title: The Shining (film)

text: Wendy finds Jack's manuscript with "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy" written repeatedly numerous times. When Jack threatens her life, Wendy knocks him unconscious with a baseball bat and locks him in the kitchen pantry, but she and Danny cannot leave due to Jack having previously sabotaged the hotel's two-way radio and snowcat. Back in their hotel room, Danny is saying "redrum" multiple times and even writes the word on the bathroom door. Wendy sees the word in the mirror and realizes that the word is actually "murder" spelled backwards. Jack is freed by Grady and goes after Wendy and Danny with an axe. Danny escapes outside through the bathroom window, and Wendy fights Jack off with a knife when he breaks through the door. Hallorann, having flown back to Colorado after Danny's telepathic SOS, reaches the hotel in another snowcat. His arrival distracts Jack, who ambushes and murders Hallorann in the lobby, then pursues Danny into the hedge maze. Wendy runs through the hotel looking for Danny, encountering the hotel's ghosts and a vision of cascading blood similar to Danny's premonition.


title: The Shining (film)

text: In the hedge maze, Danny misleads Jack and hides behind a snowdrift while Jack follows a false trail. Danny and Wendy reunite and leave in Hallorann's snowcat, leaving Jack to freeze to death in the maze. In a photograph in the hotel hallway, Jack is pictured standing amidst a crowd of party revelers from July 4, 1921.


title: The Shining (film)

text: In the European cut, all of the scenes involving Jackson and Burton were removed but the credits remained unchanged. Dennen is on-screen in all versions of the film, albeit to a limited degree (and with no dialogue) in the European cut.


title: The Shining (film)

text: The actresses who played the ghosts of the murdered Grady daughters, Lisa and Louise Burns, are identical twins; however, the characters in the book and film script are merely sisters, not twins. In the film's dialogue, Ullman says he thinks they were "about eight and ten". Nonetheless, they are frequently referred to in discussions about the film as "the Grady twins".


title: The Shining (film)

text: The resemblance in the staging of the Grady girls and the "Twins" photograph by Diane Arbus has been noted both by Arbus' biographer, Patricia Bosworth, the Kubrick assistant who cast and coached them, Leon Vitali, and by numerous Kubrick critics. Although Kubrick both met Arbus personally and studied photography under her during his time as photographer for "Look" magazine, Kubrick's widow says he did not deliberately model the Grady girls on Arbus' photograph, in spite of widespread attention to the resemblance.


title: The Shining (film)

text: Before making "The Shining", Kubrick directed the film "Barry Lyndon" (1975), a highly visual period film about an Irishman who attempts to make his way into the British aristocracy. Despite its technical achievements, the film was not a box-office success in the United States and was derided by critics for being too long and too slow. Kubrick, disappointed with "Barry Lyndon"s lack of success, realized he needed to make a film that would be commercially viable as well as artistically fulfilling. Stephen King was told that Kubrick had his staff bring him stacks of horror books as he planted himself in his office to read them all: "Kubrick's secretary heard the sound of each book hitting the wall as the director flung it into a reject pile after reading the first few pages. Finally one day the secretary noticed it had been a while since she had heard the thud of another writer's work biting the dust. She walked in to check on her boss and found Kubrick deeply engrossed in reading "The Shining"."


title: The Shining (film)

text: Speaking about the theme of the film, Kubrick stated that "there's something inherently wrong with the human personality. There's an evil side to it. One of the things that horror stories can do is to show us the archetypes of the unconscious; we can see the dark side without having to confront it directly".


title: The Shining (film)

text: Nicholson was Kubrick's first choice for the role of Jack Torrance; other actors considered included Robert De Niro (who said the film gave him nightmares for a month), Robin Williams, and Harrison Ford, all of whom met with Stephen King's disapproval. Stephen King, for his part, disavowed Nicholson because he thought that, since he had shot "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest", the viewer would tend to consider him an unstable individual from the beginning. For this reason, King preferred Jon Voight, Michael Moriarty, or Martin Sheen for the role, who would more faithfully represent the profile of the ordinary individual who is gradually driven to madness. In any case, from the beginning the writer was told that the actor for the lead role "was not negotiable."


title: The Shining (film)

text: Although Jack Nicholson initially suggested that Jessica Lange would be a better fit for Stephen King's Wendy, Shelley Duvall knew early that she was the one cast for the role (Nicholson would work with Lange on his next movie, "The Postman Always Rings Twice"). Wendy's character in the film differs notably from the novel, where she appears more capable and less vulnerable. Throughout the filming Kubrick pushed Duvall hard. It is said that the scene in which, armed with the baseball bat, she walks backwards up the stairs before the attack of her husband (one of the most reshot scenes in all of cinema), she was not representing a terrified woman; Shelley was literally "terrified." According to the "Guinness Book of Records", Kubrick demanded the shot be repeated 127 times.


title: The Shining (film)

text: The director's initial candidate to play the Torrances' son was Cary Guffey ("Close Encounters of the Third Kind"), but the young actor's parents prevented him, claiming that the film was too gruesome for a child. In his search to find the right actor to play Danny, Kubrick sent a husband-and-wife team, Leon (who portrayed Lord Bullingdon in "Barry Lyndon") and Kersti Vitali, to Chicago, Denver, and Cincinnati to create an interview pool of 5,000 boys over a six-month period. These cities were chosen since Kubrick was looking for a boy with an accent that fell between Jack Nicholson's and Shelley Duvall's speech patterns, with Nicholson coming from New Jersey and Duvall from Texas. During the filming, the little actor was protected in a special way by Kubrick; in fact, the boy believed at all times that he was shooting a drama, not a horror movie. Following his role in the 1982 film "", Danny Lloyd abandoned his acting career.


title: The Shining (film)

text: Having chosen King's novel as a basis for his next project, and after a pre-production phase, Kubrick had sets constructed on soundstages at EMI Elstree Studios in Borehamwood, Hertfordshire, England. Some of the interior designs of the Overlook Hotel set were based on those of the Ahwahnee Hotel in Yosemite National Park. To enable him to shoot the scenes in chronological order, he used several stages at EMI Elstree Studios in order to make all sets available during the complete duration of production. The set for the Overlook Hotel was at the time the largest ever built at Elstree, including a life-size re-creation of the exterior of the hotel. In February 1979, the set at Elstree was badly damaged in a fire, causing a delay in the production.


title: The Shining (film)

text: While most of the interior shots, and even some of the Overlook exterior shots, were shot on studio sets, a few exterior shots were shot on location by a second-unit crew headed by Jan Harlan. Saint Mary Lake and Wild Goose Island in Glacier National Park, Montana was the filming location for the aerial shots of the opening scenes, with the Volkswagen Beetle driving along Going-to-the-Sun Road. The Timberline Lodge on Mount Hood in Oregon was filmed for a few of the establishing shots of the fictional Overlook Hotel; absent in these shots is the hedge maze, something the Timberline Lodge does not have.


title: The Shining (film)

text: Outtakes of the opening panorama shots were later used by Ridley Scott for the closing moments of the original cut of the film "Blade Runner" (1982).


title: The Shining (film)

text: In 1977, a Warner Bros. executive, John Calley, sent Kubrick the proofs of what would become the novel. Its author, Stephen King, was already at that time a best-selling author who, after the blockbuster of "Carrie", could boast of successes in adaptations for the big screen. For his part, Kubrick had been considering directing a horror film for some time; a few years before, while "Barry Lyndon" disappointed at the box office, another Warner film he had refused to direct, "The Exorcist", directed by William Friedkin, was breaking box office records around the world.


title: The Shining (film)

text: Asked what it was that attracted Kubrick to the idea of adapting the novel by the popular writer, a regular on the best-seller lists, his executive producer (and brother-in-law) Jan Harlan revealed that Kubrick wanted to "try" in this film genre, although with the condition of being able to change King's novel. And that condition would finally be guaranteed by contract.


title: The Shining (film)

text: The script was written by the director himself with the collaboration of novel writer Diane Johnson. Kubrick had rejected the initial version of the draft, written by King himself, as too literal an adaptation of the novel. Furthermore, the filmmaker did not believe in ghost stories because that "would imply the possibility that there was something after death," and he did not believe there was anything, "not even hell." Instead, Johnson, who was teaching a Gothic novel seminar at the University of California at Berkeley at the time, seemed like a better fit for the project. Deep down, Johnson looked down on Stephen King's literature; shortly after the premiere, in an interview with the Parisian magazine "Positif", she stated:


title: The Shining (film)

text: "The Shining" had a prolonged and arduous production period, often with very long workdays. Principal photography took over a year to complete, due to Kubrick's highly methodical nature. Actress Shelley Duvall did not get along with Kubrick, frequently arguing with him on set about lines in the script, her acting techniques and numerous other things. Duvall eventually became so overwhelmed by the stress of her role that she became physically ill for months. At one point, she was under so much stress that her hair began to fall out. The shooting script was being changed constantly, sometimes several times a day, adding more stress. Nicholson eventually became so frustrated with the ever-changing script that he would throw away the copies that the production team had given him to memorize, knowing that it was going to change anyway. He learned most of his lines just minutes before filming them. Nicholson was living in London with his then-girlfriend Anjelica Huston and her younger sister, Allegra, who testified to his long shooting days. Joe Turkel stated in a 2014 interview that they rehearsed the "bar scene" for six weeks and that the shoot day lasted from 9a.m. to 10:30p.m., with Turkel recollecting that his clothes were soaked in perspiration by the end of the day's shoot. He also added that it was his favorite scene in the film.


title: The Shining (film)

text: For the final Gold Room sequence, Kubrick instructed the extras (via megaphone) not to talk, "but to mime conversation to each other. Kubrick knew from years of scrutinizing thousands of films that extras could often mime their business by nodding and using large gestures that look fake. He told them to act naturally to give the scene a chilling sense of time-tripping realism as Jack walks from the seventies into the roaring twenties".


title: The Shining (film)

text: For the international versions of the film, Kubrick shot different takes of Wendy reading the typewriter pages in different languages. For each language, a suitable idiom was used: German ("Was du heute kannst besorgen, das verschiebe nicht auf morgen" – "Never put off till tomorrow what may be done today"), Italian ("Il mattino ha l'oro in bocca" – "The morning has gold in its mouth"), French ("Un «Tiens» vaut mieux que deux «Tu l'auras»" – "One 'here you go' is worth more than two 'you'll have it, the equivalent of "A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush"), Spanish ("No por mucho madrugar amanece más temprano" – "No matter how early you get up, you can't make the sun rise any sooner.") These alternate shots were not included with the DVD release, where only the English phrase "all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy" was used.


