Stephen King has admitted not liking this version of his book.
Movie news
Great sites
Quotes
Jack: Wendy, darling, light of my life, I'm not gonna hurt ya. You didn't let me finish my sentence. I said, I'm not gonna hurt ya, I'm just gonna bash your brains in. Gonna bash 'em right the f*ck in!
Mistakes
In the shot just before when Jack finishes axing the bathroom door, one of the broken pieces of wood is resting against the camera. See more...
Movie Mistakes blog
Popular blog posts:
15 biggest Harry Potter mistake pictures
The Shining (1980) - 14 trivia entries
Directed by Stanley Kubrick, starring Barry Nelson, Danny Lloyd, Jack Nicholson, Scatman Crothers, Shelley Duvall (add more)
Stephen King has admitted not liking this version of his book.
Initially, the bathroom door Jack Nicholson was to axe in was an extremely thin one, made by the prop department to make it easier to destroy. However, Nicholson's technique with the axe was so good (he'd been a volunteer fire marshal) the door shattered into a million pieces, so they had to build a much stronger door to handle his swing.
The real Overlook Hotel is near Portland, Oregon. It has no room 237 because the owners specifically requested that a fictitious room number be used, believing that after people saw this movie (or read the book) no one would want to stay in that room.
The "snowy" maze near the conclusion of the movie consisted of salt and crushed Styrofoam.
The injured guest who frightens Wendy Torrance by saying "Great party, isn't it?" was played by film editor Norman Gay.
Stanley Kubrick was very protective of Danny Lloyd, because he was so young. Through some careful and clever directing, Lloyd was unaware he was making a horror film until after the film's release.
The line "Here's Johnny" originated on the The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, where Ed McMahon always introduced him with that phrase. Nicholson improvised the line during the shooting; Kubrick liked it and left it in.
Stanley Kubrick's daughter, Vivian Kubrick, makes a cameo in the party scene. She wears a black dress and sits on the right side of the sofa closest to the bar.
In the scene where Jack is writing and gets mightily upset when Wendy interrupts him, watch the chair behind Jack. It vanishes and then reappears. This was, however, intentional from Kubrick. The audience was supposed to get a subconscious feeling that something was wrong. Nice touch.
An outtake from the opening sequence was used in the "happy ending" version of Blade Runner, but removed from the director's cut.
Stephen King attempted to persuade Kubrick not to cast Jack Nicholson as Jack Torrance. King believed that either Michael Moriarty or Jon Voight could have played Jack's descent into madness more convincingly.
According to the Guinness Book of World Records, The Shining holds the record for the film with most retakes of a single scene (with spoken dialogue) at 127 takes. The participant in those retakes was Shelley Duvall.
The famous scene where Wendy reads through Jack's accumulated work naturally doesn't have the same impact if the viewer can't read English. Therefore, for every foreign language the film was released in, Kubrick remade this shot with an appropriate cliche in each language - French, German, etc. Also, every page of every manuscript was hand-typed to recreate the realism of typos and misalignments.
Jack's limp at the end of the movie was a real injury sustained when Jack Nicholson got drunk and fell out of a hotel window the night before shooting this scene.
You may also like: Titanic | Twilight | The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring | The Simpsons | The Dark Knight
Message boards
No discussions yet
Register as a member to post a message
The message boards are meant for discussing things with other users, rather than making submissions/corrections. By all means feel free to post what you like here, but for anything to be looked at properly and entered into the "official" section please use the "submit something" link in the navigation bar. Any members who post offensive content will have their accounts blocked. This is also not the place to contact Jon (who runs the site (although the members who help him check are a BIG help)) - for that, please use the contact form.