film made two decades earlier in 1961. Last Year at Marienbad was the product of an exchange between the cinematic and the literary “new”, a joint undertaking of the director Alain Resnais and the nouveau roman writer Alain Robbe-Grillet.

Robbe-Grillet was known for difficult self-enclosed novels about unbalanced individuals. His first published work, The Erasers (1953), follows an investigator as he roams the interlocking streets of a Flemish city. Searching for a murderer who has not yet committed the killing, the detective is compelled to keep halting at shops, where he purchases pencil erasers he doesn’t need. The detective’s watch has stopped—at the minute of the impending murder, we discover, for it starts ticking when the crime is committed. Reality is a disorienting web. The central characters in Robbe-Grillet’s novels seem trapped in a puzzle, although, as the literary critic John Sturrock pointed out, this is of their own making: events are seen through “a frantic imagination at work”.[19] Robbe-Grillet’s most recent story In the Labyrinth (1959), had observed a soldier attempting to deliver a small box following a battle. Suffering shellshock and detached from his emotions, he drifts through a maze-like town in a feverish dissociated state, trying to find the one room where he can reclaim his mind.

For his part Resnais had ushered in the cinematic “New Wave” and its unorthodox sensibility with his first feature film Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959). But in hindsight The Entire Memory of the World (1956), his short documentary on the Bibliothèque Nationale, had more bearing on the next project.[20] Following a volume from the library’s stacks to its reading room, the camera revels in the countless bookshelves, the stairwells, grills, locked doors, and over a hundred kilometres of corridors. Convoluted patterns abound in a work that likewise toys with a labyrinth motif. The paper trail of a reference work is traced from purchase order to being received, stamped, given its identity sheet, recorded in the card catalogue, then assigned a shelf position. Through a sequence of tracking shots, Resnais depicted the national library, this paper memory, as an immense maze.

With their joint effort, Resnais and Robbe-Grillet crafted a cinematic enigma that stymied the efforts of most audiences to interpret what they had seen. Last Year at Marienbad is a baffling hallucination. It does not feign to relate a story in the objective world, a myth, or even a fantasy tale. Instead we are within someone’s mind as thoughts tick over and he obsesses: “The whole film,” Robbe-Grillet admitted,

 

deals with a reality which the hero creates out of his own vision, out of his own words. And if his persistence, his secret conviction, finally prevails, it does so among a perfect labyrinth of false trails, variants, failures, and repetitions![21]

 

Shot at the baroque palaces of Schleissheim and Nymphenburg, the film’s setting is a labyrinthine resort which induces an overwhelming sense that we are inside a sumptuous puzzle. This was in keeping with the novelist’s instructions to the cameraman and set designer:

 

The path which we follow must be extremely well provided with various passages such as pillars, porticos, vestibules, chicanes, little staircases, intersecting corridors, etc. Moreover, the effect of a labyrinth is magnified by the presence of monumental mirrors, which reflect other perspectives of complicated passages.[22]

 

The inward-looking film opens with an extended montage of tracking shots and details of the hotel’s décor as a low male voice talks to itself:

 

Once again—I walk on, once again, down these corridors, through these halls, these galleries, in this structure—of another century, this enormous, luxurious, baroque, lugubrious hotel—where corridors succeed endless corridors—silent, deserted corridors overloaded with a dim, cold ornamentation of woodwork, stucco mouldings, marble, black mirrors, dark paintings, columns, heavy hangings—sculpted door frames, series of doorways, galleries—transverse corridors that open in turn on empty salons, rooms overloaded with ornamentation from another century, silent halls where the sound of advancing footsteps is absorbed by carpets so thick and heavy that nothing can be heard, as if the ear of the man walking on once again, down these corridors—through these halls, these galleries, in the structure of another century, this enormous, luxurious, baroque, lugubrious hotel…[23]

 

This description of the interiors, opulent yet monotonous, conveys the film’s character. All is slowed down, formal and restrained. Louche guests in evening wear behave as automatons within the splendour of gilded hallways and mirrored salons. Actions are stilted, mechanical, endlessly repetitive. People are positioned like chess pieces on a board. This is brought out as the guests stiffly watch a drama, stand rigid in a geometrically designed garden, and play the unwinnable Chinese game “Nim”. These amnesiacs are trapped in a structured illusion, eternally looping through the same activities. Behind all, the notes of a pipe organ follow rhythms and melodic cycles that will not reach a conclusion.