title: The Shining (film)

text: The door that Jack chops through with the axe near the end of the film was real; Kubrick originally shot this scene with a fake door, but Nicholson, who had worked as a volunteer fire marshal and a firefighter in the California Air National Guard, tore through it too quickly. Jack's line, "Heeeere's Johnny!", is taken from Ed McMahon's introduction to "The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson", and was improvised by Nicholson. Kubrick, who had lived in England for some time, was unaware of the significance of the line, and nearly used a different take. Carson later used the Nicholson clip to open his 1980 anniversary show on NBC.


title: The Shining (film)

text: During production, Kubrick screened David Lynch's "Eraserhead" (1977) to the cast and crew, to convey the mood he wanted to achieve for the film.


title: The Shining (film)

text: "The Shining" was among the early half-dozen films (after the films "Bound for Glory", "Marathon Man", and "Rocky", all released in 1976), to use the newly developed Steadicam, a stabilizing mount for a motion picture camera, which mechanically separates the operator's movement from the camera's, allowing smooth tracking shots while the operator is moving over an uneven surface. It essentially combines the stabilized steady footage of a regular mount with the fluidity and flexibility of a handheld camera. The inventor of the Steadicam, Garrett Brown, was heavily involved with the production of "The Shining". Brown has described his excitement taking his first tour of the sets, which offered "further possibilities for the Steadicam". This tour convinced Brown to become personally involved with the production. Kubrick was not "just talking of stunt shots and staircases". Rather he would use the Steadicam "as it was intended to be used — as a tool which can help get the lens where it's wanted in space and time without the classic limitations of the dolly and crane". Brown used an 18 mm Cooke lens that allowed the Steadicam to pass within an inch of walls and door frames. Brown published an article in "American Cinematographer" about his experience, and contributed to the audio commentary on the 2007 DVD release.


title: The Shining (film)

text: Kubrick personally aided in modifying the Steadicam's video transmission technology. Brown states his own abilities to operate the Steadicam were refined by working on Kubrick's film. For this film, Brown developed a two-handed technique, which enabled him to maintain the camera at one height while panning and tilting the camera. In addition to tracking shots from behind, the Steadicam enabled shooting in constricted rooms without flying out walls, or backing the camera into doors. Brown notes that:


title: The Shining (film)

text: This required the Steadicam to be on a special mount resembling a wheelchair, in which the operator sat while pulling a platform with the sound man. The weight of the rig and its occupants proved to be too much for the original tires, resulting in a blowout one day that almost caused a serious crash. Solid tires were then mounted on the rig. Kubrick also had a highly accurate speedometer mounted on the rig so as to duplicate the exact tempo of a given shot so that Brown could perform successive identical takes. Brown also discusses how the scenes in the hedge maze were shot with a Steadicam.


title: The Shining (film)

text: The stylistically modernist art-music chosen by Kubrick is similar to the repertoire he first explored in "". Although the repertoire was selected by Kubrick, the process of matching passages of music to motion picture was left almost entirely at the discretion of music editor Gordon Stainforth, whose work on this film is known for attention to fine details and remarkably precise synchronization without excessive splicing.


title: The Shining (film)

text: The soundtrack album on LP was withdrawn due to problems with licensing of the music. The LP soundtrack omits some pieces heard in the film, and also includes complete versions of pieces of which only fragments are heard in the film.


title: The Shining (film)

text: Upon their arrival at Elstree Studios, Wendy Carlos and Rachel Elkind were shown the first version of the film by Kubrick: "The film was a little on the long side. There were great gobs of scenes that never made it to the film. There was a whole strange and mystical scene in which Jack Nicholson discovers objects that have been arranged in his working space in the ballroom with arrows and things. He walks down and thinks he hears a voice and a ghost throws a ball back to him. None of that made it to the final film. We scored a lot of those. We didn't know what was going to be used for sure". After having something similar happen to her on "Clockwork Orange," Carlos has said that she was so disillusioned by Kubrick's actions that she vowed never to work with him again. She and Elkind had considered legal action against Kubrick, but because no formal contract was in place, they reluctantly accepted the situation. Carlos's own music was released in its near entirety in 2005 as part of her "Rediscovering Lost Scores" compilation.


title: The Shining (film)

text: Unlike Kubrick's previous works, which developed audiences gradually through word-of-mouth, "The Shining" initially opened on 10 screens in New York City and Los Angeles on the Memorial Day weekend, then was released as a mass-market film nationwide within a month. The European release of "The Shining" a few months later was 25 minutes shorter due to Kubrick's removal of most of the scenes taking place outside the environs of the hotel.


title: The Shining (film)

text: After its premiere and a week into the general run (with a running time of 146 minutes), Kubrick cut a scene at the end that took place in a hospital. The scene shows Wendy in a bed talking with Mr. Ullman who explains that Jack's body could not be found; he then gives Danny a yellow tennis ball, presumably the same one that Jack was throwing around the hotel. This scene was subsequently physically cut out of prints by projectionists and sent back to the studio by order of Warner Bros., the film's distributor. This cut the film's running time to 144 minutes. Roger Ebert commented:


title: The Shining (film)

text: The general consensus among those who saw the first few shows was that the film was better without it because keeping it would weaken the Overlook's threat to the family and reintroduce Ullman, who had barely had a leading role in the story, into the conflict. Co-writer Diane Johnson revealed that Kubrick had a certain "compassion" from the beginning for the fate of Wendy and Danny, and in that sense the hospital scene would give a sense of a return to normalcy. Johnson, on the other hand, was in favor of a more tragic outcome: she even proposed the death of Danny Torrance. For Shelley Duvall, "Kubrick was wrong, because the scene explained some important things, such as the meaning of the yellow ball and the role that the hotel manager played in the intrigue." Kubrick decided that the film worked better without the scene.


title: The Shining (film)

text: For its release in Europe, Kubrick cut about 25 minutes from the film. The excised scenes included: a longer meeting between Jack and Watson at the hotel; Danny being attended by a doctor (Anne Jackson), including references to Tony and how Jack once injured Danny in a drunken rage; more footage of Hallorann's attempts to get to the hotel during the snowstorm, including a sequence with a garage attendant (Tony Burton); extended dialogue scenes at the hotel; and a scene where Wendy discovers a group of skeletons in the hotel lobby during the climax. Jackson and Burton are credited in the European print, despite their scenes having been excised from the movie. According to Harlan, Kubrick decided to cut some sequences because the film was "not very well received", and also after Warner Brothers had complained about its ambiguity and length.


title: The Shining (film)

text: The scene when Jack writes obsessively on the typewriter "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy" was re-shot a number of times, but changing the language of the typed copy to Italian, French, Spanish, and German, in order to match the respective dubbed languages.


title: The Shining (film)

text: The U.S. network television premiere of "The Shining" (on the "ABC Friday Night Movie" of May 6, 1983) started with a placard saying, "Tonight's Film Deals With the Supernatural, As a Possessed Man Attempts to Destroy His Family." With the movie's ambiguities, it is not known how Kubrick felt about or if he agreed with this proclamation. The placard also said that the film was edited for television and warned about the content.


title: The Shining (film)

text: DVDs in both regions contain a candid fly-on-the-wall 33-minute documentary made by Kubrick's daughter Vivian (who was 17 when she filmed it) entitled "Making The Shining", originally shown on British television in 1980. She also provided an audio commentary track about her documentary for its DVD release. It appears even on pre-2007 editions of "The Shining" on DVD, although most DVDs of Kubrick films before then were devoid of documentaries or audio commentaries. It has some candid interviews and very private moments caught on set, such as arguments with cast and director, moments of a no-nonsense Kubrick directing his actors, Scatman Crothers being overwhelmed with emotion during his interview, Shelley Duvall collapsing from exhaustion on the set, and Jack Nicholson enjoying playing up to the behind-the-scenes camera.


title: The Shining (film)

text: In May 2019, it was announced that the film would be released on Ultra HD Blu-ray in October. The release includes a 4K remaster using a 4K scan of the original 35mm negative. Filmmaker Steven Spielberg and Kubrick's former personal assistant Leon Vitali closely assisted Warner Bros. in the mastering process. This is the same cut and 4K restoration that was screened at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival. According to the official press release, the official full-length run-time is 146 minutes.


title: The Shining (film)

text: Various theatrical posters were used during the original 1980–1981 international release cycle, but in the U.S., where the film first opened, the primary poster and newspaper advert was designed by noted Hollywood graphic designer Saul Bass. Bass and Kubrick reportedly went through over 300 potential designs before settling on the final design of an unsettling, angry-looking, underlit, pointillistic doll-like face (which does not appear in the film) peering through the letters "", with "SHiNiNG" below, in smaller letters. At the top of the poster are the words ""A MASTERPIECE OF MODERN HORROR"", with the credits and other information at the bottom.


title: The Shining (film)

text: The correspondence between the two men during the design process survives, including Kubrick's handwritten critiques on Bass's different proposed designs. Bass originally intended the poster to be black on a red background, but Kubrick, to Bass's dismay, chose to make the background yellow. In response, Bass commissioned a small, silkscreened print run of his original version, which also lacks the "masterpiece of modern horror" slogan, and has the credits in a compact white block at the bottom.


title: The Shining (film)

text: Turner Classic Movies and Fathom Events had a limited screening in October 2016 in 2K and 4K resolution.


title: The Shining (film)

text: In April 2019, a 4K resolution remastered version from a new scan of the original 35mm camera negative of the film was selected to be shown in the Cannes Classics section at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival. The length is listed as 146 minutes and 143 minutes.


title: The Shining (film)

text: "The Shining" opened on the same weekend as "The Empire Strikes Back" but was released on 10 screens and grossed $622,337 for the four-day weekend, the third highest-grossing opening weekend from fewer than 50 screens of all time, behind "Star Wars" (1977) and "The Rose" (1979). It had a per-screen average gross of $62,234 compared to $50,919 for "The Empire Strikes Back" from 126 screens.


