Film psychology THE SHINING spatial awareness and set design 2of2 

Something you failed to mention which probably is the most obvious of all, is from the exterior aerial view of the hotel at the beginning of the film there is no hedge maze at all.

It is rare for me to become frightened while watching horror/thriller films. When I first saw this film, I was shocked at how traumatized my senses were. I had similar feelings after viewing 2001. I almost couldn't sleep that night. The craziest part about this form of horror is that it doesn't just play with fear, it plays with psychological fear. The fear that leaves you with more questions than answers in the very end. That unsettling , abstract, slowly building but never ceasing fear that can paralyze a young child from ever looking under his/her bed. The fear of the unknown.

How are we supposed to know if Kubrick faked the moon landing if we can't even figure out The Shining???

The impossible architecture actually supports the "writer's story" theory quite well. If the events aren't real but just part of Jack's novel, then it's safe to assume that a writer creating a hotel in their mind wouldn't have it laid out perfectly. There would be flaws in the architecture because it's all taking place in the mind, in the abstract, so to speak. So Jack wanted a window in Ullman's office, though it's placed deep within the offices of the lobby, which are surrounded by the hotel.

The more I study this film the more you pick up. I think it all comes from what Kuberik was talking about where he wanted the look to be normal and not spooky or the traditional scary hotel look. Instead he made it a psychological angle to trigger something is wrong within the brain. The whole hotel doesn't make sense nor does the stories. In the interview the office is the first sign something is wrong with this place with the impossible window. Then he talks about Charles Grady and his daughters years apart. We as the viewer meet a man named Delbert Grady and the girls were twins. In the opening scene you clearly see there is no maze but there it is. The Gold room can't exist and yet there it is and with people Jack seems to know even though he has never been there before along with all the other spacial defects. The whole thing sets your subconsious mind with all these warnings that something is wrong which puts the viewer on edge and really not understanding why.

One of the best movies ever made, a masterpiece!

It's not really about how many times you watch it. It's a case of watching and making extensive use of pause and reverse while taking detailed written notes to cross reference later. :)

I always felt that the camera positioning with respect to the characters--sort of over-the-shoulder vantage points, following behind characters, and so forth--makes the viewer feel like an invisible voyeur. It always seemed to me Kubrick is presenting the movie to you from the point of view of the "ghost(s)". At the very least, it is obviously intentional and gives a paranoid feeling to most or all of the shots.

Another thing that's weird about Halloran's death scene is, which door does he use to get into the hotel? In the very first scene Jack enters into the lobby, yet Halloran seems to enter from the same hallway in which Wendy is seen earlier wheeling the kitchen cart... so he went in through the kitchen? And kitchen itself is shown as being on both sides of the hotel lobby.

You mentioned in the first video that someone attempted to build the hotel in Duke Nukem 3D, and since the hotel has this bizarre fantasy geometry, it was impossible. There was a fantastic indie puzzle game released recently, called Antechamber, which plays a lot with bizarre impossible geometry, rooms that are bigger on the inside, infinitely looping hallways, hallways that disappear behind you when you aren't looking, and so on. Someone should attempt to recreate hotel again in a newer game engine with these features.

Another strange anomaly in the film I noticed (which I have no idea how it was done). Is when Jack is walking down the hall to get drunk in the gold room. If you look at the mirrors on the left side of the hall (Jacks right). There is a point where Jacks reflection appears in one of the mirrors before he is Parallel to the mirror. He is still several feet behind the mirror, yet you see his reflect pass in time with him walking. I don't know how this effect was done, and it is something one wouldn't catch unless they were looking for it, but it is very strange.

I just recently discovered your film analysis work after going down the RU-vid rabbit hole with EWS theories. I have since watched everything you have on RU-vid and look forward to checking out the more dense analysis on your website. I am a Kubrick obsessive and your stuff has given me insight and new ideas I hadn’t realized or considered, even after all the books and articles I’ve read over the years. In short, your analysis of film is addicting and absolutely thought provoking. A big fan. Thank you for all of it. Cheers.

Very interesting two-part series! Your videos on the Shining have really made me want to go back and re-watch the movies and pay attention to the layout and little details. Kubrick was a brilliant, if possibly insane, filmmaker, and I never realized the extent to which he loaded his movies with subtle detail.

