Five Wonderfully Weird Facts About The Shining
16 Nov 2019.  -

Image above by Raymond Helkio

The Shining is one of my favourite Christmas movies because it starts off with many of the requisite holiday elements; a loving family, a winter storm, roaring fireplaces, an evergreen tree forest, and oh yeah a vacant hotel mansion set in a remote location. What could possibly go wrong? 

#1   The soundtrack was written by a transwoman.
The Shinning was composed by Grammy award-winning Wendy Carlos who is also responsible for the music of A Clockwork Orange and Tron. 

#2   Stanley Kubrick hadn’t read Stephen King’s screenplay.
Kubrick not only avoided reading the screenplay, but he hired another writer to rework the entire thing. Stephen King didn’t like the adaptation at all.

#3   Jack Torrance was a repressed homosexual.
In the opening scene, Jack Nicholson, who plays Jack Torrance, is sitting in the hotel lobby leafing through a magazine while he waits for the hotel manager. That magazine was Playgirl. There are dozens of other references to his character's sexuality but that’s fodder for another article.

#4   Room 237 never existed.
Room 237 was the room in the hotel where all the freaky shit went down, but the actual room they filmed in was 217. The hotel, the Timberline Lodge in Oregon, was worried about future guests not booking the room so they picked a number that didn’t correspond to any actual room numbers. Ironically, after the films release room 217 became, and remains, the most booked room at the hotel.

#5   The Shining was (almost) a flop.   
The Shining was the follow-up to Kubrick’s worst received film, Barry Lyndon in 1975 which cost $11 million to make but earned only $9.5 million. With this failure fresh on his CV the success of this film was more important than ever to save his reputation, but when The Shining came out it did so badly that it earned them Razzie nominations for “Worst Actress” and “Worst Director.” It cost $19 million to make and after some major editing, the film was made shorter and went on to generate over $50 million, one of the highest-grossing films of the ‘80s.