title: The Shining (film)

text: The film had mixed reviews at the time of its opening in the United States. Janet Maslin of "The New York Times" lauded Nicholson's performance and praised the Overlook Hotel as an effective setting for horror, but wrote that "the supernatural story knows frustratingly little rhyme or reason ... Even the film's most startling horrific images seem overbearing and perhaps even irrelevant." "Variety" was critical, stating "With everything to work with ... Kubrick has teamed with jumpy Jack Nicholson to destroy all that was so terrifying about Stephen King's bestseller." A common initial criticism was the slow pacing, which was highly atypical of horror films of the time. Neither Gene Siskel nor Roger Ebert reviewed the film on their television show "Sneak Previews" when it was first released, but in his review for the "Chicago Sun-Times", Ebert complained that it was hard to connect with any of the characters. In his "Chicago Tribune" review, Siskel gave the film two stars out of four and called it "a crashing disappointment. The biggest surprise is that it contains virtually no thrills. Given Kubrick's world-class reputation, one's immediate reaction is that maybe he was after something other than thrills in the film. If so, it's hard to figure out what." Kevin Thomas of the "Los Angeles Times" wrote "There are moments so visually stunning only a Kubrick could pull them off, yet the film is too grandiose to be the jolter that horror pictures are expected to be. Both those expecting significance from Kubrick and those merely looking for a good scare may be equally disappointed." Pauline Kael of "The New Yorker" stated "Again and again, the movie leads us to expect something – almost promises it – and then disappoints us." Gary Arnold of "The Washington Post" wrote "Stanley Kubrick's production of "The Shining", a ponderous, lackluster distillation of Stephen King's best-selling novel, looms as the Big Letdown of the new film season. I can't recall a more elaborately ineffective scare movie."


title: The Shining (film)

text: It was one of only two films of Kubrick's last eleven films, the other being "Eyes Wide Shut", to receive no nominations from the BAFTAs. It was the only one of Kubrick's last nine films to receive no nominations from either the Oscars or Golden Globes, therefore being the only one of Kubrick's last eleven films to receive no nominations at all from the Oscars or Golden Globes or BAFTAs. Instead, it was Kubrick's only film to be nominated at the Razzie Awards, including Worst Director and Worst Actress (Duvall), in the first year that award was given. Duvall's nomination was retracted by the Razzie committee on March 31, 2022. Vincent Misiano's review in "Ares" magazine concluded: ""The Shining" lays open to view all the devices of horror and suspense – endless eerie music, odd camera angles, a soundtrack of interminably pounding heart, hatchets and hunts. The result is shallow, self-conscious and dull. Read the book."


title: The Shining (film)

text: On Rotten Tomatoes, the film has a "certified fresh" approval rating of 82% based on 101 reviews, with an average rating of 8.5 out of 10. The site's critical consensus reads: "Though it deviates from Stephen King's novel, Stanley Kubrick's "The Shining" is a chilling, often baroque journey into madness -- exemplified by an unforgettable turn from Jack Nicholson." On Metacritic, it has a weighted average score of 66 out of 100 based on reviews from 26 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews". Tim Cahill of "Rolling Stone" noted in an interview with Kubrick that by 1987 there was already a "critical re-evaluation of ["The Shining"] in process".


title: The Shining (film)

text: In 2001, the film was ranked 29th on AFI's 100 Years...100 Thrills list and Jack Torrance was named the 25th greatest villain on the AFI's 100 Years...100 Heroes and Villains list in 2003. In 2005, the quote "Here's Johnny!" was ranked 68 on AFI's 100 Years...100 Movie Quotes list. It had Channel 4's all-time scariest moment, and Bravo TV named one of the film's scenes sixth on their list of the 100 Scariest Movie Moments. Film critics Kim Newman and Jonathan Romney both placed it in their top ten lists for the 2002 "Sight & Sound" poll. In 2005, "Total Film" ranked "The Shining" as the 5th-greatest horror film of all time. Director Martin Scorsese placed it on his list of the 11 scariest horror films of all time. Mathematicians at King's College London (KCL) used statistical modeling in a study commissioned by Sky Movies to conclude that "The Shining" was the "perfect scary movie" due to a proper balance of various ingredients including shock value, suspense, gore and size of the cast. In 2010, "The Guardian" newspaper ranked it as the 5th "best horror film of all time". It was voted the 62nd greatest American film ever made in a 2015 poll conducted by BBC. In 2017, "Empire" magazine's readers' poll ranked the film at No. 35 on its list of "The 100 Greatest Movies". In 2021, The film was ranked at No. 2 by "Time Out" on their list of "The 100 best horror movies". Critics, scholars, and crew members (such as Kubrick's producer Jan Harlan) have discussed the film's enormous influence on popular culture. In 2006, Roger Ebert, who was initially critical of the work, inducted the film into his Great Movies series, saying "Stanley Kubrick's cold and frightening "The Shining" challenges us to decide: Who is the reliable observer? Whose idea of events can we trust? ... It is this elusive open-endedness that makes Kubrick's film so strangely disturbing."


title: The Shining (film)

text: While Duvall's performance was initially panned by critics, she has since received praise for her acting; Maureen Murphy, a founder of the Razzies stated in 2022 that she regretted giving Duvall the Worst Actress nomination. On March 31, 2022, the Razzie committee officially rescinded Duvall's nomination, stating "We have since discovered that Duvall's performance was impacted by Stanley Kubrick's treatment of her throughout the production." The retraction of the nomination was in response to public backlash The Razzies received after refusing to retract Bruce Willis's win for "Worst Bruce Willis Performance in a 2021 Movie", a one-off award for his roles in eight films released that calendar year. Willis's family announced the star's retirement after being diagnosed with aphasia, a cognitive brain condition, on March 30, 2022. The Razzie committee retracted both Willis's win and Duvall's nomination the following day. On Duvall's performance, "Vulture" magazine wrote in 2019: "looking into Duvall's huge eyes from the front row of a theater, I found myself riveted by a very poignant form of fear. Not the fear of an actor out of her element, or the more mundane fear of a victim being chased around by an ax-wielding maniac. Rather, it was something far more disquieting, and familiar: the fear of a wife who's experienced her husband at his worst, and is terrified that she'll experience it again." Media site "Screen Rant" described Duvall as "the heart of the film; she is out of her depth in dealing with her husband's looming insanity while trying to protect her young son, all while being fearful of the malevolence around her."


title: The Shining (film)

text: In 1999, Jonathan Romney discussed Kubrick's perfectionism and dispelled others' initial arguments that the film lacked complexity: "The final scene alone demonstrates what a rich source of perplexity "The Shining" offers... look beyond the simplicity and the Overlook reveals itself as a palace of paradox". Romney further explains:


title: The Shining (film)

text: Stephen King has been quoted as saying that although Kubrick made a film with memorable imagery, it was poor as an adaptation and that it is the only adaptation of his novels that he could "remember hating". However, in his 1981 nonfiction book "Danse Macabre", King noted that Kubrick was among those "filmmakers whose particular visions are so clear and fierce that... fear of failure never becomes a factor in the equation," commenting that "even when a director such as Stanley Kubrick makes such a maddening, perverse, and disappointing film as "The Shining", it somehow retains a brilliance that is inarguable; it is simply there," and listed Kubrick's film among those he considered to have "contributed something of value to the [horror] genre." Before the 1980 film, King often said he gave little attention to the film adaptations of his work.


title: The Shining (film)

text: The novel, written while King was suffering from alcoholism, contains an autobiographical element. King expressed disappointment that some themes, such as the disintegration of family and the dangers of alcoholism, are less present in the film. King also viewed the casting of Nicholson as a mistake, arguing it would result in a rapid realization among audiences that Jack would go insane, due to Nicholson's famous role as Randle McMurphy in "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" (1975). King had suggested that a more "everyman" actor such as Jon Voight, Christopher Reeve, or Michael Moriarty play the role, so that Jack's descent into madness would be more unnerving. In the novel, the story takes the child's point of view, while in the film the father is the main character; in fact, one of the most notable differences lies in Jack Torrance's psychological profile. According to the novel, the character represented an ordinary and balanced man who little by little loses control; Furthermore, the written narration reflected personal traits of the author himself at that time (marked by insomnia and alcoholism), in addition to abuse. There is some allusion to these episodes in the American version of the film.


title: The Shining (film)

text: In an interview with the BBC, King criticized Duvall's performance, stating the character is "basically just there to scream and be stupid, and that's not the woman that I wrote about." King's Wendy is a strong and independent woman on a professional and emotional level; to Kubrick, on the other hand, it did not seem consistent that such a woman had long endured the personality of Jack Torrance.


title: The Shining (film)

text: King once suggested that he disliked the film's downplaying of the supernatural; King had envisioned Jack as a victim of the genuinely external forces haunting the hotel, whereas King felt Kubrick had viewed the haunting and its resulting malignancy as coming from within Jack himself. In October 2013, however, journalist Laura Miller wrote that the discrepancy between the two was almost the complete opposite:


title: The Shining (film)

text: King is, essentially, a novelist of morality. The decisions his characters make – whether it's to confront a pack of vampires or to break 10 years of sobriety – are what matter to him. But in Kubrick's "The Shining", the characters are largely in the grip of forces beyond their control. It's a film in which domestic violence occurs, while King's novel is about domestic violence as a choice certain men make when they refuse to abandon a delusional, defensive entitlement. As King sees it, Kubrick treats his characters like "insects" because the director doesn't really consider them capable of shaping their own fates. Everything they do is subordinate to an overweening, irresistible force, which is Kubrick's highly developed aesthetic; they are its slaves. In King's "The Shining", the monster is Jack. In Kubrick's, the monster is Kubrick.


title: The Shining (film)

text: King was also disappointed by Kubrick's decision not to film at The Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, Colorado, which inspired the story (a decision Kubrick made since the hotel lacked sufficient snow and electricity). However, King finally supervised the 1997 television adaptation also titled "The Shining", filmed at The Stanley Hotel.


title: The Shining (film)

text: The animosity of King toward Kubrick's adaptation has dulled over time. During an interview segment on the Bravo channel, King stated that the first time he watched Kubrick's adaptation, he found it to be "dreadfully unsettling". Nonetheless, writing in the afterword of "Doctor Sleep", King professed continued dissatisfaction with the Kubrick film. He said of it "...of course there was Stanley Kubrick's movie which many seem to remember – for reasons I have never quite understood – as one of the scariest films they have ever seen. If you have seen the movie but not read the novel, you should note that "Doctor Sleep" follows the latter which is, in my opinion, the True History of the Torrance Family."


