“We wanted the hotel to look authentic rather than like a traditionally spooky movie hotel,” Kubrick said. The director described the process of designing the film’s sets in an interview with writer Michel Ciment. On his returm, Kubrick leafed through the pictures, chose the ones he liked, and had his production team construct rooms that looked exactly the same. When Walker set about designing the film’s rooms, he took inspiration from real hotel rooms from around America, and went all over the country photographing different interiors. It’s vastly different from the supernatural ballroom or evil-looking bathroom seen in the film’s final act.
The pure white ceiling and floor merely accentuate the startling crimson of the walls.Īs an example of how The Shining’s set takes us through those moods, take a look at the manager’s room, where Jack is interviewed at the beginning of the film – it’s a typical 70s office, its ugly salmon-coloured walls festooned with framed pictures. The acting in this scene is so intense that it’s easy to miss just how striking the actors’ surroundings are unlike the warm, boozy golds of the ballroom Jack was drinking in seconds before, the bathroom is bathed in stark artificial light. There’s a key moment, where Grady (Philip Stone) ushers Jack into a bathroom and urges him, rather unsubtly, to “correct” his family. Even the carpets accentuate the how small and vulnerable Danny and his mother are one shot shows the little boy playing on a carpet whose huge geometric patterns surround him like a cage.Īs he did in 2001: A Space Odyssey and A Clockwork Orange, Kubrick uses violent contrasts of colour to heighten the feeling of unease.
Characters are frequently dwarfed by gigantic columns or huge windows. The set generates tension not through claustrophobia and dark spaces, but with high ceilings and lonely expanses. The rest of the film’s exteriors and interiors, meanwhile, were immaculately constructed back at Elstree Studios in the UK.Ī world away from the dusty, peeling interiors usually seen in horror movies, the hotel interior envisioned by Kubrick is spacious and modern. At the start of the film, the outside of the Overlook we see is actually the Timberline Lodge, located in Oregon. His wife Wendy (Duvall) and telepathic son Danny (Danny Lloyd) can do little more than look on in horror.Īt first glance, Kubrick and Walker appear to have created the perfect fusion between exterior and interior shots.
Instead, Kubrick’s film presents us with little more than embittered, failed writer, Jack, slowly growing crazy in a remote hotel. Pared back even by the standards of Stephen King’s source novel, the movie contains none of the rampaging elephant-shaped hedges or infernos of the original book. This is partially because The Shining has such a simple story to tell. Nevertheless, it’s the Overlook Hotel, at the time the biggest indoor set ever built, that bears so much of the film’s dramatic weight.
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