The Shining is a 1980 psychological horror film produced and directed by Stanley Kubrick and co-written with novelist Diane Johnson. It is based on Stephen King's 1977 novel and stars Jack Nicholson, Shelley Duvall, Danny Lloyd and Scatman Crothers. The film presents the descent into insanity of a recovering alcoholic and aspiring novelist who takes a job as winter caretaker for a mountain resort hotel with his wife and clairvoyant son.
Production took place almost exclusively in England at EMI Elstree Studios, with sets based on real locations. Kubrick often worked with a small crew, which allowed him to do many takes, sometimes to the exhaustion of the actors and staff. The then-new Steadicam mount was used to shoot several scenes, giving the film an innovative and immersive look and feel.
The film was released in the United States on May 23, 1980, by Warner Bros., and in the United Kingdom on October 2 by Columbia-EMI-Warner Distributors. There were several versions for theatrical releases, each of which was cut shorter than the preceding cut; about 27 minutes was cut in total. Reactions to the film at the time of its release were mixed; King criticized the film due to its deviations from the novel, which led King to produce in 1997 a three-part miniseries adaptation as more faithful to his novel. The film received two controversial nominations at the 1st Golden Raspberry Awards in 1981—Worst Director and Worst Actress—the latter of which was later rescinded in 2022 due to Kubrick's alleged treatment of Duvall on set.
The Shining has since been critically reappraised and is often cited as one of the greatest horror films ever made. In 2018, it was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant." A sequel titled Doctor Sleep, based on King's 2013 novel of the same name, was adapted to film and released in 2019.
Jack Torrance takes a caretaker position to look after the remote Overlook Hotel in the Colorado Rocky Mountains while it is closed for the winter. On arrival hotel manager Stuart Ullman informs Jack that a previous caretaker, Charles Grady, killed his wife, two young daughters and himself in the hotel a decade prior.
At home in Boulder, Jack's son Danny has a premonition and seizure; Jack's wife, Wendy, tells the doctor about a past incident when Jack accidentally dislocated Danny's shoulder during a drunken rage. Jack has been sober ever since. Before leaving for the seasonal break, the Overlook's head chef, Dick Hallorann, informs Danny of a telepathic ability the two share, which Hallorann's grandmother called "shining". He tells Danny that the hotel also "shines" due to its residual and unpleasant history and warns him to avoid Room 237.
A month passes, and Danny starts having frightening visions, including those of the murdered Grady sisters. Meanwhile, Jack's mental health deteriorates; he suffers from writer's block, is prone to violent outbursts, and has dreams of killing his family. Danny gets lured to room 237 by unseen forces, and Wendy later finds him with signs of physical trauma, for which she blames Jack. Jack defiantly sulks in the ballroom, where ghostly bartender Lloyd entices him back to drinking. Wendy tells him that Danny was attacked by a "crazy woman" in room 237. Jack investigates and encounters a hideous female ghost in the bathroom, but tells Wendy he saw nothing. He blames Danny for inflicting the bruises on himself and reacts angrily when Wendy suggests leaving the hotel. Danny enters a trance and telepathically contacts Hallorann. Returning to the ballroom, Jack finds it filled with ghostly figures, including waiter Delbert Grady, who urges Jack to "correct" his wife and child.
Wendy finds Jack's manuscript written with nothing but countless repetitions of the proverb "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy". When Jack threatens her life, Wendy knocks him unconscious with a baseball bat and locks him in the kitchen pantry, but she and Danny are snowed in—Jack previously sabotaged the hotel's two-way radio and snowcat. Back in their private apartment, Danny begins to chant, from a murmur, "red rum" more and more loudly ("red RUM") and writes it out in lipstick on the bathroom door. Wendy sees the word in the mirror; it spells out MURDER in reverse; she panics.
Grady frees Jack, who goes after Wendy and Danny with an axe. Taking shelter in the bathroom, Wendy fights Jack off with a knife when he tries to break through the door; Danny escapes out the bathroom window. Hallorann, having flown back to Colorado from his winter home in Florida, reaches the hotel by snowcat. Jack ambushes and murders him with the axe, then pursues Danny into an expansive hedge maze on the hotel grounds. With trepidation Wendy runs through the hotel looking for Danny, encountering the hotel's ghosts, Hallorann's bloody corpse, and a vision of cascading blood from an elevator similar to Danny's premonition. Danny carefully backtracks in the snow to mislead Jack and hides behind a snowdrift. While Jack rushes ahead without a trail to follow and becomes lost, Danny exits the maze and is found by Wendy. The two depart the Overlook in Hallorann's snowcat, leaving Jack to freeze to death in the maze. Meanwhile, a photograph in the hotel hallway pictures a man, by all appearances Jack, standing amidst a crowd of party revelers from July 4, 1921.
In the European cut, all of the scenes involving Jackson and Burton were removed but the credits remained unchanged. Dennen is on-screen in all versions of the film, albeit to a limited degree (and no dialogue) in the European cut.
The actresses who played the ghosts of the murdered Grady daughters, Lisa and Louise Burns, are identical twins. The characters in the book and film script are sisters, but not twins. In the film's dialogue, Ullman says that he thinks that they were "about eight and ten". Nonetheless, they are frequently referred to in discussions about the film as "the Grady twins".
There is a resemblance in the staging of the Grady girls and the Identical Twins, Roselle, New Jersey, 1967 photograph by Diane Arbus according to Arbus' biographer, Patricia Bosworth, the Kubrick assistant who cast and coached them, Leon Vitali, and by numerous Kubrick critics. Kubrick both met Arbus personally and studied photography under her during his time as a photographer for Look magazine; Kubrick's widow says he did not deliberately model the Grady girls on Arbus' photograph, in spite of widespread attention to the resemblance.
Film critic Jonathan Romney writes that the film has been interpreted in many ways, including addressing the topics of the crisis in masculinity, sexism, corporate America, and racism. "It's tempting to read The Shining as an Oedipal struggle not just between generations but between Jack's culture of the written word and Danny's culture of images", Romney writes, "Jack also uses the written word to more mundane purpose – to sign his 'contract' with the Overlook. 'I gave my word', ... which we take to mean 'gave his soul' in the ... Faustian sense. But maybe he means it more literally – by the end ... he has renounced language entirely, pursuing Danny through the maze with an inarticulate animal roar. What he has entered into is a conventional business deal that places commercial obligation ... over the unspoken contract of compassion and empathy that he seems to have neglected to sign with his family."
Several critics have also interpreted The Shining less as a conventional ghost story than as a work about family violence, patriarchal authority, and the collapse of masculine identity. In Feminist Studies, Elizabeth Jean Hornbeck argues that, despite its Gothic and supernatural elements, the film is "at its core, a story about domestic violence", with Jack Torrance functioning as a predatory father figure within an already damaged family. Laura Miller similarly contrasted Kubrick's film with Stephen King's novel, arguing that whereas King's version foregrounds alcoholism and domestic abuse as moral and familial failures, Kubrick's adaptation presents domestic violence in a more impersonal and deterministic form. More broadly, Jonathan Romney has connected the film to themes of masculinity and sexism, reading Jack's disintegration as part of a wider crisis of male authority within the family.