This allowed you to suspend your doubt of the supernatural until you were so thoroughly into the story that you could accept it almost without noticing.

The Shining [Special Edition] [4K Ultra HD] [1980] [Blu-ray

On the heels of the release of Doctor Sleep last year, and with the 1980 film celebrating its 40th anniversary in 2020, we decided that now would be an ideal time to dive into the history of the production. While Stanley Kubrick’s perfectionism led him to obsess over every shot, there is one moment in The Shining that only took two takes to capture, which is the beat after Wendy has woken Jack up from his nightmare and the two of them sit on the floor together. Beyond its winding halls and wild carpet patterns, a massive part of what makes The Overlook Hotel’s look so iconic is the unsettling patchwork-like aesthetic, and that was something that came as a result of Stanley Kubrick and his team working from thousands of reference shots taken by scouts sent out to photograph American hotels.Jack in the photo has 'always' been at the Overlook; Jack the caretaker chooses to become part of the hotel. The director's initial candidate to play the Torrances' son was Cary Guffey ( Close Encounters of the Third Kind), but the young actor's parents prevented him, claiming that the film was too gruesome for a child. Wendy runs through the hotel looking for Danny, encountering the hotel's ghosts and a vision of cascading blood similar to Danny's premonition. Ebert concludes that "The movie is not about ghosts but about madness and the energies it sets loose in an isolated situation primed to magnify them".

The Shining - Rotten Tomatoes The Shining - Rotten Tomatoes

Rather, it was something far more disquieting, and familiar: the fear of a wife who's experienced her husband at his worst, and is terrified that she'll experience it again.

Jan Harlan, an Executive Producer on The Shining, was asked about the discontinuity of sets by Xan Brooks of The Guardian and confirmed the discontinuity was intentional, "The set was very deliberately built to be offbeat and off the track, so that the huge ballroom would never actually fit inside. The new Steadicam mount was used to shoot several scenes, giving the film an innovative and immersive look and feel. In an interview with Michel Ciment, Kubrick said that the photograph suggests that Jack was a reincarnation of an earlier official at the hotel.