The Uncanny in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980) Word Count: 1394

Summary
Welcome to this blog post which is a textual analysis of the uncanny in the motion picture film Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (Kubrick, 1980). Both Stanley Kubrick and Diane Johnson wrote the screenplay for The Shining. They did this “during an eleven-week period in London” (Botting, Townshend, 2004, Pg. 273). I will be using this film as a horror text with the intention to get across my point that the film is made with the sole intention of being uncanny. The questions I will be asking you are these:  What is the uncanny? How is the uncanny used throughout the motion picture? And finally, what methods did Kubrick use to create the uncanny throughout The Shining.

What is “The Uncanny”?
The uncanny is something that can be perceived as normal, but there is something slightly off about it which your mind cannot pinpoint – for example, a teddy bear with human teeth or a mask obscuring a face. Maria M. Tatar states this in her text that the uncanny takes something familiar and causes it to “provoke a sense of dread precisely because they are at once strange and familiar” (Tatar, 1981, Pg. 169). This means a life-size doll of a human can be perceived as “uncanny” because it is so close to being human but something is not quite right and your brain cannot understand why. That is what the uncanny is.

The Setting
The first shots of the feature length film are that of a lake where helicopter shots are used. The creepy, ominous electronic music, accompanied by the sweeping shots of the camera following the car, seem almost like a ghost chasing Jack all the way to the hotel. As the intro. continues, the music loses the bass and brings in really sinister sounds, almost like ungodly creatures screaming. This puts the audience on edge. Also the wide-angle lenses used on the helicopter shots make the scenery look unsettling as it creates a “disconcerting visual distortion” (Falsetto, 2001, Pg. 70). The distorted look of the isolation can be seen as uncanny because our eyes are made to see right in front of us, it does not include the surrounding areas outside our normal view.

The Overlook Hotel is introduced in the same manner as the intro, a helicopter establishing a shot to show the isolation of the hotel in the mountains. This is when we get our first proper look at the hotel’s exterior and the more you watch the film the more you begin to realise that the interior makes no sense. This takes on the idea of Freud’s Theory of the Unheimlich as Tatar states “A house contains the familiar and congenial, but at the same time it screens what is familiar and congenial from view, making a mystery” (Tatar, 1981, Pg. 169). It is a big hotel and this family of three are going to be living there for several months. The idea of family trying to make an unhomely place a home is uncanny, as it is a familiar location, but it does not make sense.

The Set
Inside the Overlook Hotel set, which was built at EMI Elstree Studios in North London, there are huge rooms including Jack’s writing space and the Gold Room, all of which physically could not fit in the exterior of the Overlook Hotel. The uncanny atmosphere during the whole movie gives the hotel an already creepy vibe. Throughout the film mirrors are used in certain shots to emphasise the uncanniness of the scene. Richard Jameson states that “standard reality-illusion device of mirrors” (Jameson, 1980, Pg. 28) is used throughout the film. For example, when Danny goes looking for his toy and Jack is sitting on the bed it cuts to the shot showing Danny, Jack and Jack’s reflection in a mirror.

Subconsciously it looks like there are three people in the bedroom and it adds to the idea that Stanley Kubrick’s look of ghosts in The Shining are to do with mirrors. This introduces the idea of the Doppelganger, the double mirror image of something or someone that comes across within the scene. Andrew J. Webber states in his book that the Doppelganger theory is surrounded by the idea of “deductively and inductively” (Webber, 1996, Pg. 2) which plays out within the scene – you can deduct that it is indeed Jack but you can deduct what his intentions are. In another scene, when Jack meets the ghost of Delbert Grady in the bathroom, there are mirrors in the scene adding to my point above. My final piece of evidence is the bathroom scene in room 237, where Jack cheats on his wife, there is a nude woman who emerges from the bath and it is not until he looks in the mirror that he realises she an old decaying woman who is clearly a ghost.

The Cinematography
The Shining was one of the first films to use the so-called Steadicam, a device used for stabilizing footage while in motion, i.e. walking or running with the camera in hand. Serena Ferrara states in his book “is an uncanny literary companion to my long-term fascination with the physics, aesthetics and history of camera movement.” (Ferrara, 2001, Pg. 9). Already putting stabization onto a moving shot is uncanny because when you normally see a running shot, from a phone or camera, the picture moves up and down and the footage is unintentionally shaken and people over the years of media have become used to that. The sequence in the film that the Steadicam is remanded for is the tricycle squenences.

As Danny is cycling around the hotel space the camera is always following behind him, almost like a ghost. The move of the camera is quite unnerving as you, the viewer, are not in control of where you want to go, whereas the camera is.

The Soundtrack
Probably the most memorable aspects about The Shining, aside from the famous “Here’s Johnny!” scene, is the soundtrack. The use of scratching and plucking a violin creates a really unnerving sound that is completely opposite of what you hear when hearing violin. The soundtrack also does not match what you are seeing on screen. For example during a scene when Danny is on the tricycle you can hear the soundtrack building up and the breakdown happens but nothing ever happens on screen. This leaves you on edge because not only can you not trust your sight, you can also not trust what you hear.  David J. Code talks about how critics found the soundtrack “iconic of its genre” (Code, 2009, Pg. 134) and even today you can hear reminisces of The Shining soundtrack in other media. The uncanny in the soundtrack is that it is all wrong. The way the instruments are played and also when the music is used, i.e. the breakdown implying something has happened when nothing in fact happened.

Conclusion
After doing all my research into the uncanny and the unheimlich I can come to the conclusion that The Shining successfully plays with the main key ideas of the uncanny and uses them for terror and creepiness over jumpscares you might see in films today. The use of location, the set, the cinematography and the soundtrack all play a part in pulling off an uncanny feel throughout the whole motion picture. So the next time you watch The Shining remember to look out for all these things, the location of The Overlook, the set not making sense geologically, the cinematography advances of the time and finally the soundtrack which plays with the expectations, everything to make this film uncanny.

Bibliography

Kubrick, S. (1980). The Shining. Motion Picture. Warner Bros.

Botting, F. Townshend, D. (2004). American Female Gothic. Gothic: Eighteenth-century Gothic : Radcliffe, reader, writer, romancer. Taylor & Francis.

Tatar, M. (1981). The Houses of Fiction: Toward a Definition Of the Uncanny. Duke University Press.

Falsetto, M. (2001). Time and Space: Part 2. Stanley Kubrick: A Narrative and Stylistic Analysis. Greenwood Publishing Group.

Jameson, R. (1980). Kubrick’s Shining. Film Society of Lincoln Center.

Webber, A. (1996). The Doppelgänger in Practice. The Doppelgänger: Double Visions in German Literature. Clarendon Press.

Ferrara, S. (2001). Foreword. Steadicam: techniques and aesthetics. Focal Press.

Lerner, N. (2009). Rehearing The Shining. Code, D. Music in the Horror Film: Listening to Fear. Routledge.