What there is of a story centres on three characters: a woman, A (Delphine Seyrig), and two men, M (Sacha Pitoeff) who is A’s partner, and X (Giorgio Albertazzi). X stands apart. He does not behave in the stilted manner of other guests. He keeps competing with M, an ace at “Nim”, trying to break the pattern of inevitability. X also attempts to get the attentions of A, telling her they met last year at Marienbad and fell in love. She repeatedly denies this took place, insisting she has not visited the spa. At the end, A abruptly recalls that she had known and loved X at Marienbad, but he had died in an accident in the hotel’s garden. A and X then leave the hotel, and the remaining guests resume their cycle. However, having lost track of the couple’s encounters, it is unclear if we just watched current events, flashbacks, flash forwards, or an alternate reality. The story is vague, hallucinatory, unresolved.

 

Stanley Kubrick had slipped a visual reference to Last Year at Marienbad into Barry Lyndon: with a long scene in a similar baroque garden, he has characters strike mannered poses like Resnais’s hotel guests. The Shining was a more inventive adaptation of the French film’s underpinning motif, as Kubrick merged the Overlook Hotel with the hallucinatory resort of Last Year at Marienbad. Besides placing a large maze in the hotel’s garden, the luxury interior is a Marienbad-like labyrinth, as his editing and cinematography impress upon the audience.

The labyrinth motif is introduced gradually in The Shining. The first hint comes as the Torrances are shown through the hotel. Wendy jokes to the manager that she needs to leave a trail of breadcrumbs to find her way through the warren of passages.

Then in the third section of the film (titled “One Month Later”) the camera follows behind Danny as he rides on his tricycle around halls, through the deserted Colorado Lounge, and then into service corridors. This is carried out in a single tracking shot—it marks a technical breakthrough for camerawork—turning corner after corner as the child leads us through the winding building.

Two minutes later the maze motif is firmly pressed in a scene where Wendy and Danny go into the hotel’s garden on a sunny day, then a stroll through the “Overlook Maze”. The camera lingers on a sign showing the maze’s geometric design, then cuts to another tracking shot following the pair through the confusing pathways. This is intercut with shots of Jack, who is alone in the Colorado Lounge, as he wanders over to a scale model of the maze. He stands over it and looks down with a slight smile, and we then see from above the tiny figures of Wendy and Danny reaching the model’s centre. The camera lingers on this hallucinatory image: Jack is literally “overlooking” as his wife and child wander exactly like rats in a maze (this emblem underpins the film, much like the garden engraving on the hotel wall at Marienbad[24]).

Next come three scenes of Danny inside the hotel-as-maze. In the first the camera again follows him on his tricycle, this time around carpeted halls on the labyrinthine second floor, stopping for a few moments outside the unsettling Room 237. The next has him riding through halls and service corridors, turning a corner to find the ghostly Grady twins waiting for him in a narrow hall with floral wallpaper. Two scenes later Danny is playing with his toys near Room 237 in a long passage on the second floor. This time the camera is elevated and looks down on him so as to show a maze-like geometric pattern to the carpet.

Scene by scene, for twenty-three minutes over the second quarter of The Shining, Kubrick presents the Overlook Hotel as an enclosed labyrinth. Diane Johnson recalls that this maze motif was the director’s idea, and mostly worked into the storyline as he was shooting. Kubrick would telephone her in California to discuss what he had in mind, talking through the psychological implications, and seeking her advice before committing it to film.[25]

Kubrick’s camerawork and editing here presented his viewers with three direct symbols. There was the labyrinth-as-enigma where we are shown a puzzle that needs to be solved, the maze hiding a dark secret. The question raised soon after the film’s start is what happened in Room 237. This may employ the customary haunted-chamber motif coined in Clara Reeve’s Gothic novel The Old English Baron; although in deleting King’s backstory, Kubrick has the Torrances—and his viewers—pondering that mysterious room and how it fits in the labyrinth.

