Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining” is a movie that lives in its own special sphere. Simply put, I think it may be the most fascinating horror film ever made…that’s not scary. The most fascinating horror film ever made that is scary is “Psycho”; that’s because it’s the ultimate film to watch yourself watching. And let’s be clear: I realize that “The Shining” is widely considered to be a terrifying movie. But I saw it the night it opened — on May 23, 1980 — and have seen it a dozen times since, and while the film’s mood and mysteries have deepened for me, to the point that I find it a uniquely seductive piece of cinema, I have always had the same problem with it, going back to that very first viewing.
In “The Shining,” we watch an enormous metaphysical puzzle from the dark side, a ghost story where the ghosts rise up from the Overlook Hotel to weave in and out of the madness of Jack Torrance, the aspiring novelist played by Jack Nicholson. He’s unraveled by a collection of things that fuse into a psycho-mystical conspiracy: his writer’s block; his rage; the alcohol that triggers it; and the specters of the Overlook, notably the caretaker. He tries to influence Jack, and Jack essentially becomes him. That’s why Jack is pictured at the end in that old photograph from the 1920s. The movie is about the timelessness of murder, which is all very creepy and elusive in a shivery omnipotent way.
But when Jack Torrance’s id gets let out of its cage, what we see isn’t elusive. It’s the most brutally obvious, head-on image of homicidal violence the cinema has ever given us: Jack Nicholson, in full loony-tunes mode, swinging his ax like a madman as Jack attempts to kill his wife and young son. When “The Shining” came out, we were already in the thick of the slasher-film era. And while I’m not the fan of the “Halloween”/”Friday the 13th” genre a lot of other folks are, I think a number of those films are actually scarier than “The Shining.” Nicholson holding that ax like a deranged lumberjack? I’m sorry, but there’s zero mystery to that. “The Shining” is brilliantly made around the edges but with (to me) a huge dollop of evil banality at its climax.
Yet that’s why “Shine On” is my kind of “Shining” documentary. It’s just 25 minutes long, and it’s the rare archival film to have been made with the cooperation of the Kubrick estate. You can click right onto it on YouTube. What you will see isn’t a deep plunge into the enigmas of the “Shining” universe, like Rodney Ascher’s head-spinning “Room 237.” Written and directed by Paul King, and narrated in tones of dulcet awe by Michael Sheen, “Shine On” is a featurette that devotes itself to the physical production of “The Shining” — that is, to the film’s sets, a few of which, in the form of industrial rooms that were doubling as movie locations, still exist. So “Shine On” is a movie about the shell of “The Shining.”
But that shell is really the most unnerving thing about “The Shining.” I realized how deeply the experience of the movie had touched my subconscious when the documentary stated that “The Shining” was shot almost entirely at Elstree Studios in Hertfordshire, England, and my reptile-brained reaction was, “What? It wasn’t shot in the Stanley Hotel in the Rocky Mountains?!” (That’s the hotel that was the model for the Overlook.) Sure, I knew Kubrick hadn’t left England in decades; I knew that he specialized in creating elaborate sets that became worlds of their own (the spaceship in “2001: A Space Odyssey,” the bombed-out city of Hué in “Full Metal Jacket,” which Kubrick built out of a demolished gasworks outside London). Yet my sense-memory told me that the Overlook — the psychedelic maze carpets, the creamy walls and ceilings, the cavernous lobby with its chandeliers and staircase — was too solid and imposing to be a mere set. I had to do a double take to take in, all over again, that Kubrick had built it all.
“The Shining” probably makes more dramatic use of ceilings than any film since “Citizen Kane.” (They’re the ultimate thing that can make a set not look like a set.) And the sheer vastness of the Overlook is Kubrick’s great sleight-of-hand trick. Given that there are only three characters living there for the heart of the movie, the size of the place keeps telling you: It would be insane to build a set this large to contain these characters and this ghost tale. The mania of Kubrick’s obsessive overscaling becomes another link in the chain of the film’s madness.
As “Shine On” explains, the sets occupied the entirety of Elstree Studios — every soundstage, or half a dozen airplane hangars’ worth of space. Given that Kubrick took just under a year to shoot “The Shining,” that’s a lot of real estate. But even then, there wasn’t enough space. Most of those original sets are gone, but there were several places at Elstree where the dowdy officious backrooms became the sets — notably the Overlook’s gigantic kitchen and its larder, a nondescript office that Kubrick filled with real kitchen equipment and real utensils and real cans and boxes of food products. The heart of “Shine On” consists of three veterans of the “Shining” shoot — executive producer Jan Harlan; art director Leslie Tomkins; and Kubrick’s eldest daughter, Katharina Kubrick, who he invited to work on the set when she was 25 — strolling through that former kitchen and matching pieces of it with the film, which has the eerie effect of making everything in “The Shining” seem like a ghost.
There’s one astonishing piece of footage that’s been seen before, but it never fails to amaze: Kubrick laying on his back against the larder door, holding a lens and framing Nicholson’s face from the ground up and saying, “Well, that’s not bad,” and you realize that one of the most iconic film images of the last half century was made up by Kubrick on the spot, because he needed to do something. We also see Shelley Duvall’s meltdown in the kitchen as it was being filmed, which is a rare piece of footage indeed, since it’s the actual take used in the film. In “Shine On,” there’s evidence, and testimony, to support the contention that the basic atmosphere on the set of “The Shining” was convivial. But you can believe that and also believe that Duvall, at moments, came close to thinking she was having a nervous breakdown.
“Shine On,” short as it is, joins other documentaries of Kubrickiana — “Kubrick by Kubrick,” “Stanley Kubrick’s Boxes,” the enthralling and essential “Filmworker” — as a small piece of the puzzle of who Kubrick was and how he made his films. More than perhaps any other major film artist, he built them — like massive ships in a bottle. And “The Shining” was the most elaborately built of all. It’s the story of a haunted house, but the way Kubrick made it, the film itself is the haunted house. The spectacular scale and concreteness of the sets says: The mystery concealed here is as grand as God. You can’t see it, but it’s everywhere. That may be the coolest idea ever implanted in a horror film. If it were as scary as it was cool, “The Shining” really would be a masterpiece instead of the ultimate elevated horror curio.