About 8 years after seeing the movie, I went summer snowboarding at Mt Hood. I had no idea this lodge would be there, the parking lot is on the side, you walk past lodge to get to the Palmer snowfield lift. Not many steps past where you are in front of it I realized what it was, and it rattled me. My next thoughts raced as it was blatantly obvious the exterior was no where near the right scale as interior on film (and of course no maze). Later when I walked around parts inside they were all low ceiling and narrow hall ways. I had a great week of riding but the whole trip was tinted by memories of the film. As well as oddly enough, in the snowfield a week before I was there a snowcat had lost control and killed a hiker. It was an active investigation and you could literally still see the large bloodstained patch of snow. Which imprinted the film even deeper into my psyche....

Yes, I'm a scouser, but I lived in Canada for five years as a child. It permanently affected my accent :)

Man, it just never gets old, dissecting this movie.

When I was growing up in the seventies I lived in a place called Murrieta Hot springs (in California). It was built around the turn of the century and was a famous resort for the Jet set crowd and movie stars. It had a very similar history in some respects. And it had multiple buildings. But in the seventies the back part of the resort was closed down and deserted. It had become a ghost town resort in a lot of respects. I as a child would often play in the deserted buildings (although I wasn't supposed to LOL). The buildings reminded me very much of the look of the Overlook. They had that same combination of seventies colors and patterns of carpets with furniture for the 20's and 30's. It was rather erie how much the inside of the buildings looked like the sets in the movie. It also had huge Irion Chandeliers in some places that looked almost identical to the ones in the Colorado lounge. The resort is still there but it has been re-opened and repainted and the carpets replaced and the old furniture removed :( . But I remember growing up in my own little shinning. And to top this all off, my name is Danny. I guess that is why I love this film so much!

Very, very impressive, i'll be re-watching several films now. There is obviously a hell of a lot of work that goes into producing these slick videos. 5 star, 10 out of 10

Watching this 11 video years later and feeling nostalgic about the time when you could watch a video without hearing “let’s talk about todays sponsor” halfway through

Another very important thing to mention about the psychology of this film and what makes it soooo creepy, is not the designs and spatial anomalies, but rather the music. That strange creepy voice in the music gives me the chills, it is the sound of sheer madness of the mind.

Stanley Kubrick really knew how to push all the right buttons to make people feel unnerved by the experience of The Shining. Every time I watched it there was that weird feeling that while everything looked normal it wasn't at all. Going over these scenes in detail does give new insight to how the house interacts with its subjects. Even the viewing audience. Giving a heightened sense of awareness throughout the movie that plays on the imagination.

I'm not done reviewing all you have to say about The Shining, but I am so impressed with the scholarship so far. Part of me feels bad seeing the secrets of the magician exposed (even though they are inspiring on their own). The first several times I watched it, I just FELT something was wrong. It was such a unique, abstract thing for a film to make you feel (as opposed to the low-hanging fruit of love or fear or laughter). Now I'm much more attuned to WHY it feels wrong. Intellectual trade.

My favourite impossibility is that in the long shot of the hotel the car park is directly in front of the entrance and in front of the car park is a steep slope. In the later scenes there is no car park in front but instead the maze and no steep drop.

I'm not really into the "esoteric" readings. Too often it's obvious from the other writings of those authors that they already believed in advance of interpreting the movie that the world is run by occultist, monarch / mind control, illuminati or whatever and they then seek circumstantial corroboration in movies to support it. My question is "what do the film makers believe and how are they communicating it?"

Your videos are so enlightening. I have always loved Stanley Kubrick's films and I see new things in his films every time I watch them. It's like watching them for the first time every time I watch.

This was brilliant! :)

Kudos to you for making the most interesting video I've seen on RU-vid in years. The Shinning has always been one of my favorite horror movies and I've always had fascinated by the Hotel design, now I finally understand why. What would be regarded as continuity errors, were essentially done on purpose by Kubrick himself, which just proves that he truly was one of the greatest directors of all time.

I had just assumed that the Gold Room was on the far right side of the frame in the wing that has no windows on the lower floors which corresponds to where the actual Timberline Lodge has its event spaces, The Mount Hood room and the Mount Jefferson room. The windows above correspond to a smaller event space called the Ravens Nest (or possibly some guest rooms at the very top of that wing? It's been so long since I've been there I don't recall exactly) It could be the Gold Room is laid out in a similar fashion, one large room instead of two smaller event spaces in the same wing topped by a smaller (and unseen by us) event space. Every time I watch this movie I have to keep reminding myself there are a lot of areas of this hotel that we as an audience never see. (Freight elevators, a dishwashing area employee break rooms, just to name a few) The Timberline itself has around 70 guest rooms. The movie also presents a large section of the hotel as being for staff quarters indicates that the Overlook is probably meant to be substantially larger than the Timberline. The hotel probably also has many guest amenities that we don't see such as a restaurant and bar that is not in the event space as well as things like saunas and a swimming pool. I agree with the analysis overall as it gives the entire movie a very dream or nightmare-like logic. This is exactly the way continuity behaves in a dream. On the other hand, if the entire hotel made No sense to us it would be pretty obvious. If parts of a do make sense and others subtly don't, then it has a lot deeper impact on our psyche.

