Edited by Danel Olson and published by Centipede Press, Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining: Studies in the Horror Film is an enormous tome packed with inside information from cast and crew, including Jack Nicholson, Shelley Duvall, Scatman Crothers, the Shining Twins, and even Lia Beldam, the actress who played the ghost of the woman in room 237.
This meticulously researched volume also includes illuminating, sometimes surprising, essays by many of those who know the film best. In Tony Magistrale’s “Sutured Time: History and Kubrick’s The Shining”, we get a detailed look at Jack Torrance’s descent into insanity, including Stephen King’s thoughts on how Kubrick handled the collapse of the character’s emotional state and the speed with which Jack’s mental unraveling took place.
In “They Ate Each Other Up?”, Bernice M. Murphy looks at The Shining as a tale with roots in the windigo of Native American legend, a thesis she claims is reinforced by the frequent references to cannibalism in the film. Bev Vincent’s “The Genius Fallacy” analyses attempts to uncover messages hidden in The Shining and how the search for this secret subtext has even given us a new word – crypto-kubrology. And in Danel Olson’s “Shining Through the Labyrinth”, we’re treated to an intriguing and thought-provoking comparison between Kubrick’s work and that of Guillermo del Toro.
To complete this definitive volume, there are dozens of photographs of cast, crew, and set, as well as a detailed analysis of the film’s music and little known facts about scenes that were filmed but that never made it to the final cut.
In short, the book is a visual and literary feast that can only enhance what Lee Unkrich calls “our dread for and perverse interest in the Overlook.”