The Shining in IMAX: where madness awaits you
The Overlook Hotel forgets no one. Not even 46 years on. Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining returns to the cinema – and for the first time unfurls its creeping madness in Switzerland on the vast IMAX screen.
I remember sitting at a mate’s house in my early teens, watching Jack Torrance walk down those endless corridors for the first time. The Steadicam follows him calmly and relentlessly, like a pulse slowly quickening. Not one cut to save you. Not a moment to catch your breath. Just this single, steady forward motion – as if the Overlook Hotel itself had you by the collar and simply wouldn’t let go.
My mate and I had smuggled the DVD into his bedroom and slipped it into his PlayStation 2, because his dad had strictly forbidden him from watching the film. We did it anyway – and were nervous wrecks afterwards.
Now Stanley Kubrick’s horror film returns to where its images always truly belonged: the biggest screen possible. On Saturday, 12 September at 7 p.m., we’re screening The Shining in IMAX, in partnership with The Ones We Love and Pathé Switzerland, in English, without subtitles. It’ll be the 144-minute version.
Here’s where to get your tickets:
Saturday, 12 September: 7 p.m., EN: Spreitenbach | Ebikon | Bern | Balexert
EN = English without subtitles.
But this piece isn’t meant to be a mere reminder to buy tickets. Rather, it’s an exploration of a film that hasn’t lost any of its power in 46 years and keeps us awake at night to this day. Sit back, play Wendy Carlos and Rachel Elkind’s score in the background if you like, and let yourself sink into this article.
Warning: spoilers ahead!
The Overlook refuses to be pinned down
The Shining begins the way so many horror films do: with a family moving to a remote location. Jack Torrance, played by Jack Nicholson, takes on the job of winter caretaker high in the Rocky Mountains at the Overlook Hotel, snowed in and cut off from the world. His wife Wendy and young Danny accompany him. Danny has a gift called «the shining»: the ability to see things others cannot.
And he sees plenty at the Overlook Hotel.
Source: Warner Bros.
What sets the film apart from other haunted-house stories right from the start is that Kubrick never decides whether the Overlook is genuinely cursed or whether we’re simply watching a man’s mind unravel. Both possibilities exist on top of each other throughout, like two images on the same exposure. The ghosts could be real. But they could just as well be nothing more than what Jack’s own rage and self-loathing find in the empty corridors, if they search for long enough.
This very indecision is key: a film that tells you what’s real and what isn’t robs you of any uncertainty. And it’s in uncertainty that real horror lives.
The architecture of madness
What fascinates me most about The Shining is how much its madness is a question of space. The Overlook Hotel is geometrically impossible. There are windows that couldn’t possibly exist from the outside. Rooms that don’t fit on the floor plan. Corridors that behave like a labyrinth, despite seeming entirely ordinary at first glance.
Kubrick built this chaos with obsessive precision, and that’s exactly where the irony lies: a director notorious for his need for control made a film about a man who falls apart because he loses it. Kubrick is said to have demanded up to 127 takes for some scenes. Shelley Duvall, who plays the desperate Wendy, later described a shoot that pushed her to the brink of exhaustion – and it shows. Her fear on screen is rarely acted. It’s real.
Source: Warner Bros.
The hedge maze outside the hotel is only the most obvious metaphor: a place to get lost in, while outside everything lies buried under snow and inside something grows that’s far more dangerous than any dead end. The hotel itself is a labyrinth too. One that Jack no longer wants to leave, because it promises him what he could never give himself: meaning. Control. A spot in a place where he’d always been, as the film’s famous final shot suggests.
«All work and no play»
There’s one scene that sums up the movie best for me. Wendy sneaks into the room where Jack has supposedly been working on his novel for weeks, day after day. She finds a stack of paper, hundreds of pages tall. She begins to read.
It’s the same sentence. Over and over again.
«All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.»
There’s no blood, no ghost, no scream. Just paper and that dreadful music carving itself under your skin. And yet it’s one of the most shocking moments in the entire movie, because it shows us unmistakably that the man Wendy has been living with for years is no longer the same man. This scene tells us that no supernatural forces are needed for isolation to destroy someone. Sometimes all it takes is an empty house, a lonely winter and a man who can no longer stand himself.
This is what makes The Shining more than a ghost story. A study of domestic violence, of a father and husband who’d started terrorising his family long before he ever picked up the axe. The hotel merely gives him permission to finally become what he’d always longed to be.
Twins, blood and a photograph from 1921
Meanwhile, Kubrick scatters images throughout the film that refuse to be explained. The twin girls at the end of the corridor, inviting Danny to play with them «forever and ever and ever». The elevator that unleashes a wave of blood so immense it threatens to swallow the entire lobby. The man in the bear costume, doing something to another guest in a hotel room that the film never explains nor intends to ever explain.
Source: Warner Bros.
None of it makes conventional sense. But that’s exactly the point. The Shining isn’t a puzzle waiting to be solved. It’s a trauma that keeps bubbling back up to the surface, without ever fully explaining itself. It’s no coincidence that entire generations of Kubrick fans are still searching for the film’s «true» meaning today, be it in the documentary Room 237 or across countless forums. The movie invites exactly this kind of search, because it never pins itself down.
The most striking element in the film’s final shot: a yellowed photograph from the Overlook’s lobby, dated 4 July 1921. It shows a party in full swing, guests dressed for a ball. Right in the middle, smiling, is Jack.
We don’t know how he got there. Whether he’d always been there, or been there in an earlier life or as a reincarnation, or whether the hotel simply claimed him for itself, as it seems to do with everyone who lingers too long within its walls. That, too, is left open. What remains is just this one, unsettling feeling: some places never truly let you go.
A movie that haunts us to this day
46 years after its premiere, The Shining is still one of the most quoted, most analysed and most feared films in history, even though Stephen King, author of the original novel, famously never really warmed to Kubrick’s version. For King, the film lacked the warmth of his book, the redemption, the compassion for Jack as a human being rather than a monster.
He might even be right. But that’s exactly what makes Kubrick’s The Shining what it is: not a movie about a good man overtaken by evil forces, but about a man in whom something had long been dormant, who finally found a place to draw it out of him. The Overlook Hotel doesn’t create Jack’s madness. It simply recognises it and welcomes it in.
«Heeeeere’s Johnny!» has long since become pop culture, a line everyone knows even if they’ve never seen the film. And yet, in context, with the full force of the big screen, this moment loses none of its terror. On the contrary. In IMAX, the Overlook becomes as vast, oppressive and inescapable as Kubrick likely dreamed it would be.
So, come along. Take a seat. Welcome to the hotel that never truly lets anyone go.
I write about technology as if it were cinema, and about films as if they were real life. Between bits and blockbusters, I’m after stories that move people, not just generate clicks. And yes – sometimes I listen to film scores louder than I probably should.
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