It’s been well over three decades since the release of Stanley Kubrick’s seminal “The Shining,” but one person has just never gotten on board with the film: Stephen King. The author, who penned the source material, much of which he based upon his own battles with addiction, has always been vocal about his distaste for the film. Just this February showed him taking a few more jabs at the film, calling it a “big, beautiful Cadillac with no engine inside.”
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But whatever King might have to say about the adaptation, the rest of the world is still deeply enamored with Kubrick’s layered and challenging film. Easily one of the finest horror films ever made — though even calling “The Shining” just a horror film feels reductive, as though there is nothing more to it than the tropes of the genre — it is a movie that is still generating discussion, serving as the subject of theses, and producing speculation and theories from cinephiles around the world — in part because of just how ridiculous the making of the movie was. Scheduled for a 17-week shoot, filming instead lasted for 14 months, with Kubrick reportedly shooting well over a million feet of film. In a way, it almost feels like a miracle that the final product didn’t succumb (and still hasn’t succumbed) to the rigors and hype.
To add one more square to the quilt that is “The Shining” is a documentary from Vivian Kubrick dug up by Dangerous Minds. The 35-minute “The Making Of ‘The Shining’” was originally shot by the director’s then-17-year-old daughter for the BBC show “Arena.” And still today it serves as fascinating insight into the intensity, craft, love, stress, blood, and tears that went into the making of a true classic.
Check out “The Making Of ‘The Shining’” above and weigh in with your thoughts in the comments.