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Kubrick’s starting point was, of course,Stephen King’s bestselling novel.
He doesn’t believe in ghosts.
Credit: Everett Collection
Having forgotten to maintain the hotel’s aging boiler, Jack perishes as the resort goes up in flames.
He thought there might be something else that would be metaphorically and visually more interesting …
The talkiness [of the book] was also discussed.
Warner Bros
And Kubrick really thought somebody should get killedbecause it was a horror movie.
So we weighed the dramatic possibilities of killing off various characters and did different treatments.
We actually talked it over in detail the possibility of having different people getting killed.
Warner Bros
He was emotionally involved with the point of view of a little boy who is afraid of his father.
And Kubrick liked that image.
But he was too tender-hearted for that ending and thought it would be too terrible to do…
Warner Bros; Courtesy of University of the Arts London
In one of the treatments, Wendy kills Jack in self-defense in the third act.
Johnson: That’s right.
We always had the powers of the hotel in mind.
Warner Bros
So the hotel would have been warping Hallorann’s mind for quite a long time.
Johnson: The photograph wasalwaysin the ending.
The maze chase grew out of the topiary animal hedges that move around in the book.
He wanted it to be mostly psychological.
So there was some discussion about trying to find a way of ending it without a lot of blood.
Harlan: Very often crew members asked him, “Can you explain that to me?”
And he said, “I never explain anything, I don’t understand it myself.
It’s a ghost film!”
Any child can see that.
And Stanley’s explanation was, “It’s a ghost film!
It’s not a movie with a serious message.
While he was alive all that was relatively quiet.
After his death, these [theories] came out which were funny, and partly insulting.
The most insulting one is the idea thatThe Shiningis a film about the Holocaust.
The other ideas are much more harmless, where continuity mistakes are attributed with deep meaning.
Two key scenes that heavily impacted the ending were actually shot and then deleted from the final cut.
The photographs set up the final haunting image of Jack in the 1921 picture.
The scrapbook is briefly glimpsed in the final cut sitting on Jack’s writing desk.
Johnson: There was a big length problem with Warner Bros.
The film was too long and people said it had to be shortened.
The scene that I thoughtwasreally necessary was the scrapbook scene.
It’s an element in classic fairy taleslike the poisoned apple.
I argued very strenuously [to keep it].
Johnson: In other words: All of this really happened, and the magic events were actual.
It was just a little twist.
It was easy to jettison.
The hospital scene was included in the film’s preview screening for critics in New York and Los Angeles.
Johnson has previously said Kubrick liked the scene because it reassured the audience that Wendy and Danny were okay.
But Ullman giving Danny the ball ramped up audience confusion.
So in an unusual move, Kubrick ordered it removed from prints distributed around the country.
Harlan: The tennis ball is the same thing as the photographit’s unexplainable.
It makes Ullman now another ghost element.
Was he the ghost from the very beginning?
The film is complex enough because nothing is explained.
That non-explaining is what was bad for the film initially.
It was not a huge success.
Now everybody thinks it’s the best horror film ever or whatever.
But when it came out the audience expected a horror film with a resolution, with an explanation.
Who is the baddie?
What was going on?
And they were disappointedmany of them, anyway.
The fact they were left puzzled was exactly what Stanley Kubrick wanted.
So Stanley did it.
He’s not stubborn, especially since this is a film mainly to entertain people.
Jack had somehow been the creature of the hotel through reincarnation.
At the same time, we’re meant to experience it “in the now.”
There’s no way of resolving that, it’s meant to be magical.
I do think it would have made more sense [with the scrapbook scene included].
All the footage of the scrapbook scene and the hospital scene were destroyed.
As for the hospital scene, Kubrick’s daughter Vivian took four photographs during filming.
Harlan: Stanley wanted to double-check that nobody would ever re-assemble his edit in any other way.
All outtakes and unused scenes were systematically destroyedincluding negatives and rushes.
He himself knew that he would never consider a re-cut.
He was someone who lived totally in the present.
He never looked back.
