How Stanley Kubrick’s cat inspired ‘The Shining’: “I’ve always been interested in the paranormal”
Fear is one of the most evocative emotions that can be translated to the silver screen, with decades of horror movies that have preyed on our terror over spiders, dark spaces and deserted houses. Some people go to the movies to be comforted, but others go to feel something extreme, looking for stories that make them leap out of their skin and terrify them to their very core.
We love to make predictions about what will happen, thinking we can outsmart the tropes of the genre by trying to anticipate each jump scare and who the killer will be. But there was perhaps only one director who could truly outsmart his audiences, capitalising on our fear of the unknown through one of the most puzzling and transfixing horrors of all time, even if it was inspired by his cat.
Stanley Kubrick was the master of versatility, working on individualistic and vastly different projects throughout his career that demonstrated his talent in all storytelling genres.
Whether it be his period epic or his eerily accurate tale of the dangers of artificial intelligence, the director created poignant films that were leagues ahead of the times, something that is searingly obvious through The Shining and his mastery over the language of fear.
Before creating the film, Kubrick already had an idea of how he would approach this due to his early fascination with supernatural elements, as he said, “I’ve always been interested in ESP and the paranormal. In addition to the scientific experiments which have been conducted, suggesting that we are just short of conclusive proof of its existence, I’m sure we’ve all had the experience of opening a book at the exact page we’re looking for, or thinking of a friend a moment before they ring on the telephone.”
However, it was his cat’s connection to the supernatural world that sparked his desire to create The Shining, about which he noted, “I have a long-haired cat, named Polly. [She] regularly gets knots in her coat, which I have to comb or scissor out. She hates this, and on dozens of occasions while I have been stroking her and thinking that the knots have got bad enough to do something about them, she has suddenly dived under the bed before I have made the slightest move to get a comb or scissors. I have obviously considered the possibility that she can tell when I plan to use the comb because of some special way I feel the knots when I have decided to comb them, but I’m quite sure that isn’t how she does it.”
His early fascination with Polly’s supposed psychic powers and the supernatural perhaps sowed the seeds for a film that explores many of these paranormal elements under the one roof of the Overlook Hotel. Everything that manifests in that deserted building is an extension of these ideas, with the goings on in the hotel forcing us to notice strange and otherworldly connections between each turn of events, leading to one of the most unsettling masterpieces of all time.
