Into the maze of The Shining...
From its ominous, opening aerial shots of a winding road through the Rocky Mountains to its frozen finale in the impossible maze of the Overlook Hotel, TheShining has you in its icy grip from beginning to end.
Stanley Kubrick's 1980 film certainly wasn't a critical hit on release - I believe the euphemism is that it got a mixed reception - but its reputation has grown over the years; not only is it now regarded as a classic horror but it also has cult status with its own mythology and a whole host of apocryphal tales surrounding its making and meaning.
Writer/director Rodney Ascher's 2012 documentary Room 237 explores some of the more bizarre stories and myths surrounding The Shining, some of which frankly seem bonkers... Continuity errors get expanded into full-blown conspiracy theories with the film variously symbolising The Holocaust, the faking of the Apollo Moon landings and the massacre of the indigenous Native American people. Great significances are read into numbers that appear in the film, along with a jumper worn by the young actor ??? playing Danny and the fact that a kid's sticker on a door goes missing between shots.
Most people wouldn't even notice these things and if they did think nothing of them. Not so, these Shining obsessives.
