The Shining, by Stanley Kubrick is a prime example of engaging audiences in a story through its architecture. Through its meticulous and deliberate stage set up and elements of surprise, invoking sentiments of discomfort, uneasiness and an inevitable sense of the unknown horrors lurking outside the frame, are what makes it stand out as a phenomenal cinematography and movie. This movie masterfully generates a profound sense of tension and suspense, largely due to its meticulous and evocative spatial design. Kubrick’s creation of a detailed and immersive architectural atmosphere significantly enhances the film’s psychological impact.
The Overlook
“We wanted the hotel to look authentic rather than like a traditionally spooky movie hotel. The hotel’s labyrinthine layout and huge rooms, I believed, would alone provide an eerie enough atmosphere.” — Stanley Kubrick
The setting for this movie is majorly within the walls of the hotel, The Overlook. Stanley Kubrick, along with Roy Walker, designed the set of The Overlook with deliberate anomalies, paying minute attention to the colours, textures and materials of all the rooms within the grandiose, yet mostly empty hotel.
The interior of The Overlook Hotel doesn’t match the exterior seen on the studio set or the real-life Timberline Lodge in Oregon. Initially, it might seem like Kubrick designed the interiors to align with the set’s exterior, but this isn’t the case. Upon closer inspection, it becomes clear that only one window in the entire film aligns correctly with the interior, and there’s only one entry/exit that fits logically. Additionally, the different parts of the hotel’s interior don’t connect in the way Kubrick’s editing suggests. He creates visual assumptions that turn out to be misleading. Ultimately, the only room that fits within the second-floor section Danny cycles around is Room 237.
This is a deliberate attempt to create a sense of confusion and in literal sense, a foreboding of an unending maze that even the viewers are left grappling to comprehend.
Colour Theory and Textures
Kubrick’s genius lay in his understanding of the power of architecture and the strategic use of vivid colours and textures to evoke a single, pervasive emotion: fear. Throughout the movie, bright colours and rich textures are employed to mirror the characters’ psychological states during key moments. For instance, when Jack converses with Grady, the previous caretaker’s ghost, in the ballroom restroom, the room’s blood-red walls reflect the sinister shift in Jack’s mindset. The recurring motif of the colour red intensifies the film’s suspenseful atmosphere.
Textures play an equally significant role, adding layers of visual complexity and tension. These meticulous design choices, combined with stellar cinematography and acting, culminate in a psychological horror masterpiece. The film’s unsettling authenticity stems not from traditional scares but from its deeply immersive and disturbing realism.
Take, for example, the scene where Danny is playing. He is shown against a backdrop of a vividly carpeted hallway with a geometric cage-like pattern, subtly hinting at the impending danger and enhancing the sense of foreboding.
The Labyrinthine Horror
“The hotel’s labyrinthine layout and huge rooms, I believed, would alone provide an eerie enough atmosphere. This realistic approach was also followed in the lighting, and in every aspect of the decor it seemed to me that the perfect guide for this approach could be found in Kafka’s writing style. His stories are fantastic and allegorical, but his writing is simple and straightforward, almost journalistic.” – Kubrick.
The meticulously planned set design amplifies the overwhelming vastness of the Overlook Hotel, heightening the characters’ sense of powerlessness. The towering ceilings and expansive spaces dwarf Jack and his family, accentuating their insignificance. This theme of disorientation extends to the hedge maze, an element created specifically for the film. The maze’s vastness and complexity mirror the hotel’s interior, reinforcing the notion that the Overlook itself is a labyrinth.
Kubrick draws deliberate parallels between the maze and the hotel’s winding corridors. Effective camera work like following Danny through both the hotel and the maze, highlights their similar, disorienting designs. This spatial complexity suggests that the hotel, like the maze, is inescapable both physically and historically.
The film’s design also underscores themes of repetition and cyclical history. Jack feels an eerie familiarity with the hotel, echoed by Delbert Grady’s assertion that Jack has always been the caretaker. This idea of eternal recurrence is symbolised by Jack’s frozen fate in the maze and his appearance in an old photograph. The repeated phrases on Jack’s typewriter and the twins’ haunting invitation to Danny further emphasise the hotel’s endless cycle of violence and horror.
