It’s been 45 years since *The Shining* came out. Since then, we’ve had countless horror movies with insanely high kill counts and absolutely shocking imagery. You’d think I’d be numb to a story where, spoiler alert for a cinematic classic, only two people die—and one of those deaths happens because the doofus couldn’t find his way out of a hedge maze. And yet, *The Shining* remains frightening in a way that’s really hard to pin down.
How did Stanley Kubrick manage to make shots of a hallway creepy? Well, by making those hallways feel not just scary, but more specifically, *uncanny*.
These days, “uncanny” is a concept most often used in discourse about robots and computer animation. The Uncanny Valley—you know the feeling it evokes. Think about the abject horror of that kid from *The Polar Express*—good god, get him off the screen.
The *Uncanny* (capital T, capital U) speaks to the fear of something that isn’t fully unknown. It’s unfamiliar while retaining elements of familiarity, and that tension causes a deep sense of unease. Returning to the Valley, imagine robots that move in a way that’s slightly wrong. Suddenly, you feel unsafe, in danger, but you’re not even sure exactly why.
And this feeling isn’t confined to robots and animation. A lot can be described as uncanny, including ghosts, doppelgängers, mirrors, and even human faces. Breaking it down, there’s a throughline here: we’re confronted with human or humanoid bodies not quite lining up with what we’re expecting. This pulls at fears of loss of identity, fears about mortality, fears of childhood nightmares suddenly becoming true.
But let’s take one step further—over the threshold from uncanny bodies to uncanny places.
For example, have you ever been in a dead mall? There should be people there. It’s built for foot traffic and to allow noise to carry, but it’s empty, silent, falling apart. There’s nothing dangerous there, but it feels terrible to be there. It just feels off.
Kubrick leaned all the way into this feeling with *The Shining*, which is set in a hotel that’s closed for the season. The halls and sitting rooms are empty—*too* empty. It’s disquieting from the jump because this just isn’t what a hotel is supposed to look like or feel like.
Sure, lots of movies are set in creepy old houses, but *The Overlook Hotel* isn’t “creepy” at least on its face. There aren’t cobwebs, creaky floorboards, or disjointed architecture that distinguish the classic haunted house. Instead, Kubrick decided to make the Overlook as real as possible—by sending out photographers to capture hundreds of pictures of real hotel halls, rooms, and elevators. He then picked the ones he found most interesting or evocative to build his sets from, replicating them down to the inch.
Literally, they photographed the spaces with rulers in frame to make sure everything was fully to scale. The Red Bathroom where Jack meets Grady was a real bathroom, created one-to-one on a soundstage in England.
The fact that all these spaces are clean, mundane, and downright normal only makes the discomfort all the more pronounced because they feel like spaces we’re familiar with. But something is clearly wrong in this hotel—and we just can’t put our finger on what that wrongness is.
It’s been 45 years, but the vibes of *The Overlook* are still a phenomenon.
Sure, the lady in the tub is pretty scary, as are the twins. But, at least for us, the most memorable parts of this movie are the long shots tracking through the hallways, the echoing emptiness of the Colorado Lounge, and the unshakeable feeling of wrongness that *The Overlook Hotel* brings simply by being normal, and yet not—all at once.
What do you think? Does *The Shining* still give you nightmares, or has it gotten dated, at least as an entry in the horror genre? Let us know in the comments!
https://mashable.com/video/how-it-hits-the-shining-stephen-king