The Invisible Horror of The Shining: How Music Makes Stanley Kubrick’s Iconic Movie Even Extra Terrifying

Inex­plic­a­ble as it could sound to learn­ers of this website, there are movie-lovers who declare to not benefit from the work of Stan­ley Kubrick. However even his most stead­quick non-appre­ci­a­tors have at hand it to him for The Shin­ing, his 1980 Stephen King adap­ta­tion extensive­ly con­sid­ered one of many scari­est — fairly pos­si­bly the scari­est – movie ever made. The visu­al rea­sons for its effec­tive­ness properly past the core audi­ence of Kubrick enthu­si­asts are many, they usually’ve been a lot scru­ti­nized by twen­ty-first-cen­tu­ry video essay­ists. However as defined in the Kap­tain Kris­t­ian video above, a sig­nif­i­cant por­tion of the hor­ror of The Shin­ing is invis­i­ble. That’s, we don’t see it, however hear it; or quite, what we hear nice­ly inten­si­fies what we see.

One tech­nique pow­er­ful­ly employed within the movie has the incon­gru­ous identify of “Mick­ey Mou­s­ing.” Named after the person­ner through which clas­sic automobile­toons had been scored in tight syn­chrony with the transfer­ments of their char­ac­ters, it had fall­en into dis­use by the 9­teen-sev­en­ties, when a sub­tler cin­e­mat­ic type pre­vailed.

For The Shin­ing, Kubrick and musi­cal edi­tor Gor­don Stain­forth selected to revive it, assem­bling scenes to items of music like Béla Bartók’s “Music for Strings, Per­cus­sion and Celes­ta” in order to top­en not simply shock moments, but in addition to deep­en the sense of dread that per­vades the film from its open­ing moments. So tight does the cor­re­spon­dence really feel between The Shin­ing’s music and its char­ac­ters’ actions that it comes as a sur­prise that many of the movie was shot with­out what we hear on the sound­observe play­ing on the set; some scenes weren’t even intend­ed to have music in any respect earlier than edit­ing.

Stain­forth has mentioned that the over­all concept was to make use of “music as destiny”: for examination­ple, the “huge chords” that accom­pa­ny the title playing cards announc­ing the day of the week, which por­have a tendency “a dooms­day of judg­ment com­ing ever clos­er.” When subsequent you watch The Shin­ing, pay atten­tion to the cues, and see simply how shut­ly they’re asso­ci­at­ed in your mem­o­ry with — and the way rather more fright­en­ing they’re made by — their accom­pa­ny­ing pictures: Jack danc­ing by the ball­room full of jazz-age ghosts, Dan­ny flip­ing a cor­ner and see­ing the pal­lid twins, the blood circulate­ing out of the ele­va­tor, Wendy lock­ing eyes with the person within the bear go well with. However then, I sus­pect that final one could be scary no mat­ter what was on the sound­observe.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free Doc­u­males­tary View from the Over­look: Craft­ing The Shin­ing Appears to be like at How Kubrick Made “the World’s Scari­est Film”

How Stan­ley Kubrick Adapt­ed Stephen King’s The Shin­ing right into a Cin­e­mat­ic Mas­ter­piece

A Kubrick Schol­ar Dis­cov­ers an Eerie Element in The Shin­ing That’s Gone Unno­ticed for Extra Than 40 Years

Stan­ley Kubrick’s Anno­tat­ed Copy of Stephen King’s The Shin­ing

Decod­ing the Display screen­performs of The Shin­ing, Moon­rise King­dom & The Darkish Knight: Watch Classes from the Display screen­play

The Clas­si­cal Music in Stan­ley Kubrick’s Movies: Lis­ten to a Free 4-Hour Playlist

Based mostly in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His initiatives embody the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the ebook The State­much less Metropolis: a Stroll by Twenty first-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social web­work for­mer­ly often called Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.