I just went to the theater and saw "Room 237", and I would like to say that your videos are superior to that film in every way. Keep up the great work.

This is endlessly intriguing, I too find it hard to believe Kubrick didn't deliberately made all these spatial impossibilities. On a subcontious level it adds to the desorientating feel of the movie.

Carpet pattern changes orientation in the hall in which Danny plays with the ball.

I am amazed that there are so much confusion about the making of this film. So many of the enigmas contained in The Shining must be very easy to answer if we only got to ask the people who were involved in the making of the film. Scholars really should try to find the answers to these questions while there are still people alive to answer them. Thank you for a very interesting analysis!

Sending a workers into a hedge maze with the wrong map 1000% seems like a Stanley Kubrick thing to do.

In reality, Kubrick did end up with the cliche of cobwebs and skeletons (goldroom party) in the final chase scene, however some versions of the movie have it edited out.

Maybe Wendy kept getting lost while she was pushing the trolley around 🤣 Imagine her constantly making wrong turns while pushing it around. She did say it was like a big maze.

I just found your channel. I've not found a video I don't like! Great job, and I do hope you keep them coming.

Thanks for sharing this. What I always have wondered why only the movie viewers notice all this and not the characters in the film? Foe example, the man interviewed Jack . Wouldn't he and including Jack notice that window doesnt belong? How is it the family staying there for 6 months not get lost or even noticed that the hotel is out of place?it was never mentioned from characters.

Awesome of you to notie these things. It's like an Easter Egg hidden behind the entire movie. Love it!

perhaps it's already been noted before, but as I was watching this and the narrator was describing all of the blatant spatial impossibilities it dawned on me that perhaps the hotel was also called the Overlook for this reason (among others). most viewers of the movie would never notice all of these things. I've never noticed and I've seen it multiple times and am a large Kubrick fan. this is an excellent analysis! thanks for your thoughtful work!

I'm so hooked on ya videos explaining the shinning, it's mind blowing, thank you...

You know, as a teen watching the original trailers in the theaters (the elevator door opening) and later actually seeing the film on HBO back when we kids thought playing Pong was a great way to spend an hour or two, I noticed the odd discrepancies about the design of the hotel. But all movies played with space/time dimensions back then If it wasn't the possibility of Kubrick's whimsy might actually be operating, I would attribute it to the same cost-cutting techniques that films like "Dirty Harry" or "Bullitt" used in playing fast and loose with actual geographical locations during car chases. It has no meaning. It was cheaper and more economical. But Kubrick being Kubrick and a great showman, he'd love your interpretation.

Go read a Guardian newspaper article called "shining a light in room 237". The exec producer of the film confirms (a year after I posted this video) the gold room was deliberately designed so that it would never actually fit in the hotel. That's already mentioned in the captions at the start of the video, which it seems you overlooked :)

This is the kind of film journalism the world needs. Legitimate analysis and dissection of films will never be replaced by blurbs about the plot and 1-5 star ratings.

This 2-parter and the Gold series just blew my mind! I've seen some hokey attempts to try to "uncover" the hidden stuff in Kubrick's films, but your videos are the real deal. Many congrats!

The Hotel sems a little bitt like in a Dream or Nightmare where Hallways change when you turn around.

WOW! This is honestly one of the coolest videos I've ever seen. I'm very impressed with the way it is put together. Especially the map sections. I was still skeptical about the EXIT sign and doorway, but once I saw the Room 237 Hallway scene and the walk-in scene, my mind was blown. Very well played sir! Very well played!

I love the film more for having seen this, what higher praise can I give? Thank you.

Oh also of note: The corridor outside the Game Room has peach walls. This same area is possibly the tiny peach walled area seen at the end of one of the green corridors near the kitchen area. Also important to note is the fact that there are multiple entrances to the hotel that have that gazebo-like design.

Your analysis was aMAZEing! I got lost in the details. LOL!