title: The Shining (film)

text: Mike Flanagan, director of the film adaptation of "Doctor Sleep", would reconcile the differences between novel and film versions of "The Shining" there. "Doctor Sleep" is a direct adaptation of its novel counterpart, which itself is a sequel to the novel version of "The Shining", but is also a continuation of Kubrick's film; in explaining the latter, Flanagan expressed, ""The Shining" is so ubiquitous and has burned itself into the collective imagination of people who love cinema in a way that so few movies have. There’s no other language to tell that story in. If you say ‘Overlook Hotel,’ I see something. It lives right up in my brain because of Stanley Kubrick. You can't pretend that isn't the case". King initially rejected Flanagan's pitch of bringing back the Overlook as seen in Kubrick's film, but changed his mind after Flanagan pitched a scene within the hotel towards the end of the film that served as his reason to bring back the Overlook. Upon reading the script, King was so satisfied with the result that he said, "Everything that I ever disliked about the Kubrick version of "The Shining" is redeemed for me here."


title: The Shining (film)

text: Film critic Jonathan Romney writes that the film has been interpreted in many ways, including addressing the topics of the crisis in masculinity, sexism, corporate America, and racism. "It's tempting to read "The Shining" as an Oedipal struggle not just between generations but between Jack's culture of the written word and Danny's culture of images", Romney writes, "Jack also uses the written word to more mundane purpose – to sign his 'contract' with the Overlook. 'I gave my word', ... which we take to mean 'gave his soul' in the ... Faustian sense. But maybe he means it more literally – by the end ... he has renounced language entirely, pursuing Danny through the maze with an inarticulate animal roar. What he has entered into is a conventional business deal that places commercial obligation ... over the unspoken contract of compassion and empathy that he seems to have neglected to sign with his family."


title: The Shining (film)

text: Among interpreters who see the film reflecting more subtly the social concerns that animate other Kubrick films, one of the early viewpoints was discussed in an essay by ABC reporter Bill Blakemore titled "Kubrick's 'Shining' Secret: Film's Hidden Horror Is The Murder of the Indian", first published in "The Washington Post" on July 12, 1987. He believes that indirect references to American killings of Native Americans pervade the film, as exemplified by the Amerindian logos on the baking powder in the kitchen and the Amerindian artwork that appears throughout the hotel, though no Native Americans are seen. Stuart Ullman tells Wendy that when building the hotel, a few Indian attacks had to be fended off since it was constructed on an Indian burial ground.


title: The Shining (film)

text: Blakemore's general argument is that the film is a metaphor for the genocide of Native Americans. He notes that when Jack kills Hallorann, the dead body is seen lying on a rug with an Indian motif. The blood in the elevator shafts is, for Blakemore, the blood of the Indians in the burial ground on which the hotel was built. The date of the final photograph, July 4, is meant to be ironic. Blakemore writes:


title: The Shining (film)

text: As with some of his other movies, Kubrick ends "The Shining" with a powerful visual puzzle that forces the audience to leave the theater asking, "What was that all about?" "The Shining" ends with an extremely long camera shot moving down a hallway in the Overlook, reaching eventually the central photo among 21 photos on the wall, each capturing previous good times in the hotel. At the head of the party is none other than the Jack we've just seen in 1980. The caption reads: "Overlook Hotel – July 4th Ball – 1921." The answer to this puzzle, which is a master key to unlocking the whole movie, is that most Americans overlook the fact that July Fourth was no ball, nor any kind of Independence day, for native Americans; that the weak American villain of the film is the re-embodiment of the American men who massacred the Indians in earlier years; that Kubrick is examining and reflecting on a problem that cuts through the decades and centuries.


title: The Shining (film)

text: Film writer John Capo sees the film as an allegory of American imperialism. This is exemplified by many clues, such as the closing photo of Jack in the past at a Fourth of July party, or Jack's earlier reference to the Rudyard Kipling poem "The White Man's Burden", which was written to advocate the American colonial seizure of the Philippine islands, justifying imperial conquest as a mission-of-civilization.


title: The Shining (film)

text: Film historian Geoffrey Cocks has extended Blakemore's idea that the film has a subtext about Native Americans by arguing that the film indirectly reflects Stanley Kubrick's concerns about the Holocaust (both Cocks' book and Michael Herr's memoir of Kubrick discuss how he wanted his entire life to make a film dealing directly with the Holocaust but could never quite make up his mind). Cocks, writing in his book "The Wolf at the Door: Stanley Kubrick, History and the Holocaust", proposed a controversial theory that all of Kubrick's work is informed by the Holocaust; there is, he says, a holocaust subtext in "The Shining". This, Cocks believes, is why Kubrick's screenplay goes to emotional extremes, omitting much of the novel's supernaturalism and making the character of Wendy much more hysteria-prone. Cocks places Kubrick's vision of a haunted hotel in line with a long literary tradition of hotels in which sinister events occur, from Stephen Crane's short story "The Blue Hotel" (which Kubrick admired) to the Swiss Berghof in Thomas Mann's novel "The Magic Mountain", about a snowbound sanatorium high in the Swiss Alps in which the protagonist witnesses a series of events which are a microcosm of the decline of Western culture. In keeping with this tradition, Kubrick's film focuses on domesticity and the Torrances' attempt to use this imposing building as a home which Jack Torrance describes as "homey".


title: The Shining (film)

text: Cocks claims that Kubrick has elaborately coded many of his historical concerns into the film with manipulations of numbers and colors and his choice of musical numbers, many of which are post-war compositions influenced by the horrors of World War II. Of particular note is Kubrick's use of Penderecki's "The Awakening of Jacob" to accompany Jack Torrance's dream of killing his family and Danny's vision of past carnage in the hotel, a piece of music originally associated with the horrors of the Holocaust. Kubrick's pessimistic ending in contrast to Stephen King's optimistic one is in keeping with the motifs that Kubrick wove into the story.


title: The Shining (film)

text: Cocks's work has been anthologized and discussed in other works on Stanley Kubrick films, though sometimes with skepticism. Julian Rice, writing in the opening chapter of his book "Kubrick's Hope", believes Cocks's views are excessively speculative and contain too many strained "critical leaps" of faith. Rice holds that what went on in Kubrick's mind cannot be replicated or corroborated beyond a broad vision of the nature of good and evil (which included concern about the Holocaust) but Kubrick's art is not governed by this one obsession. Diane Johnson, co-screenwriter for "The Shining", commented on Cocks's observations, saying that preoccupation with the Holocaust on Kubrick's part could very likely have motivated his decision to place the hotel on a Native American burial ground, although Kubrick never directly mentioned it to her.


title: The Shining (film)

text: Geoffrey Cocks notes that the film contains many allusions to fairy tales, both "Hansel and Gretel" and the "Three Little Pigs", with Jack Torrance identified as the Big Bad Wolf, which Bruno Bettelheim interprets as standing for "all the asocial unconscious devouring powers" that must be overcome by a child's ego.


title: The Shining (film)

text: The saying "all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy" appeared first in James Howell's "Proverbs in English, Italian, French and Spanish" (1659).


title: The Shining (film)

text: Roger Ebert notes that the film does not really have a "reliable observer", with the possible exception of Dick Hallorann. Ebert believes various events call into question the reliability of Jack, Wendy and Danny. This leads Ebert to conclude that:


title: The Shining (film)

text: Ebert concludes that "The movie is not about ghosts but about madness and the energies". The film critic James Berardinelli, who is generally much less impressed with the film than Ebert, notes that "King would have us believe that the hotel is haunted. Kubrick is less definitive in the interpretations he offers." He dubs the film a failure as a ghost story, but brilliant as a study of "madness and the unreliable narrator."


title: The Shining (film)

text: In some sequences, there is a question of whether or not there are ghosts present. In the scenes where Jack sees ghosts, he is always facing a mirror or, in the case of his storeroom conversation with Grady, a reflective, highly polished door. Film reviewer James Berardinelli notes "It has been pointed out that there's a mirror in every scene in which Jack sees a ghost, causing us to wonder whether the spirits are reflections of a tortured psyche."


title: The Shining (film)

text: Kubrick's reliance on mirrors as visual aids for underscoring the thematic meaning of this film portrays visually the internal transformations and oppositions that are occurring to Jack Torrance psychologically. Through ... these devices, Kubrick dramatizes the hotel's methodical assault on Torrance's identity, its ability to stimulate the myriad of self-doubts and anxieties by creating opportunities to warp Torrance's perspective on himself and [his family]. Furthermore the fact that Jack looks into a mirror whenever he "speaks" to the hotel means, to some extent, that Kubrick implicates him directly into the hotel's "consciousness", because Jack is, in effect, talking to himself.


title: The Shining (film)

text: Ghosts are the implied explanation for Jack's seemingly physically impossible escape from the locked storeroom. In an interview of Kubrick by scholar Michel Ciment, the director made comments about the scene in the book that may imply he similarly thought of the scene in the film as a key reveal in this dichotomy:


title: The Shining (film)

text: It seemed to strike an extraordinary balance between the psychological and the supernatural in such a way as to lead you to think that the supernatural would eventually be explained by the psychological: 'Jack must be imagining these things because he's crazy.' This allowed you to suspend your doubt of the supernatural until you were so thoroughly into the story that you could accept it almost without noticing ... It's not until Grady, the ghost of the former caretaker who axed to death his family, slides open the bolt of the larder door, allowing Jack to escape, that you are left with no other explanation but the supernatural.


title: The Shining (film)

text: Early in the film, Stuart Ullman tells Jack of a previous caretaker, Charles Grady, who, in 1970, succumbed to cabin fever, murdered his family and then killed himself. Later, Jack meets a ghostly butler named Grady. Jack says that he knows about the murders, claiming to recognize Grady from pictures, but the butler introduces himself as "Delbert" Grady.


title: The Shining (film)

text: Gordon Dahlquist of "The Kubrick FAQ" argues that the name change "deliberately mirrors Jack Torrance being both the husband of Wendy/father of Danny and the mysterious man in the 1920s July Fourth photo. It is to say he is two people: the man with choice in a perilous situation and the man who has 'always' been at the Overlook. It's a mistake to see the final photo as evidence that the events of the film are predetermined: Jack has any number of moments where he can act other than the way he does and that his (poor) choices are fueled by weakness and fear perhaps merely speaks all the more to the questions about the personal and the political that "The Shining" brings up. In the same way Charles had a chance – once more, perhaps – to not take on Delbert's legacy, so Jack may have had a chance to escape his role as 'caretaker' to the interests of the powerful. It's the tragic course of this story that he chooses not to." Dahlquist's argument is that Delbert Grady, the 1920s butler, and Charles Grady, the 1970s caretaker, rather than being either two people or the same are two 'manifestations' of a similar entity; a part permanently at the hotel (Delbert) and the part which is given the choice of whether to join the legacy of the hotel's murderous past (Charles), just as the man in the photo is not exactly Jack Torrance but nor is he someone different. Jack in the photo has 'always' been at the Overlook; Jack the caretaker chooses to become part of the hotel. The film's assistant editor Gordon Stainforth has commented on this issue, attempting to steer a course between the continuity-error explanation on one side and the hidden-meaning explanation on the other; "I don't think we'll ever quite unravel this. Was his full name Charles Delbert Grady? Perhaps Charles was a sort of nickname? Perhaps Ullman got the name wrong? But I also think that Stanley did NOT want the whole story to fit together too neatly, so [it is] absolutely correct, I think, to say that 'the sum of what we learn refuses to add up neatly'."


