“Then he grew up”: Stanley Kubrick’s ridiculous 1966 pitch for “the world’s scariest movie”
When Stanley Kubrick finally made a horror movie, he made one of the greatest horror movies of all time, because that’s the sort of thing you do when you’re Stanley Kubrick.
When he made a sci-fi movie, he made one of the greatest sci-fi movies of all time; he made three war movies, all of which rank among the greatest of all time, and when he made a dystopian movie, he made one of the greatest dystopian movies of all time, which is what you do when you’re Stanley Kubrick.
However, The Shining wasn’t the first time he’d contemplated scaring the shit out of cinema audiences, and the filmmaker was so confident that he’d be able to terrify the majority of paying customers that he came up with an idea that, in retrospect, was ridiculous, and would have lost an absolute fortune.
As much as some cinephiles can’t bring themselves to walk out of a screening, no matter how bad it is, making that the major selling point of his hypothetical production would have inevitably encouraged some thrifty viewers to get up and leave, regardless of whether or not they were enjoying what they were seeing.
In 1966, sandwiched in between Dr Strangelove and 2001: A Space Odyssey, the light bulb went off in the auteur’s head. Usually, that was a good sign, since history has shown that when Kubrick was inspired, the results were always innovative, often transformative, and frequently destined for greatness.
However, he was a million miles off it on this occasion. At the time, he wanted to make “the world’s scariest movie, involving a series of episodes that would play upon the nightmare fears of the audience,” according to his widow, Christiane. That’s fair enough, and if he set his mind to it, it wasn’t the most far-fetched dream in the world, although it would have been a fiscal nightmare.
“Later,” she elaborated. “He decided he was going to make a horror film so scary that he would advertise it by saying, ‘You can get your money back if you can sit all the way through’. That was the idea; that it would be so frightening, people would absolutely have to leave.” Sound, in theory, but stupid, had it ever made it to the execution phase?
After all, if you tell 100 people in a packed theatre that they can be refunded in full if they decide to vacate the premises before the credits roll, how many of them do you think would take the cash? Quite a few, something Kubrick wouldn’t have accounted for, since he would have been confident in his abilities to make something so terrifying that the average punter would be glued to the screen.
That doesn’t account for the penny-pinchers, though, and there’d be more than a few of them. His intentions were noble, but after thinking about it for more than a couple of seconds, Christiane hit the nail on the head and explained why it never came to pass: “Then he grew up, and said that was a bad idea.”