The Maze of Madness
From the beginning, Kubrick emphasises the critical role of the Overlook Hotel’s architecture in “The Shining.” His use of the Steadicam transcends mere technical novelty, guiding viewers through the hotel’s bizarre and unsettling interior. We traverse garish carpets, gleaming floors, and expansive kitchens, experiencing the hotel’s vast, dehumanising scale before the psychological warfare begins. Kubrick meticulously sets the stage for the impending mental battles.
The Overlook Hotel serves as a psychological torture chamber, entrapping its victims in a maze of confounding corridors and rooms. This internal labyrinth mirrors the hedge maze outside, ingeniously constructed from a wooden and wire frame interwoven with foliage. With its towering eight-foot walls, the maze was so intricate that even the crew occasionally lost their way.
Kubrick’s daughter, Vivian, captured behind-the-scenes footage in a candid documentary about the film’s production. This footage shows the director and crew poring over maps of the maze’s layout. During the year-long shoot, Kubrick reportedly rearranged the maze’s walls without informing the crew, leading to moments of genuine disorientation. Their cries for help were often met with Kubrick’s echoing laughter, adding a real-life layer of unease that paralleled the film’s eerie atmosphere.
A Living and Breathing Architecture
“The Shining” exemplifies how set design can profoundly enhance a film’s narrative. Through Kubrick’s direction, the Overlook Hotel emerges as a perceptive entity, watching its inhabitants and amplifying the film’s tension. The set’s oppressive nature is so convincingly portrayed that viewers rarely notice the spatial anomalies, though these subtle inconsistencies likely affect us on a subconscious level.
Kubrick skillfully utilises the hotel’s architecture and layout, employing wide-angle lenses to intensify the feeling of confinement in the corridors, making them appear endless. This technique suggests imminent danger, urging characters and viewers alike to escape. In a memorable scene where Danny plays in the first-floor lobby, our attention is drawn to the long hallway behind him, using perspective to isolate him within a vast, foreboding space. Each shot is meticulously composed with Renaissance-like symmetry, dividing the frame into grids that enhance the power of perspective beyond mere cinematography.
The film’s realistic lighting further adds to its authenticity. To achieve the pale sunlight streaming through the hotel’s windows, Kubrick used an array of powerful studio lights, which eventually caused the set to catch fire. Unyielding in his pursuit of perfection, Kubrick had the entire set rebuilt to maintain his exacting standards.
Architecture of Terror
The film crafts a subtle spatial disjunction between inside and outside, cleverly misleading viewers into believing they understand the layout from the start. An early tour of the hotel by the manager for the Torrance family, with the audience in tow, presents what appears to be a seamless flow from interior to exterior. However, these transitions are achieved through cuts between real locations and studio sets, omitting the passage from room to room. This deliberate omission leaves viewers familiar with each space yet disoriented by their connections, fostering a growing sense of unease.
Kubrick’s obsessive attention to detail creates a horror experience like no other. The Overlook Hotel itself becomes an unforgettable, malevolent presence, reinforcing the film’s unsettling atmosphere. The symbolism of the labyrinth offers a glimpse into the film’s deeper theme: the terror of domestic violence. This terror isn’t about losing sanity but about the fear of being trapped, as Wendy and Danny experience. As Jack’s grip on reality loosens, he becomes more determined to control the space and his family. This highlights the sinister potential of architecture to exert power and control, emphasising that the true horror often lies within the mundane elements of our surroundings.
References:
- Analysis of Kubrick’s the shining, maps of the overlook Analysis of Kubrick’s The Shining – Maps of The Overlook. Available at: https://idyllopuspress.com/idyllopus/film/sh_maps.htm
- Sharma, P. (2022) The shining: An architectural review of perception, Medium. Available at: https://bootcamp.uxdesign.cc/the-shining-an-architectural-review-of-perception-80f79e887e9c.
- Lambie, R. (2011) Iconic set design: The Shining’s Overlook Hotel, Den of Geek. Available at: https://www.denofgeek.com/movies/iconic-set-design-the-shinings-overlook-hotel/.
- The shining (1980) – interiors : An online publication about architecture and film (no date) Interiors. Available at: https://www.intjournal.com/0613/the-shining.
- Buckley, C. et al. (2020) Senses of cinema, Senses of Cinema. Available at: https://www.sensesofcinema.com/2020/the-shining-at-40/the-shinings-disjunctive-spaces/.