I've studied enough on Kubrick to be able to write a pretty detailed biography. And i haven't seen anything connecting him to the occult or masons. Plus he was an atheist. You only have to read his interviews to know that. If you're interested in what got Kubrick interested in political stuff and conspiracies see my article on Dr Strangelove.

@Don148 The colorado lounge in height occupies two floors. So I just drew a sort of composite map, though understandably misleading.

Binge watching your work! Brilliant stuff!

You have an amazing eye for detail and a lot of patience ;) After watching your analysis of The Shining, I'm viewing the film in a completely different way. Thanks for posting.

As much as that might cure you headache, it's a well known fact that Kubrick was obsessive about such details - having sets built and rebuilt and shooting the same shots dozens, sometimes hundreds of times. He did care about the details more than almost any other director does.

Just watched both and find them, as with all your work, exceptional.

The director of a film that requires the construction of the interior of an enormous building while restrained by a budget.. may opt to use tried-and-true methods of creating the illusion of a much larger building than there truly is... Lining the walls with “dummy doors” that lead nowhere and using stairways and hallways (and yes.. windows) that are incomplete because they literally don’t fit where they seem to be.. are just some of the many ways set designers and directors get “more bang for your buck” and produce something that seems to have exceeded the budget greatly. Kubrik’s genius and thoughtful way of doing what others have done before him, steps this up a notch and accomplishes an even larger product for a comparatively smaller budget. He was just very good at these tricks... So good that the audience can go on long, sweeping tours of the building without noticing the impossibility of the spaces, or the true size of what they’re touring. Only years later, when Kubrick’s legendary status and unfortunate absence began to birth a culture of obsession over his masterworks.. were these techniques picked apart, cataloged, analyzed, reverse-engineered, mapped out, written about, argued about and ultimately given speculative meaning and subliminal purpose... lifting Kubrick’s talent level higher and higher and higher than he ever lived to acknowledge or deny. “The only way they could occur is If Stanley wanted them there.” 3:34

I believe that part of it is practicality: The Overlook does not exist, so you assemble it from the location in Colorado and various other buildings and locations you have access to, using the best shots to tell the story.

Mr. Agar, this is fantastic work. I was the guy who sent you that Duke Nuke 'Em map diagram with the impossible office window. I had NO IDEA at the time just how extensive the impossibilities of the Overlook's floor plan were, or where it would lead. I feel privileged to have been even a small link in the chain of discovery. Thanks!

Damn this is cool. My favourite is the window in Ullman's office, it's so bright, clear and totally impossible.

Cool stuff! I wish I had the ability to notice things like this!

Ever compare Danny's escape through the bathroom window in the Shining into the maze where he outsmarts Nicholson's insane character who meets his end, to the astronaut escaping the pod, outsmaring HAL, gaining access to the confusing passageways to put an end to his insane adversary in 2001?

Excellent - thanks for posting.

i wanted to say that these videos about the shining have been instrumental in writing of a film essay for a uni course. you have been fully credited of course! i would strongly encourage you to think about writing an actual book because this is so insightful and fantastic. i went to the stanley kubrick archives recently - they are amazing. i want to go back to write a bigger essay on it, maybe even a thesis. anyway, thank you. i hope you're in room 237 when it finally comes out!

Seen this movie more times than I care to admit. Never noticed this. Super interesting video. Love it!

@SheilaTequila1000 The exterior was a constructed set in england, loosely based on the timberline lodge in America, which we see in an aerial shot at the beginning. The opportunity was there to make any necessary alterations to make it roughly match the constructed interiors, but it blatantly doesn't. We could say that SK's intention was to match the aerial shot exteriors of the original hotel but those mismatch as well :)

@jonathan1stewart Yeah there's a lot of stuff I didn't mention. was trying to keep the vid short, but it is mentioned in my full article.

Very fascinating. Excellent work.

Those were awesome. Thanks for sharing!

Amazing. Absolutely amazing analysis mate. Thank you for this

I enjoyed stumbling upon this analysis, thank you! :)

Collative learning is such a great channel and web page ...

Good point. I occasionally get people asking why it's worth making a film if so few people get the message, but like you say it only takes a few to get it and pass it on. My 2001: Meaning of The Monolith video has nearly half a million viewings so plenty of people have gotten that message now.

Go to the full analysis linked in the video description and then go to chapter 8 :)

love this. Apart from the huge size of the maze on the aerial shot i never picked up on any of this!

very interesting and thoroughly depicted - it was a pleasure watching this analysis! what's also interesting is that the maze is not seen in the aerial shots.

