Where to watch The Shining (1980)
The Shining is available to stream in GB on Sky Go, HBO Max and Now TV. It can also be rented or bought from AppleTV and Amazon.
A struggling writer takes a winter caretaker job at a remote hotel, moving there with his wife and young son. Cut off from the outside world, the family faces an increasingly oppressive environment and unsettling forces that threaten their safety and sanity.
Cast: Jack Nicholson, Shelley Duvall, Danny Lloyd, Scatman Crothers, Barry Nelson, Philip Stone, Joe Turkel, Anne Jackson, Tony Burton, Lia Beldam, Billie Gibson, Barry Dennen
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Trivia & production notes
- Stanley Kubrick chose The Shining from a stack of horror novels that he famously rejected by hurling across his office, making an exception only for Stephen King's manuscript.
- Kubrick rejected Stephen King's initial draft script as too literal an adaptation and instead collaborated with novelist Diane Johnson, who was teaching a Gothic literature seminar at UC Berkeley.
- Kubrick deliberately avoided treating the haunted hotel as a literal ghost story, because he did not believe in the supernatural or anything beyond death.
- Stephen King disliked Jack Nicholson's casting as Jack Torrance because he felt Nicholson's role in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest would make audiences perceive him as unstable from the start.
- Slim Pickens turned down the role of Dick Hallorann because he insisted his scenes be filmed in fewer than 100 takes, a demand Kubrick refused based on their previous experience together on Dr. Strangelove.
- Kubrick sent a husband-and-wife team to Chicago, Denver, and Cincinnati to audition 5,000 boys over six months to find the right actor to play Danny Torrance, seeking a child whose accent fell between Jack Nicholson's New Jersey dialect and Shelley Duvall's Texas drawl.
- Young actor Danny Lloyd was kept unaware that he was filming a horror movie throughout production, believing instead that he was making a drama.
- Cary Guffey's parents refused to allow him to audition for the role of Danny Torrance, deeming the material too disturbing for a child.
- Kubrick and screenwriter Diane Johnson drew inspiration from 18th and 19th century Gothic literature, Freud's essay on the uncanny, Bruno Bettelheim's The Uses of Enchantment, and the short story The Blue Hotel by Stephen Crane.
- Principal photography lasted nearly a year, running from May 1978 to April 1979 primarily at Elstree Studios in southern England.
Adapted from the Wikipedia article The Shining (film), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Rewritten for StreamShack; errors are ours — tell us about them.
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