There was also the labyrinth-as-prison where the characters are trapped, feeling increasingly powerless, then finding they cannot escape.[26] This is foreshadowed in the hallucinatory image of Danny and Wendy in the maze, then played out in following scenes with Danny riding endlessly through the hotel’s corridors. The culmination will be the film’s climax where on a snowy night the insane Jack Torrance chases Danny through the dark maze.

And there is the labyrinth-as-mind where the geometry signifies or mirrors a mind locked in upon itself. Moving beyond the baffling hallucinations of Last Year at Marienbad, Kubrick uses the labyrinth to suggest a destabilised mind. This was pressed in Jack’s vision of his family in the maze, and when we find the manuscript he has been typing comprises page upon page of the same sentence in geometric patterns (“All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy”). His mind has succumbed to a paranoid cycle.[27] So, besides acting as a stand-in for the Gothic castle, the alpine resort comes to signify the obsessed thoughts of Jack Torrance cycling through delusions. Indeed, the director’s intention with the end, according to his biographer John Baxter, was to show Torrance “frozen to death in the labyrinthine passages which echo his psychosis”.[28]

Kubrick used the labyrinth motif to weave two further allusions into his overarching Gothic framework. One was an overt suggestion to Bluebeard’s Castle from French folk tales: hidden inside the maze-like castle was a bloody chamber which contained the grisly corpses of young women murdered by the cruel duke, outwardly a loving husband but secretly a sadistic killer. This parallel had been hinted at early in King’s book, but the film pressed it more forcefully with the recurring sight of a foyer flooding with blood. And there is also very much in Kubrick’s version a sense of the Minotaur’s Cave of Greek myth. In this the twisting labyrinth of the resort is the lair of a predatory monster awaiting sacrificial victims. Both tales knit mythic aspects into Jack Torrance’s mental disintegration and final violent rampage: part Bluebeard, part Minotaur, the bestial Jack roams around his dark labyrinth.

 

What did Stephen King think of the finished feature film? Kubrick had anticipated frictions; after all, there was protracted strife with the novelist Anthony Burgess over the filming of A Clockwork Orange. So the director stipulated to Warner Brothers that King be granted only a single visit to the movie studio during production. Kubrick did telephone King with queries several times as the screenplay was being written, although King was bewildered by the conversations. He couldn’t keep up:

 

Kubrick: The whole idea of a ghost is optimistic, isn’t it?

King: I don’t understand what you mean.

Kubrick: Well, the concept of a ghost presupposes life after death. That’s a cheerful concept.

King: But what about hell?

Kubrick: I don’t believe in hell.[29]

 

King did see a copy of the working script during his day on set at Elstree, and he was anxious. Why were Kubrick and Johnson using psychological theories in what was a clear-cut ghost movie? Where had the Gothic touches gone? And what had happened to manifest evil?

Wisely, King kept his own counsel when The Shining was released in cinemas in June 1980. His devoted fans were furious that the tale had been rewritten, lamenting the absence of monsters, mobsters and the novel’s fiery end. For them this sophisticated, complex film was a travesty, and they said so. But King held off commenting for three years, until, in an interview with a journalist for Playboy, he vented his disillusion:

 

I’m still profoundly ambivalent about the whole thing. I’d admired Kubrick for a long time and had great expectations for the project, but I was deeply disappointed in the end result. Parts of the film are chilling, charged with a claustrophobic terror, but others fall flat … Kubrick is a very cold man—pragmatic and rational—and he had great difficulty conceiving, even academically, of a supernatural world.[30]

 

How could the distinguished director have got it wrong? Because, in Stephen King’s opinion, “Kubrick set out to make a horror film with no apparent understanding of the genre.”[31]