Shining

Today, I chose to introduce a Stanley Kubrick's movie: The Shining released in 1980. I've picked up this one because, like The Exorcist, this is a movie I saw when I was quite young (maybe too young...)and i thought it was amazing, even if it scared me. Jack Nicholson's performance is just astonishing, especially for its madness. This movie can be classified as a horror movie, but given that it is a classic (totally deserves it), I, once again, do encourage you to see this movie.

The plot is about a man, his son and wife becoming the winter keepers of an isolated hotel where Danny, the son, sees disturbing visions of the hotel's past using "The Shining" (a kind of supernatural gift). The father, Jack Torrance, is writing a book when he slowly goes insane as a result of isolation and the hotel's ghosts.

Did you know that:

1. The Timberline Lodge on Mt. Hood in Oregon was used for the front exterior of the hotel, but all the interiors were specially built at Elstree Studios in London. The management of the Timberline requested Kubrick not to use 217 for a room number (as specified in the book), fearing that nobody would want to stay in that room ever again. Kubrick changed the script to use the imaginary room number 237.
2. Kubrick decided that having the hedge animals come alive (like in the book) was impossible due to restrictions in special effects, so he changed for a hedge maze instead.
3. According to the Guinness Book of Records, the scene where Wendy is backing up the stairs swinging the baseball bat was shot 127 times. But members of the crew denied, saying that it was actually shot about 35-45 times. Nevertheless, the scene where Hallorann explains to Danny what his gift is was shot 148 times (still a world record).
4. Kubrick got the shot of blood flowing from the elevators in only three takes. The shot took nine days to set up; every time the doors opened and the blood poured out, Kubrick said, "It doesn't look like blood." In the end, the shot took approximately a year.
5. For the film, Kubrick made his crew watch Eraserhead, Rosemary's Baby and The Exorcist so that they would be in the appropriate state of mind.
6. Because of the intense heat generated from the lighting used to recreate window sunlight in Elstree Studios (the room took 700,000 watts of light per window to make it look like a snowy day outside), the Colorado Lounge (where Jack does his typing) set caught fire. Fortunately, the scenes were already shot and the set was rebuilt with a higher ceiling.
7. At the time of release, you couldn't put blood in trailers if you wanted them to be seen by the audiences. Strangely, the trailer for The Shining consists entirely of the shot of blood pouring out of the elevator. Kubirck had convinced the board responsible for the restriction that the blood flooding out of the elevator was actually rusty water.
8. Because Danny Lloyd was so young and since it was his first acting job, Kubrick was very protective of the child. During the shooting of the movie, Lloyd thought that the film he was making was a drama, not a horror movie. In fact, when Wendy carries Danny away while shouting at Jack in the Colorado Lounge, she is actually carrying a life-size dummy so Lloyd would not have to be in the scene. He only realized the truth seven years later, when, aged 13, he was shown a heavily edited version of the film. He didn't see the uncut version of the film until he was 17 - eleven years after the making of the movie.
9. The "snowy" maze near the conclusion of the movie consisted of 900 tons of salt and crushed Styrofoam.
10. "Shining" was voted the ninth scariest film of all time by Entertainment Weekly.

It was hard to choose 10 facts for this one as there are a lot of interesting anecdotes, but it was also hard to pick up a scene. In the end, The only one (and the most famous) is the "little pig" scene with Jack Nicholson at the top of his madness.