The Shining

1980

Hired as warden of the Overlook Hotel during its winter closing, Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) is hoping to write a novel there. With his wife Wendy (Shelley Duvall) and son Danny (Danny Lloyd), he moves into this isolated luxury establishment where, ten years earlier, a caretaker had massacred his wife and daughters. Apparitions gradually invade the hotel, inviting the child to join them, persuading the father that he is one of them and inciting him to kill his family. Cut off from the world, Wendy and Danny discover Jack's murderous fury as he pursues them armed with an axe. Danny escapes his father, condemning him to freeze to death in the snow-covered labyrinth. The film ends with a photo dated 1921, in which Jack appears frozen in the hotel's past.

After meticulous preliminary research, the hotel and labyrinth were constructed in the studio. The filming took place from May 1978 to April 1979 in London, with the exception of a few exteriors shot in the United States. The increased number of takes, the directing of actors and technical innovations (the intensive use of the Steadicam) contributed to the filmmaker's reputation as a perfectionist.

Kubrick made a personal adaptation of the best-seller by Stephen King (1), who disavowed it. The striking scenes in what has become a "cult" horror film (the twins, the labyrinth and the repetition of the sole phrase constituting Jack's manuscript (2)) are not in the novel. The filmmaker skims over the father's alcoholism, deleting the scene that mentioned it in the original version, shortened owing to the mixed public and critical reception (3) upon its release in the United States, on 21 May 1980. The film came out in France the following 22 October.