‘The Shining’ explained: The one thing that appears in every single shot
When a master filmmaker puts all his genius into making something unsettling, thought-provoking, and downright terrifying, you get Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining taking pride of place on the Mount Rushmore of horror movies.
In the process of adapting Stephen King’s novel, the 2001: A Space Odyssey director changed so much of the book that King famously despised the film. However, Kubrick is nothing if not a visionary, and what he created mightn’t have hewn as close to the text as the author would have liked, but more than made up for it in scares, thematic fascinations, and symbolism that has fuelled decades of scholarly analysis. One of those symbols, in fact, appears in every single shot of The Shining, but the average audience may not even notice it to begin with, or understand its meaning.
In the early going of the movie, the symbol is introduced so subtly that it’s almost imperceptible. It appears in the tie that the Overlook Hotel manager, Stuart Ullman, is wearing as he interviews Jack Nicholson’s Jack Torrance about the winter caretaker position, and it appears in his wife Wendy’s jumper and tights when she speaks to a doctor about Jack accidentally dislocating his son Danny’s shoulder while drunk. Then, when the family is given a tour of the Overlook, it appears in the wheels of a cart transporting luggage, and in the clothes Jack is wearing.
What is this symbol that is making its presence known more and more as the film develops? Well, it’s the colour red. It’s everywhere in The Shining, and it only becomes more obvious as the characters enter the hotel, which houses the infamous red elevator doors and scarlet red halls with geometric carpets. Then there is the garish red and white bathroom where Jack meets the ghost of Delbert Grady, the previous caretaker who lost his mind before killing his family with an axe and committing suicide, and the red lipstick Danny uses to write ‘REDRUM’ on the door of the family’s room.
Now, while it’s all well and good to say that Kubrick uses a lot of red in The Shining, the question piqued is whether it actually means anything. Couldn’t its pervasiveness be put down to aesthetic choices by the costume department, set dressers, and prop masters? Well, while that may sometimes be the case in certain movies, the abundance of red in The Shining undoubtedly serves a function in the film beyond simply being interesting to look at.
For Kubrick, red is the harbinger of shadows around the corner, and a visual cue that appears onscreen to signal that a malevolent force hangs over the Torrances, and the more prominent the usage becomes, the more immediate and deadly that malevolence manifests itself. The different shades used in the movie also have different meanings: when Wendy and Danny wear red in the early parts of the film, it indicates innocence and frolic, which is juxtaposed with the darker hues worn by Jack, symbolising a disconnect in the family, his own existence, and the dark times to come.
What is the significance of the colour red in ‘The Shining’?
Red, obviously, is the colour of blood, and much like the blue curtains your English teacher insists indicate sadness, this primary shade is often used in movies to symbolise anger, rage, and passion because of that. But in The Shining, it transcends to an atmosphere of dread, before quite literally exploding into a tidal wave of blood when the elevator doors unsheath its contents in full view of Shelley Duvall’s terrified Wendy.
By this point, few audience members won’t have cottoned on to the symbolism, as Kubrick arguably turns his subtext into text, but the visual of the blood cascading into the hallway in dramatic waves is too spectacular, haunting, and iconic not to use as the centrepiece of the movie, and the director delivers on all counts beyond visual extremes.