title: The Shining (film)

text: At the end of the film, the camera moves slowly towards a wall in the Overlook and a 1921 photograph, revealed to include Jack seen at the middle of a 1921 party. In an interview with Michel Ciment, Kubrick said that the photograph suggests that Jack was a reincarnation of an earlier official at the hotel. This has not stopped alternative readings, such as that Jack has been "absorbed" into the Overlook Hotel. Film critic Jonathan Romney, while acknowledging the absorption theory, wrote:


title: The Shining (film)

text: As the ghostly butler Grady (Philip Stone) tells him during their chilling confrontation in the men's toilet, 'You're the caretaker, sir. You've always been the caretaker.' Perhaps in some earlier incarnation Jack really was around in 1921, and it's his present-day self that is the shadow, the phantom photographic copy. But if his picture has been there all along, why has no one noticed it? After all, it's right at the center of the central picture on the wall, and the Torrances have had a painfully drawn-out winter of mind-numbing leisure in which to inspect every corner of the place. Is it just that, like Poe's purloined letter, the thing in plain sight is the last thing you see? When you do see it, the effect is so unsettling because you realise the unthinkable was there under your nose – overlooked – the whole time.


title: The Shining (film)

text: Artist Juli Kearns first identified and created maps of spatial discrepancies in the layout of the Overlook Hotel, the interiors of which were constructed in studios in England. These spatial discrepancies included windows appearing in impossible places, such as in Stuart Ullman's office, which is surrounded by interior hallways, and apartment doorways positioned in places where they cannot possibly lead to apartments. Rob Ager is another proponent of this theory. Jan Harlan, an Executive Producer on "The Shining", was asked about the discontinuity of sets by Xan Brooks of "The Guardian" and confirmed the discontinuity was intentional, "The set was very deliberately built to be offbeat and off the track, so that the huge ballroom would never actually fit inside. The audience is deliberately made not to know where they're going. People say "The Shining" doesn't make sense. Well spotted! It's a ghost movie. It's not supposed to make sense." Harlan further elaborated to Kate Abbot, "Stephen King gave him the go-ahead to change his book, so Stanley agreed – and wrote a much more ambiguous script. It's clear instantly there's something foul going on. At the little hotel, everything is like Disney, all kitsch wood on the outside – but the interiors don't make sense. Those huge corridors and ballrooms couldn't fit inside. In fact, nothing makes sense."


title: The Shining (film)

text: The film differs from the novel significantly with regard to characterization and motivation of action. The most obvious differences are those regarding the personality of Jack Torrance (the source of much of author Stephen King's dissatisfaction with the film).


title: The Shining (film)

text: In the film, the motive of the ghosts is apparently to "reclaim" Jack (although Grady expresses an interest in Danny's "shining" ability), who seems to be a reincarnation of a previous caretaker of the hotel, as suggested by the 1920s photograph of Jack at the end of the film and Jack's repeated claims to have "not just a "déjà vu"". The film is even more focused on Jack (as opposed to Danny) than the novel.


title: The Shining (film)

text: The room number 217 has been changed to 237. Timberline Lodge, located on Mount Hood in Oregon, was used for the aerial exterior shots of the fictional Overlook Hotel. The Lodge requested that Kubrick not depict Room 217 (featured in the book) in "The Shining", because future guests at the Lodge might be afraid to stay there, and a nonexistent room, 237, was substituted in the film. Contrary to the hotel's expectations, Room 217 is requested more often than any other room at Timberline.


title: The Shining (film)

text: There are fringe analyses relating this number change to rumors that Kubrick faked the first Moon landing, as there are approximately 237,000 miles between the Earth and the Moon (average is 238,855 miles), and claiming that the film is a subtle confession of his involvement. Another theory posits an obsession with the number 42 in the film, and the product of the digits in 237 is 42.


title: The Shining (film)

text: The novel initially presents Jack as likeable and well-intentioned, yet haunted by the demons of alcohol and authority issues. Nonetheless, he becomes gradually overwhelmed by what he sees as the evil forces in the hotel.


title: The Shining (film)

text: At the novel's conclusion, it is suggested that the evil hotel forces have possessed Jack's body and proceeded to destroy all that is left of his mind during a final showdown with Danny. He leaves a monstrous entity that Danny is able to divert while he, Wendy and Dick Hallorann escape.


title: The Shining (film)

text: The film's Jack is established as somewhat sinister much earlier in the story and dies in a different manner. Jack kills Dick Hallorann in the film, but only wounds him in the novel. King attempted to talk Stanley Kubrick out of casting Jack Nicholson even before filming began, on the grounds that he seemed vaguely sinister from the very beginning of the film.


title: The Shining (film)

text: Only in the novel does Jack hear the haunting, heavy-handed voice of his father, with whom he had a troubled relationship. In both the novel and film, Jack's encounter with the ghostly bartender is pivotal to Jack's deterioration. However, the novel gives much more detail about Jack's problems with drinking and alcohol.


title: The Shining (film)

text: The film prolongs Jack's struggle with writer's block. Kubrick's co-screenwriter Diane Johnson believes that in King's novel, Jack's discovery of the scrapbook of clippings in the boiler room of the hotel, which gives him new ideas for a novel, catalyzes his possession by the ghosts of the hotel, while at the same time unblocking his writing. Jack is no longer a blocked writer, but now filled with energy. In her contribution to the screenplay, Johnson wrote an adaptation of this scene, which to her regret Kubrick later excised, as she felt this left the father's change less motivated. Kubrick showed Jack's continued blockage quite late in the film with the "all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy" scene, which does not appear in the novel.


title: The Shining (film)

text: Stephen King stated on the DVD commentary of the 1997 miniseries of "The Shining" that the character of Jack Torrance was partially autobiographical, as he was struggling with both alcoholism and unprovoked rage toward his family at the time of writing. Tony Magistrale wrote about Kubrick's version of Jack Torrance in "Hollywood's Stephen King":


title: The Shining (film)

text: From Thomas Allen Nelson's "Kubrick: Inside a Film Artist's Maze": "When Jack moves through the reception area on his way to a 'shining' over the model maze, he throws a yellow tennis ball past a stuffed bear and Danny's Big Wheel, which rests on the very spot (a Navajo circle design) where Hallorann will be murdered."


title: The Shining (film)

text: Jack's tennis ball mysteriously rolls into Danny's circle of toy cars just before the boy walks through the open door of Room 237.


title: The Shining (film)

text: Danny Torrance is considerably more open about his supernatural abilities in the novel, discussing them with strangers such as his doctor. In the film, he is quite secretive about them even with his prime mentor Dick Hallorann, who also has these abilities. The same is true of Dick Hallorann, who in his journey back to the Overlook in the book, talks with others with the "shining" ability, while in the film he lies about his reason for returning to the Overlook. Danny in the novel is generally portrayed as unusually intelligent across the board. In the film, he is more ordinary, though with a preternatural gift.


title: The Shining (film)

text: Although Danny has supernatural powers in both versions, the novel makes it clear that his apparent imaginary friend "Tony" really is a projection of hidden parts of his own psyche, though heavily amplified by Danny's psychic "shining" abilities. At the end it is revealed that Danny Torrance's middle name is "Anthony".


title: The Shining (film)

text: Wendy Torrance in the film is relatively meek, submissive, passive, gentle, and mousy; this is shown by the way she defends Jack even in his absence to the doctor examining Danny. In the novel, she is a far more self-reliant and independent personality, who is tied to Jack in part by her poor relationship with her parents. In the novel, she never displays hysteria or collapses the way she does in the film, but remains cool and self-reliant. Writing in "Hollywood's Stephen King", author Tony Magistrale writes about the mini-series remake:


title: The Shining (film)

text: De Mornay restores much of the steely resilience found in the protagonist of King's novel and this is particularly noteworthy when compared to Shelley Duvall's exaggerated portrayal of Wendy as Olive Oyl revisited: A simpering fatality of forces beyond her capacity to understand, much less surmount.


title: The Shining (film)

text: Co-screenwriter Diane Johnson stated that in her contributions to the script, Wendy had more dialogue, and that Kubrick cut many of her lines, possibly due to his dissatisfaction with actress Shelley Duvall's delivery. Johnson believes that the earlier draft of the script portrayed Wendy as a more rounded character.


title: The Shining (film)

text: In the novel, Jack's interviewer, Ullman, is highly authoritarian, a kind of snobbish martinet. The film's Ullman is far more humane and concerned about Jack's well-being, as well as smooth and self-assured. Only in the novel does Ullman state that he disapproves of hiring Jack but higher authorities have asked that Jack be hired. Ullman's bossy nature in the novel is one of the first steps in Jack's deterioration, whereas in the film, Ullman serves largely as an expositor.


title: The Shining (film)

text: In "Stanley Kubrick and the Art of Adaptation", author Greg Jenkins writes "A toadish figure in the book, Ullman has been utterly reinvented for the film; he now radiates charm, grace and gentility."


title: The Shining (film)

text: From "Kubrick: Inside a Film Artist's Maze": Ullman tells Jack that the hotel's season runs from May 15 to October 30, meaning that the Torrances moved in on Halloween (October 31). On Ullmann's desk next to a small American flag sits a metal cup containing pencils and a pen – and a miniature replica of an ax.


title: The Shining (film)

text: "When Ullman, himself all smiles, relates as a footnote the story about the former caretaker who 'seemed perfectly normal' but nevertheless cut up his family with an ax, Jack's obvious interest (as if he's recalling one of his own nightmares) and his insincere congeniality (early signs of a personality malfunction) lead the viewer to believe that the film's definition of his madness will be far more complex."


