#shining

1:Kim Carlsson

2: Christian Larsson

3:Graf Von Baphomet

4:S.D Ramirez

Stephen King, embracing the traditional Gothic subtexts and connotations, has his Overlook Hotel built in vertical, with the most supernaturally-active parts of the building being the top and the bottom - the third floor/roof and the basement, which are where the most crucial scenes and supernatural events take place (plus the elevator, which connects these two points). It mirrors the way King compares and associates the Overlook with a hive, a wasp's nest, a "vertical" structure.

Yet, Kubrick's Overlook is entirely horizontal. It is not about going down the depths of the hotel or rising up the staircase, or gazing at the world from its roof ; no, it is about travelling endlessly through its labyrinth of corridors and hallways, it is about lateral movements and turning around corners, and it corresponds to the element Kubrick introduced: mirroring the Overlook itself with the hedge-maze crucial to the story, an "horizontal" structure.

Yet I had missed that "The Shining" itself WAS a take on Jackson's haunted house story. Luckhurst points out that the very basis on which "Shining" was written is the same one that every post-Hill House haunted house have - the idea of the presence of mediumnic/psychic-gifted people worsening or triggering the power of a haunted house. And this logic was very present among 70s haunted house movies, from "The Stone Tape" to "The Legend of Hell House" - the very horror decade used as a material for Kubrick's own Shining.