Far Out Trivia: Why is Room 237 haunted in ‘The Shining’?
Having been released to mixed reviews, The Shining has become revered as one of the best and scariest horror films ever made. Director Stanley Kubrick applied a painstaking level of detail to every scene to ensure it gave audiences the fright of their lives.
No scene in the movie has terrified more audiences or caused more debate than the one involving Room 237 in the Overlook Hotel, the main setting for its story. In it, Jack Nicholson’s protagonist Jack Torrance goes to investigate after his son Danny comes from the room with bruises on his neck, claiming someone strangled him.
Jack enters the hotel room and initially finds nothing. But then he sees the light on in the bathroom and gently pushes open the door, at which point a whirring crescendo of percussive music prepares us, the audience, to expect something horrifying. And yet, still, there is nothing except an empty room of eerily clashing pastel greens, yellow and beige. Like a hospital ward. And a half-drawn curtain covering the bathtub.
Behind the curtain, we see the outline of a figure moving, then drawing back the curtain as Jack watches on in horror. It’s a naked woman who approaches Jack before they embrace and kiss. As Jack sees himself in the bathroom mirror, the back of the woman he is embracing turns to rotten flesh, and soon, her entire body is that of a dead person.
This sudden transformation completely confounds our immediate expectations. Yet, ultimately culminating in the horror that we went into the bathroom expecting, it makes for a perfectly executed double bluff. The scene also leaves Jack with some explaining to do, which he avoids by lying before snapping at his wife, Danny’s mother. The entire episode marks the turning point in the movie, a moment when Jack’s loyalty goes over from the side of his family to the side of the hotel he is taking care of.
Director Kubrick, who wrote the film’s screenplay with Diane Johnson, chooses to leave open the question of what was going on in Room 237 and why. Apart from the hotel chef’s instruction that Danny should avoid the room earlier in the story, there are no other references. We never get a hint as to who the woman in the bathtub is or why she might have attacked Danny and seduced Jack. This ambiguity adds to the sense that there are multiple interpretations of Jack’s trajectory towards madness as the plot develops.
Is it the hotel and its collection of ghosts that willed him into losing his mind? Or is it simply the cabin fever of being holed up alone over the winter that has driven him stir-crazy? Has Jack become dissatisfied with his marriage to the point that he fantasised about the woman in the bathroom, which tallies him lying to and shouting at his wife? Is he responsible for the bruises on Danny’s neck? Or is a haunted hotel accountable for all of it?
Perhaps he had psychopathic tendencies in the first place, which the hotel has simply helped bring out in him. Kubrick leaves all of these questions up to us to answer.
This is not the case in the Stephen King novel on which the film version of The Shining is based. There is, unambiguously, a ghost living in the hotel room, which is Room 217, rather than Room 237 of the movie. It’s the ghost of Lorraine Massey, a lawyer from New York who died while staying at the Overlook Hotel the previous summer. Massey slit her wrists in the room’s bathtub after a young lover with whom she was cheating on her husband had left the hotel.
The number of the room was changed at the request of the hotel where the film was shot, Timberline Lodge. Since there was a real room 217 at the hotel, the manager was worried guests would be afraid of staying in the room in future, so the number was changed to that of a room, which didn’t exist. As it’s panned out, due to the film’s success, room 217 is now the most requested room at Timberline Lodge.