title: The Shining (film)

text: Stephen King provides the reader with a great deal of information about the stress in the Torrance family early in the story, including revelations of Jack's physical abuse of Danny and Wendy's fear of Danny's mysterious spells. Kubrick tones down the early family tension and reveals family disharmony much more gradually than does King. In the film, Danny has a stronger emotional bond with Wendy than with Jack, which fuels Jack's rather paranoid notion that the two are conspiring against him. The exact opposite is true in the book, where Wendy occasionally experiences jealousy at the fact that Danny clearly prefers Jack to her.


title: The Shining (film)

text: In the novel Jack recovers his sanity and goodwill through the intervention of Danny while this does not occur in the film. Writing in "Cinefantastique" magazine, Frederick Clarke suggests, "Instead of playing a normal man who becomes insane, Nicholson portrays a crazy man attempting to remain sane." In the novel, Jack's final act is to enable Wendy and Danny to escape the hotel before it explodes due to a defective boiler, killing him. The film ends with the hotel still standing. More broadly, the defective boiler is a major element of the novel's plot, entirely missing from the film version.


title: The Shining (film)

text: Because of the limitations of special effects at the time, the living topiary animals of the novel were omitted and a hedge maze was added, acting as a final trap for Jack Torrance as well as a refuge for Danny.


title: The Shining (film)

text: In the film, the hotel possibly derives its malevolent energy from being built on a Native American burial ground. In the novel, the reason for the hotel's manifestation of evil is possibly explained by a theme present in King's previous novel "Salem's Lot" as well as Shirley Jackson's "The Haunting of Hill House": a physical place may absorb the evils that transpire there and manifest them as a vaguely sentient malevolence. The film's Hallorann speaks to Danny about that phenomenon occurring at the Overlook. In the novel, Jack does a great deal of investigation of the hotel's past through a scrapbook, a subplot almost omitted from the film aside from two touches: a brief appearance of the scrapbook beside the typewriter, and Jack's statement to the ghost of Grady that he knows his face from an old newspaper article describing the latter's horrific acts. Kubrick in fact shot a scene where Jack discovers the scrapbook but removed it during post-production, a decision which co-screenwriter Diane Johnson lamented.


title: The Shining (film)

text: Some of the film's most iconic scenes, such as the ghost girls in the hallway, the torrent of blood from the elevators, and typewritten pages Wendy discovers on Jack's desk, are unique to the film. Similarly, many of the most memorable lines of dialogue ("Words of wisdom" and "Here's Johnny!") are heard exclusively in the film.


title: The Shining (film)

text: Although Stephen King fans were critical of the novel's adaptation on the grounds that Kubrick altered and reduced the novel's themes, a defense of Kubrick's approach was made in Steve Biodrowski's review of the film. He argues that as in earlier films, Kubrick stripped out the back story of the film, reducing it to a "basic narrative line", making the characters more like archetypes.


title: The Shining (film)

text: His review of the film is one of the few to go into detailed comparison with the novel. He writes, "The result ... [is] a brilliant, ambitious attempt to shoot a horror film without the Gothic trappings of shadows and cobwebs so often associated with the genre."


title: The Shining (film)

text: Both parodies and homages to "The Shining" are prominent in U.K. and U.S. popular culture, particularly in films, TV shows, video games and music. Images and scenes including the Grady girls in the hallway, the word "Redrum", the blood spilling out of the elevator doors and Jack sticking his head through the hole in the bathroom door, saying, "Here's Johnny", are frequently referenced in the media.


title: The Shining (film)

text: Director Tim Burton, who credits Kubrick as an influence, modeled the characters of Tweedledum and Tweedledee in his 2010 version of "Alice in Wonderland" on the Grady girls (like so many viewers of the film, Burton identifies the girls as twins in spite of Ullman's dialogue to the contrary).


title: The Shining (film)

text: "The Simpsons" 1994 episode "Treehouse of Horror V" includes a parody titled "The Shinning". Similarities include Sherri and Terri, the twins in Bart's fourth grade class looking visually similar to the Grady girls, Homer writing "No TV and No Beer Make Homer Go Crazy" and Homer breaking into a room with an axe and uttering 'here's Johnny', only to discover that he had entered the wrong room and using the introduction for "60 Minutes" instead. The season 30 2019 episode "Girl's in the Band" has Homer, driven mad from working double shifts at the nuclear power plant, experiencing a Gold Room party scene with Lloyd followed by an axe-wielding Human Resources Director who resembles Nicholson's character.


title: The Shining (film)

text: Dutch dance music duo Hocus Pocus sampled Nicholson's "Here's Johnny" line in their 1993 dance song "Here's Johnny". In 1994, the song would go number 1 in Australia, making it the first dance single to do so, without radio support in Australia. It stayed at the number one position on the Australian ARIA Charts for five weeks through to 1995.


title: The Shining (film)

text: American heavy metal band Slipknot pay homage to the film in their first music video for their 2000 song "Spit It Out", directed by Thomas Mignone. The video consists of conceptual imagery of the band members each portraying characters enacting iconic scenes from the film, with Joey Jordison as Danny Torrance; Shawn Crahan and Chris Fehn as the Grady sisters; Corey Taylor as Jack Torrance; Mick Thomson as Lloyd the Bartender; Craig Jones as Dick Hallorann; James Root as Wendy Torrance; Paul Gray as Harry Derwent; and Sid Wilson as the corpse in the bathtub. The video was banned from MTV for overtly graphic and violent depictions, including Corey Taylor's smashing through a door with an axe and the scene wherein James Root viciously assaults Corey Taylor with a baseball bat. Mignone and the band eventually re-edited a less violent version, which was subsequently aired on MTV.


title: The Shining (film)

text: The film's haunted ballroom scene served as inspiration for English musician Leyland Kirby to create the Caretaker alias; his debut album "Selected Memories from the Haunted Ballroom" (1999) featured a prominent influence from the film.


title: The Shining (film)

text: American rock band Thirty Seconds to Mars produced a music video for their 2006 single "The Kill" which is an extended homage to the film. The music video is set in a haunted hotel, and replicates imagery from the film including the black intertitles with white text, Jack's typewriter, Lloyd's bar, Jack bouncing a tennis ball against a wall, the ghostly woman in the bathroom, the murdered Grady sisters, and the hotel guest being fellated by another man dressed as a bear. The music video was directed by lead singer Jared Leto.


title: The Shining (film)

text: The film was played at the drive-in theater alongside "Psycho" as part of the Night of Horrors combo in "Twister" from 1996. In the 2003 animated film "Finding Nemo", Bruce the shark says "Here's Brucey!", which is inspired from the "Here's Johnny!" quote.


title: The Shining (film)

text: The 2017 song "Enjoy Your Slay" by American metalcore band Ice Nine Kills is inspired primarily by the novel as well as the film adaption. The song also features Stanley Kubrick's grandson Sam Kubrick as guest vocalist.


title: The Shining (film)

text: The TV series "Psych" has a 2012 episode titled "Heeeeere's Lassie" in which the plot and characters are based on the film. "Here's Johnny!" was parodied by British comedian Lenny Henry in an advertisement for Premier Inn. It was banned from being screened on a children's TV network.


title: The Shining (film)

text: Vince Gilligan, being a fan of Kubrick and his "non-submersible moments", has included references to Kubrick movies in many of his works. "I'm happy to see that his inspiration has shown in noticeable ways in our work in "Breaking Bad" and "Better Call Saul"", says Gilligan. "Breaking Bad's" 2010 episode "Sunset" has a cop radioing for assistance and begins, "KDK-12" – the radio address at the Overlook, before being axed. The axe-murdered Grady twins in "The Shining" are turned into the axe-murdering Salamanca twins in "Breaking Bad". The descent of the main character, school teacher Walt, into the dark killer has some similarities to Jack's arc. Reflections are used in both to show the characters change. "Better Call Saul" has a "Here's Johnny" scare in a flashback. Gilligan has also likened his early writing situation, getting snowed in and not writing, to feeling like Jack while going insane.


title: The Shining (film)

text: Steven Spielberg, a close friend of Kubrick, included a sequence dedicated to "The Shining" in the 2018 film "Ready Player One" when they could not get rights to use "Blade Runner" for a similar sequence. The Overlook Hotel is recreated, including the Grady sisters, the elevator, room 237, the lady in the bath tub, the ballroom, and the 1921 photo, in addition to using the score. Spielberg considered this inclusion a tribute to Kubrick.


title: The Shining (film)

text: In his 2019 novel "The Institute", Stephen King refers to the film, writing, "The little girls, Gerda and Greta, were standing and watching with wide, frightened eyes. They were holding hands and clutching dolls as identical as they were. They reminded Luke of twins in some old horror movie."


title: The Shining (film)

text: In 2020, the fifth-season episode "Our Mojo" of "Lucifer" paid homage to Kubrick and "The Shining" by having a young boy riding on a tricycle down a corridor in a hotel with wallpaper similar to the carpet pattern in the film.


title: The Shining (film)

text: In 2014, Warner Bros. Pictures began developing a film adaptation of "Doctor Sleep" (2013), Stephen King's sequel to his book, "The Shining" (1977). In 2016, Akiva Goldsman announced that he would write and produce the film for Warner Bros. For several years, Warner Brothers could not secure a budget for the sequel nor for a prequel to "The Shining" to be called "Overlook Hotel".


title: The Shining (film)

text: In June 2019, writer and director Mike Flanagan confirmed "Doctor Sleep" would be a sequel to both the 1980 film and King's novel. It was released in several international territories on October 31, 2019, followed by the United States and Canada on November 8, 2019.


title: The Shining (film)

text: In April 2020, a spin-off titled "Overlook" entered development for HBO Max. In August 2021, HBO Max opted not to proceed with the project. It was soon after reported Netflix was a frontline bidder on the project, though they, too, eventually passed.


title: Saint Petersburg

text: Saint Petersburg (), formerly known as Petrograd (1914–1924) and later Leningrad (1924–1991), is the second-largest city in Russia. It is situated on the Neva River, at the head of the Gulf of Finland on the Baltic Sea, with a population of roughly 5.4 million residents. Saint Petersburg is the fourth-most populous city in Europe after Istanbul, Moscow and London, the most populous city on the Baltic Sea, and the world's northernmost city of more than 1 million residents. As Russia's Imperial capital, and a historically strategic port, it is governed as a federal city.


title: Saint Petersburg

text: The city was founded by Tsar Peter the Great on 27 May 1703 on the site of a captured Swedish fortress, and was named after apostle Saint Peter. In Russia, Saint Petersburg is historically and culturally associated with the birth of the Russian Empire and Russia's entry into modern history as a European great power. It served as a capital of the Tsardom of Russia, and the subsequent Russian Empire, from 1713 to 1918 (being replaced by Moscow for a short period of time between 1728 and 1730). After the October Revolution in 1917, the Bolsheviks moved their government to Moscow.