You are the best at what you do!

Ager's Razor suggests that Occam's Razor is a flawed perceptual principle that leads people to lazy assumption without taking detailed information into account. Kubrick once confessed in a letter to a fan that he'd encoded all sorts of sexual cross references with war into Dr Strangelove and pointed out that the press never got it - the letter is reprinted in the SK archives book. Kubrick did encode hidden themes, but by 1970 he'd largely withdrawn from doing interviews.

well this was very interesting! I will def be checking out your other videos!

brilliantly detailed analysis, great job.

theses analyses are great. i know king thought kubrick's shining lacked something (like he thought some of the jumpscares could be anticipated too much by the horror-literate and also Jack's performance starts out too crazy rather than progressing into craziness) but he clearly brought many interesting ideas to the project too

A thought just struck me. If Kubrick's Gold Room was supposed to represent the federal reserve, then perhaps it makes sense that it doesn't seem to fit in the Overlook. There is no gold in the reserve, we were taken off the gold standard and use fiat monopoly money backed by nothing. So perhaps there is no Gold Room in the confines of the Overlook?

@XenoGenome Yep, Kubrick could have had all manner of angles of the Overlook to hide the fact the maze wasn't there (s shot from inside the approaching car would have been creepier), but chose to blatantly reveal it as missing. The hotel itself is the maze.

This is great stuff, at first I was like wow obsessive compulsive much? But was very interesting and wanted to finish both parts :) really enjoyed it. I knew something was off at that hotel. the overlook hotel is secretly a tardis :)

For both part 1 and 2: For a long time I thought I was the only one to notice such small things. I'm glad I'm not. Nicely put together! :)

A really thought-provoking film. It strikes me that some of your ideas touch upon the unexplored differences between the novel and the film. For example, King's description of the patterns of the hallway carpets shifting, the fire hose changing direction between Jack entering the bedroom and leaving, signifying different "eras" of the hotel's existence, would suggest to me that Kubrick is putting into pictures much the same sort of disorientation that King described. Fascinating stuff, thanks.

Very interesting. Thank you for the analysis. Kubrick is an inspiring director and story teller.

I'm astonished by this film. There are so many layers that one can view it many times over and still come away with something they hadn't noticed before. Kubrick is not just one of the best-ever film directors. He may be the best sci-fi/horror director we will ever see. "The Shining" is his magnum opus.

While watching this, a couple of things popped into my head. One, there was an old commercial for a tourist attraction in the Santa Cruz mountains of California called The Mystery Spot. It's a place where gravity and magnetism are screwed up and, as the commercial said - BALLS ROLL UP HILL! This may have been an inspiration for the impossible features of the Overlook. Too bad I can't find the vintage commercial online. Another thing is that Ullman's name is similar to Bullman, which is the Minotaur. Remember in Room 237 documentary one guy thought he saw a subliminal image of a paper tray that suggested a big black d+++ when Ullman shook Jack's hand? Then, notice when Wendy is opening a can in the kitchen, behind her are two black shapes that look like limp d==== . The Minotaur doesn't want her. Or minotaurs.

Is it possible that like in all movies, there are budget and set restraints that ultimately lead to these discontinuities? I like the idea that this was all done by design just to add the confusing and disorienting effect that the Overlook Hotel has on the family and audience.

Excellent movie, excellent analysis.

Okay man, you've convinced me that a movie I thought was simply very good is actually brilliant. You've succeeded in deepening my appreciation for one of my favorite movies.

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, Mr. Ullman says he thinks they were "about eight and ten"

Amazing how it reminds me of another Stephen King movie called Rose Red. The never ending labyrinth of a mansion cursed yet stunning.

Brilliant! This video made me appreciate the film even more

My daughter was telling me that people have built the overlook on Minecraft...I don't see how it's even possible

Hey @collativelearning I love your videos on the shining, it’s my favorite movie. Would you ever do a video on the deleted scenes? Since you been to the archives, any more information on the scenes with the scrap book, or the famous ending epilogue ?

Another inconsistency I only noticed while watching some analysis film, was when Halloran was showing Wendy the kitchen. When they emerge from the walk in freezer, they are in a completely different location to where they were when they entered.

Interesting video. Thank you for your hard work.

put another way, the interior space of the hotel is non-euclidian (i.e. 4 dimentional), that constantly changes its properties

Your spa is awareness is incredible