If there are any sets that are going to experience odd happenings then they would have to be the sets of horror movies, particularly those that deal with ghosts and madness on a level that is utterly terrifying all on its own without any embellishment. The Shining wasn’t exactly the favorite movie of many people when it first came out, but the fact is that over the years it’s become such a legend that people have continued to theorize about it and search for hidden meanings with such fervor that it’s become a phenomenon that a lot of people can’t help but marvel over. There might have been more weird happenings that took place on the movie set, but the fact is that a lot of the strange things that happened on this set had more to do with getting the actors into character. The fire that destroyed two sets didn’t really have a solid explanation that many people managed to hear, but the cheese sandwiches that the director, Stanley Kubrick, fed to Jack Nicholson in order to get him into character, the fact that Kubrick emotionally wrecked Shelley Duvall, and even the typing of the insane mantra that Jack Torrance was responsible for in the movie are oddities to be certain since the movie was about a man who was slowly but surely going mad and seeing ghosts within the halls of the empty, historic hotel known as the Overlook, a place that had a long history that many people have memorized by now, and that has lived on in notoriety all these years since people want the fiction to be real so often that some folks will actually confuse the veil between reality and fiction as little more than window dressing as they peer into the madness that Stephen King offered us so long ago.
There were bound to be quite a few feelings about this movie, possibly while making it and possibly while walking the sets as the energies that were being created on the set were the type that could be described as manic, harmful, and even damaging for the most part since this type of movie doesn’t typically call for kindness and rational thought. There’s no doubt that around Kubrick that things were likely tense and that the actors might have at times wished to be anywhere else. The rumor is that Kubrick kept the young boy that played Danny Torrance away from most of the horror that the movie had to offer, so it’s possible that he was able to lead a regular life without having to speak to a therapist. But one thing that might be interesting to think about, especially if anyone was to think that recreating The Shining would be a good idea, would be if strange happenings started to occur on that set, as it might be that Kubrick is still looking back from the great beyond and trying to do things his way, using his unseen influence to manipulate things in an attempt to keep shooting one scene after another. It’s not speaking ill of the dead to say that Kubrick was a very well-known perfectionist and was notorious for having his actors film a scene over and over and over until he felt that they’d attained the right look and tone that he’d been looking for. Those that are thinking that this is overkill might not have understood Kubrick’s methods or even agreed with them, but the reality of it is that he sought to create something that was so insanely accurate and on point that he actually terrorized his actors and crew at times in order get to what he wanted. It’s very likely that Kubrick is seen as a continuation of the genius yet troublesome stereotypical directors that have been depicted as tyrants on the set throughout the years. There was a method to his madness, but very few could ever see it in full detail.
The Shining was a movie built from a book that was built on a type of madness that many a writer knows about since a lot of us have touched it more than once and while some of us have shied away from it since the touch is simply too much, others have embraced it in order to better understand it. The same can be said of anyone that creates something that touches upon a different state of mind that many others can’t understand, and there’s no doubt that it’s eerie to watch some of us work and wonder where the oddities that we come up with tend to come from. But in the case of The Shining, the truly strange things that happened on set and in the movie were born of very practical and in some cases even sadistic design.
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