title: Saint Petersburg

text: As Russia's cultural center, Saint Petersburg received over 15 million tourists in 2018. It is considered an important economic, scientific, and tourism centre of Russia and Europe. In modern times, the city has the nickname of being "the Northern Capital of Russia" and is home to notable federal government bodies such as the Constitutional Court of Russia and the Heraldic Council of the President of the Russian Federation. It is also a seat for the National Library of Russia and a planned location for the Supreme Court of Russia, as well as the home to the headquarters of the Russian Navy, and the Western Military District of the Russian Armed Forces. The Historic Centre of Saint Petersburg and Related Groups of Monuments constitute a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Saint Petersburg is home to the Hermitage, one of the largest art museums in the world, the Lakhta Center, the tallest skyscraper in Europe, and was one of the host cities of the 2018 FIFA World Cup and the UEFA Euro 2020.


title: Saint Petersburg

text: A proponent of westernising Russia, Peter the Great, the then Tsar, who established the city, originally named it () in Dutch manner and later its spelling was standardised as Sankt-Peterburg () under German influence. On 1 September 1914, after the outbreak of World War I, the Imperial government renamed the city "Petrograd" (), meaning 'Peter's city', in order to expunge the German words and . On 26 January 1924, shortly after the death of Vladimir Lenin, it was renamed to "Leningrad" (), meaning 'Lenin's City'. On 6 September 1991, the original name, "Sankt-Peterburg", was returned by citywide referendum. Today, in English the city is known as "Saint Petersburg". Local residents often refer to the city by its shortened nickname, "Piter" ().


title: Saint Petersburg

text: A former spelling of the city's name in English was "Saint Petersburgh", under the influence of "burgh". This spelling survives in the name of a street in the Bayswater district of London, near St Sophia's Cathedral, named after a visit by the Tsar to London in 1814.


title: Saint Petersburg

text: Saint Petersburg has been traditionally called the "Window to Europe" and the "Window to the West" by the Russians. The city is the northernmost metropolis in the world, and is also often described as the "Venice of the North" or the "Russian Venice" due to its many water corridors, as the city is built on swamp and water. Furthermore, it has strongly Western European-inspired architecture and culture, which is combined with the city's Russian heritage. Another nickname of Saint Petersburg is "The City of the White Nights" because of a natural phenomenon which arises due to the closeness to the polar region and ensures that in summer the night skies of the city do not get completely dark for a month. The city is also often called the "Northern Palmyra", due to its extravagant architecture.


title: Saint Petersburg

text: Swedish colonists built Nyenskans, a fortress at the mouth of the Neva River in 1611, which was later called Ingermanland. This area was inhabited by a Finnic tribe of Ingrians. The small town of Nyen grew up around the fort.


title: Saint Petersburg

text: At the end of the 17th century, Peter the Great, who was interested in seafaring and maritime affairs, wanted Russia to gain a seaport to trade with the rest of Europe. He needed a better seaport than the country's main one at the time, Arkhangelsk, which was on the White Sea in the far north and closed to shipping during the winter.


title: Saint Petersburg

text: On , during the Great Northern War, Peter the Great captured Nyenskans and soon replaced the fortress. On , closer to the estuary ( inland from the gulf), on Zayachy (Hare) Island, he laid down the Peter and Paul Fortress, which became the first brick and stone building of the new city.


title: Saint Petersburg

text: The city was built by conscripted peasants from all over Russia; in some years several Swedish prisoners of war were also involved under the supervision of Alexander Menshikov. Tens of thousands of serfs died while building the city. Later, the city became the centre of the Saint Petersburg Governorate. Peter moved the capital from Moscow to Saint Petersburg in 1712, 9 years before the Treaty of Nystad of 1721 ended the war. He referred to Saint Petersburg as the capital (or seat of government) as early as 1704. While the city was being built, Peter lived in a three-room log cabin with his wife Catherine and their children.


title: Saint Petersburg

text: During its first few years, the city developed around Trinity Square on the right bank of the Neva, near the Peter and Paul Fortress. However, Saint Petersburg soon started to be built out according to a plan. By 1716 the Swiss Italian Domenico Trezzini had elaborated a project whereby the city centre would be on Vasilyevsky Island and shaped by a rectangular grid of canals. The project was not completed but is evident in the layout of the streets. In 1716, Peter the Great appointed Frenchman Jean-Baptiste Alexandre Le Blond as the chief architect of Saint Petersburg.


title: Saint Petersburg

text: The style of Petrine Baroque, developed by Trezzini and other architects and exemplified by such buildings as the Menshikov Palace, Kunstkamera, Peter and Paul Cathedral, Twelve Collegia, became prominent in the city architecture of the early 18th century. In 1724 the Academy of Sciences, University and Academic Gymnasium were established in Saint Petersburg by Peter the Great.


title: Saint Petersburg

text: In 1725, Peter died at age fifty-two. His endeavors to modernize Russia had been opposed by the Russian nobility. There were several attempts on his life and a treason case involving his son. In 1728, Peter II of Russia moved his seat back to Moscow. But four years later, in 1732, under Empress Anna of Russia, Saint Petersburg was again designated as the capital of the Russian Empire. It remained the seat of the Romanov dynasty and the Imperial Court of the Russian tsars, as well as the seat of the Russian government, for another 186 years until the communist revolution of 1917.


title: Saint Petersburg

text: In 1736–1737 the city suffered from catastrophic fires. To rebuild the damaged boroughs, a committee under Burkhard Christoph von Münnich commissioned a new plan in 1737. The city was divided into five boroughs, and the city centre was moved to the Admiralty borough, on the east bank between the Neva and Fontanka.


title: Saint Petersburg

text: It developed along three radial streets, which meet at the Admiralty building and are now known as Nevsky Prospect (which is considered the main street of the city), Gorokhovaya Street and Voznesensky Avenue. Baroque architecture became dominant in the city during the first sixty years, culminating in the Elizabethan Baroque, represented most notably by Italian Bartolomeo Rastrelli with such buildings as the Winter Palace. In the 1760s, Baroque architecture was succeeded by neoclassical architecture.


title: Saint Petersburg

text: Established in 1762, the Commission of Stone Buildings of Moscow and Saint Petersburg ruled that no structure in the city could be higher than the Winter Palace and prohibited spacing between buildings. During the reign of Catherine the Great in the 1760s–1780s, the banks of the Neva were lined with granite embankments.


title: Saint Petersburg

text: However, it was not until 1850 that the first permanent bridge across the Neva, Annunciation Bridge, was allowed to open. Before that, only pontoon bridges were allowed. Obvodny Canal (dug in 1769–1833) became the southern limit of the city.


title: Saint Petersburg

text: In 1810, Alexander I established the first engineering Higher education, the Saint Petersburg Main military engineering School in Saint Petersburg. Many monuments commemorate the Russian victory over Napoleonic France in the Patriotic War of 1812, including the Alexander Column by Montferrand, erected in 1834, and the Narva Triumphal Arch.


title: Saint Petersburg

text: In 1825, the suppressed Decembrist revolt against Nicholas I took place on the Senate Square in the city, a day after Nicholas assumed the throne.


title: Saint Petersburg

text: By the 1840s, neoclassical architecture had given way to various romanticist styles, which dominated until the 1890s, represented by such architects as Andrei Stackenschneider (Mariinsky Palace, Beloselsky-Belozersky Palace, Nicholas Palace, New Michael Palace) and Konstantin Thon (Moskovsky railway station).


title: Saint Petersburg

text: With the emancipation of the serfs undertaken by Alexander II in 1861 and an Industrial Revolution, the influx of former peasants into the capital increased greatly. Poor boroughs spontaneously developed on the outskirts of the city. Saint Petersburg surpassed Moscow in population and industrial growth; it became one of the largest industrial cities in Europe, with a major naval base (in Kronstadt), the Neva River, and a seaport on the Baltic.


title: Saint Petersburg

text: The names of Saints Peter and Paul, bestowed upon the original city's citadel and its cathedral (from 1725—a burial vault of Russian emperors) coincidentally were the names of the first two assassinated Russian emperors, Peter III (1762, supposedly killed in a conspiracy led by his wife, Catherine the Great) and Paul I (1801, Nikolay Alexandrovich Zubov and other conspirators who brought to power Alexander I, the son of their victim). The third emperor's assassination took place in Saint Petersburg in 1881 when Alexander II was murdered by terrorists (see the Church of the Savior on Blood).


title: Saint Petersburg

text: On 1 September 1914, after the outbreak of World War I, the Imperial government renamed the city "Petrograd", meaning "Peter's City", to remove the German words "Sankt" and "Burg".


title: Saint Petersburg

text: In March 1917, during the February Revolution Nicholas II abdicated for himself and on behalf of his son, ending the Russian monarchy and over three hundred years of Romanov dynastic rule.


title: Saint Petersburg

text: On , the Bolsheviks, led by Vladimir Lenin, stormed the Winter Palace in an event known thereafter as the October Revolution, which led to the end of the post-Tsarist provisional government, the transfer of all political power to the Soviets, and the rise of the Communist Party. After that the city acquired a new descriptive name, "the city of three revolutions", referring to the three major developments in the political history of Russia of the early 20th century.


title: Saint Petersburg

text: In September and October 1917, German troops invaded the West Estonian archipelago and threatened Petrograd with bombardment and invasion. On 12 March 1918, the Soviets transferred the government to Moscow, to keep it away from the state border. During the Russian Civil War, in mid-1919 Russian anti-communist forces with the help of Estonians attempted to capture the city, but Leon Trotsky mobilized the army and forced them to retreat back to Estonia.


title: Saint Petersburg

text: On 26 January 1924, five days after Lenin's death, Petrograd was renamed "Leningrad". Later some streets and other toponyms were renamed accordingly. The city has over 230 places associated with the life and activities of Lenin. Some of them were turned into museums, including the cruiser "Aurora"—a symbol of the October Revolution and the oldest ship in the Russian Navy.


