The Shining Poster UK — Buy Kubrick's Horror Masterpiece Wall Art

"Here's Johnny!" — The confirmed Shining (1980) poster on 260gsm archival matte paper — from £3 — same-day dispatch — 98types Camden

"Here's Johnny!" — Kubrick's Masterpiece

The Shining (1980), directed by Stanley Kubrick from Stephen King's 1977 novel, is the finest horror film ever made — a distinction complicated by the fact that its source's author publicly hates the adaptation. King's objection is coherent: Kubrick replaced King's novel's warm-hearted protagonist (Jack Torrance is a recovering alcoholic who genuinely loves his family and is corrupted by the Overlook Hotel's supernatural influence) with Nicholson's interpretation (a man who appears fundamentally damaged from the first scene and seems likely to have always been capable of violence). The change is precisely why Kubrick's film is superior to King's intention: it is more honest about the specific male capacity for domestic violence.

The Overlook Hotel set — built at Elstree Studios, London, over a year before principal photography began — is the finest constructed film environment of the decade. The carpet pattern, the Gold Room bar, Room 237, the hedge maze, the REDRUM bathroom: each space was designed by Roy Walker to create specific disorientation, specific wrongness. The one-point perspective corridors (used repeatedly as Danny rides his tricycle) reference Kubrick's earlier use of the technique in Barry Lyndon and A Clockwork Orange, but in The Shining they carry specific menace: the corridor that ends in the twins.

The "Here's Johnny" Scene — The Most Parodied Horror Moment in Cinema

The "Here's Johnny" scene — in which Jack Torrance breaks through the bathroom door with an axe to reach Wendy Darling — is the most parodied moment in horror cinema history. Nicholson's line was improvised, referencing Ed McMahon's introduction of Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show; Kubrick kept it after Nicholson delivered it in the sixth take. Shelley Duvall's reaction — genuine terror, delivered after weeks of Kubrick's deliberately antagonistic direction that prevented her from sleeping, eating properly or connecting with the rest of the cast — is one of the finest performances of fear in any horror film.

Room 237 — The Most Analysed Film

The Shining is the most analysed film in cinema history after Citizen Kane (1941): the documentary Room 237 (2012) presents nine different conspiratorial interpretations of Kubrick's intentions, including the theory that the film is Kubrick's coded confession to faking the Apollo 11 moon landing footage, the theory that it is an allegory for the genocide of Native Americans, and the theory that it is a meditation on the Holocaust. None of these interpretations is definitively correct or incorrect, which is precisely the achievement: Kubrick constructed a film so precisely and so densely that it rewards interpretive overdetermination.