title: Saint Petersburg

text: In the 1920s and 1930s, the poor outskirts were reconstructed into regularly planned boroughs. Constructivist architecture flourished around that time. Housing became a government-provided amenity; many "bourgeois" apartments were so large that numerous families were assigned to what were called "communal" apartments ("kommunalkas"). By the 1930s, 68% of the population lived in such housing. In 1935 a new general plan was outlined, whereby the city should expand to the south. Constructivism was rejected in favour of a more pompous Stalinist architecture. Moving the city centre further from the border with Finland, Stalin adopted a plan to build a new city hall with a huge adjacent square at the southern end of Moskovsky Prospekt, designated as the new main street of Leningrad. After the Winter (Soviet-Finnish) war in 1939–1940, the Soviet–Finnish border moved northwards. Nevsky Prospekt with Palace Square maintained the functions and the role of a city centre.


title: Saint Petersburg

text: In December 1931, Leningrad was administratively separated from Leningrad Oblast. At that time it included the Leningrad Suburban District, some parts of which were transferred back to Leningrad Oblast in 1936 and turned into Vsevolozhsky District, Krasnoselsky District, Pargolovsky District and Slutsky District (renamed Pavlovsky District in 1944).


title: Saint Petersburg

text: On 1 December 1934, Sergey Kirov, the popular communist leader of Leningrad, was assassinated, which became the pretext for the Great Purge. In Leningrad, approximately 40,000 were executed during Stalin's purges.


title: Saint Petersburg

text: During World War II, German forces besieged Leningrad following the Axis invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. The siege lasted 872 days, or almost two and a half years, from 8 September 1941 to 27 January 1944.


title: Saint Petersburg

text: The Siege of Leningrad proved one of the longest, most destructive, and most lethal sieges of a major city in modern history. It isolated the city from food supplies except those provided through the Road of Life across Lake Ladoga, which could not make it through until the lake froze. More than one million civilians were killed, mainly from starvation. Many others escaped or were evacuated, so the city became largely depopulated.


title: Saint Petersburg

text: On 1 May 1945 Joseph Stalin, in his Supreme Commander Order No. 20, named Leningrad, alongside Stalingrad, Sevastopol, and Odessa, hero cities of the war. A law acknowledging the honorary title of "Hero City" passed on 8 May 1965 (the 20th anniversary of the victory in the Great Patriotic War), during the Brezhnev era. The Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR awarded Leningrad as a Hero City the Order of Lenin and the Gold Star medal "for the heroic resistance of the city and tenacity of the survivors of the Siege". The Hero-City Obelisk bearing the Gold Star sign was installed in April 1985.


title: Saint Petersburg

text: In October 1946 some territories along the northern coast of the Gulf of Finland, which had passed to the USSR from Finland in 1940 under the peace treaty following the Winter War, were transferred from Leningrad Oblast to Leningrad and divided into Sestroretsky District and Kurortny District. These included the town of Terijoki (renamed Zelenogorsk in 1948). Leningrad and many of its suburbs were rebuilt over the post-war decades, partially according to pre-war plans. The 1948 general plan for Leningrad featured radial urban development in the north as well as in the south. In 1953 Pavlovsky District in Leningrad Oblast was abolished, and parts of its territory, including Pavlovsk, merged with Leningrad. In 1954 the settlements Levashovo, Pargolovo and Pesochny merged with Leningrad.


title: Saint Petersburg

text: Leningrad gave its name to the Leningrad Affair (1949–1952), a notable event in the postwar political struggle in the USSR. It was a product of rivalry between Stalin's potential successors where one side was represented by the leaders of the city Communist Party organization—the second most significant one in the country after Moscow. The entire elite leadership of Leningrad was destroyed, including the former mayor Kuznetsov, the acting mayor Pyotr Sergeevich Popkov, and all their deputies; overall 23 leaders were sentenced to the death penalty, 181 to prison or exile (exonerated in 1954). About 2,000 ranking officials across the USSR were expelled from the party and the Komsomol and removed from leadership positions. They were accused of Russian nationalism.


title: Saint Petersburg

text: The Leningrad Metro underground rapid transit system, designed before the war, opened in 1955 with its first eight stations decorated with marble and bronze. However, after Stalin's death in 1953, the perceived ornamental excesses of the Stalinist architecture were abandoned. From the 1960s to the 1980s many new residential boroughs were built on the outskirts; while the functionalist apartment blocks were nearly identical to each other, many families moved there from "kommunalkas" in the city centre to live in separate apartments.


title: Saint Petersburg

text: On 12 June 1991, simultaneously with the first Russian presidential elections, the city authorities arranged for the mayoral elections and a referendum upon the city's name, when the name reverted to Saint Petersburg. The turnout was 65%; 66.13% of the total count of votes went to Anatoly Sobchak, who became the first directly elected mayor of the city.


title: Saint Petersburg

text: Meanwhile, economic conditions started to deteriorate as the country tried to adapt to major changes. For the first time since the 1940s, food rationing was introduced, and the city received humanitarian food aid from abroad. This dramatic time was depicted in photographic series of Russian photographer Alexey Titarenko. Economic conditions began to improve only at the beginning of the 21st century. In 1995 a northern section of the Kirovsko-Vyborgskaya Line of the Saint Petersburg Metro was cut off by underground flooding, creating a major obstacle to the city development for almost ten years. On 13 June 1996 Saint Petersburg, alongside Leningrad Oblast and Tver Oblast, signed a power-sharing agreement with the federal government, granting it autonomy. This agreement was abolished on 4 April 2002.


title: Saint Petersburg

text: In 1996, Vladimir Yakovlev defeated Anatoly Sobchak in the elections for the head of the city administration. The title of the city head was changed from "mayor" to "governor". In 2000 Yakovlev won re-election. His second term expired in 2004; the long-awaited restoration of the broken subway connection was expected to finish by that time. But in 2003 Yakovlev suddenly resigned, leaving the governor's office to Valentina Matviyenko.


title: Saint Petersburg

text: The law on election of the City Governor was changed, breaking the tradition of democratic election by universal suffrage. In 2006 the city legislature re-approved Matviyenko as governor. Residential building had intensified again; real-estate prices inflated greatly, which caused many new problems for the preservation of the historical part of the city.


title: Saint Petersburg

text: Although the central part of the city has a UNESCO designation (there are about 8,000 architectural monuments in Petersburg), the preservation of its historical and architectural environment became controversial. After 2005, the demolition of older buildings in the historical centre was permitted. In 2006 Gazprom announced an ambitious project to erect a skyscraper (the Okhta Center) opposite to Smolny, which could result in the loss of the unique line of Petersburg landscape. Urgent protests by citizens and prominent public figures of Russia against this project were not considered by Governor Valentina Matviyenko and the city authorities until December 2010, when after the statement of President Dmitry Medvedev, the city decided to find a more appropriate location for this project. In the same year, the new location for the project was relocated to Lakhta, a historical area northwest of the city centre, and the new project would be named Lakhta Center. Construction was approved by Gazprom and the city administration and commenced in 2012. The high Lakhta Center has become the first tallest skyscraper in Russia and Europe outside of Moscow.


title: Saint Petersburg

text: The area of Saint Petersburg city proper is . The area of the federal subject is , which contains Saint Petersburg proper (consisting of eighty-one municipal "okrugs"), nine municipal towns – (Kolpino, Krasnoye Selo, Kronstadt, Lomonosov, Pavlovsk, Petergof, Pushkin, Sestroretsk, Zelenogorsk) – and twenty-one municipal settlements.


title: Saint Petersburg

text: Petersburg is on the middle taiga lowlands along the shores of the Neva Bay of the Gulf of Finland, and islands of the river delta. The largest are Vasilyevsky Island (besides the artificial island between Obvodny canal and Fontanka, and Kotlin in the Neva Bay), Petrogradsky, Dekabristov and Krestovsky. The latter together with Yelagin and Kamenny Island are covered mostly by parks. The Karelian Isthmus, North of the city, is a popular resort area. In the south, Saint Petersburg crosses the Baltic-Ladoga Klint and meets the Izhora Plateau.


title: Saint Petersburg

text: The elevation of Saint Petersburg ranges from the sea level to its highest point of at the Orekhovaya Hill in the Duderhof Heights in the south. Part of the city's territory west of Liteyny Prospekt is no higher than above sea level, and has suffered from numerous floods. Floods in Saint Petersburg are triggered by a long wave in the Baltic Sea, caused by meteorological conditions, winds and shallowness of the Neva Bay. The five most disastrous floods occurred in 1824 ( above sea level, during which over 300 buildings were destroyed); 1924 (); 1777 (); 1955 (); and 1975 (). To prevent floods, the Saint Petersburg Dam has been constructed.


title: Saint Petersburg

text: Since the 18th century, the city's terrain has been raised artificially, at some places by more than , making mergers of several islands, and changing the hydrology of the city. Besides the Neva and its tributaries, other important rivers of the federal subject of Saint Petersburg are Sestra, Okhta and Izhora. The largest lake is Sestroretsky Razliv in the north, followed by Lakhtinsky Razliv, Suzdal Lakes, and other smaller lakes.


title: Saint Petersburg

text: Due to its northerly location at c. 60° N latitude the day length in Petersburg varies across seasons, ranging from 5 hours 53 minutes to 18 hours 50 minutes. A period from mid-May to mid-July during which twilight may last all night is called "the white nights".


title: Saint Petersburg

text: Saint Petersburg is about from the border with Finland, connected to it via the M10 highway (E18), along which there is also a connection to the historic city of Vyborg.


title: Saint Petersburg

text: Under the Köppen climate classification, Saint Petersburg is classified as "Dfb", a humid continental climate. The distinct moderating influence of Baltic Sea cyclones results in warm, humid, and short summers and long, moderately cold wet winters. The climate of Saint Petersburg is close to that of Helsinki, although colder in winter and warmer in summer because of its more eastern location.


title: Saint Petersburg

text: The average maximum temperature in July is , and the average minimum temperature in February is ; an extreme temperature of occurred during the 2010 Northern Hemisphere summer heat wave. A winter minimum of was recorded in 1883. The average annual temperature is . The Neva River within the city limits usually freezes up in November–December and break-up occurs in April. From December to March there are 118 days on average with snow cover, which reaches an average snow depth of by February. The frost-free period in the city lasts on average for about 135 days. Despite St. Petersburg's northern location, its winters are warmer than Moscow's due to the Gulf of Finland and some Gulf Stream influence from Scandinavian winds that can bring temperature slightly above freezing. The city also has a slightly warmer climate than its suburbs. Weather conditions are quite variable all year round.


title: Saint Petersburg

text: Average annual precipitation varies across the city, averaging per year and reaching maximum in late summer. Due to the cool climate, soil moisture is almost always high because of lower evapotranspiration. Air humidity is 78% on average, and there are, on average, 165 overcast days per year.