The book repeatedly quotes "And the Red Death held sway over all," a line from Edgar Allan Poe's short story "The Masque of the Red Death". Only that phrase isn't to be found in the actual story; the closest approximation is the last sentence: "And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all."
Deleted Scene: Originally, there was a prologue titled "Before the Play" that chronicled earlier events in the Overlook's history, as well as an epilogue titled "After the Play", though neither remained part of the published novel. "Before the Play" featured five different stories: the building of the Overlook and the eventual downfall of its first owner, a young woman's terrifying experiences at the hotel in the 1930s, the backstory and eventual murder of Roger (the man in the dog costume) in one of the rooms, Jack's father terrorizing him as a child, and the assassination of the mob boss in the presidential suite. Most of these bits would eventually be worked into the narrative, albeit as background facts mentioned in passing. The prologue was later published in Whispers magazine in August 1982, and an abridged version appeared in the April 26–May 2, 1997 issue of TV Guide to promote the then-upcoming miniseries. The epilogue was thought to have been lost, but was re-discovered in 2016 as part of an early manuscript version of the novel. Both "Before the Play" and "After the Play" were published as part of the Deluxe Special Edition by Cemetery Dance Publications in early 2017.
What Could Have Been: Per "Shine of the Times" (an interview originally published in a 1979 issue of the science fiction and fantasy magazine Shayol, and reprinted in Bare Bones: Conversations on Terror with Stephen King), the first draft of The Shining had Jack "beat his wife to death with the mallet", but King felt "It was really just terrible and I couldn't do it. I couldn't leave it that way." In the same interview, King notes that "The original plan was for them all to die up there and for Danny to become the controlling force of the hotel after he died. And the psychic force of the hotel would go up exponentially." This was changed because, as King says, "If it had still felt good to me when I got to the end of the book I would have done it that way. But I got connected to the kid."
Write What You Know: Stephen King has admitted that the novel came about because of his own alcoholism and concerns about his own parenting. Also, King stayed overnight in room 217 of the Stanley Hotel with wife Tabitha, and the Stanley is what King used as a reference point for the Overlook. King also stated that the Stanley, much like the Overlook, was getting ready to close for the season, so King and Tabitha were the hotel's only guests, meaning that aside from the handful of staff, they had the hotel much to themselves, as the Torrances do in the novel.
The film
Ability over Appearance: King wanted a blonde, buxom actress to play Wendy, envisioning her as a down-to-earth former-cheerleader type completely unprepared for any supernatural chaos. Instead Kubrick chose skinny, pale, black-haired Shelley Duvall, who comes off as the human embodiment of the word "skittish". Tellingly, when casting Wendy for King's own version of The Shining, Rebecca De Mornay — a blonde actress who more closely resembled King's original vision — was chosen.
Acting in the Dark: Because Danny Lloyd was so young, and since it was his first acting job, Stanley Kubrick was highly protective of the boy and was genuinely concerned that the dark elements of the movie would traumatize him. So he treated each scene with Danny like it was a playful game, and shielded him from the true nature of the movie. During the shooting of the movie, Lloyd was under the impression that the film he was making was a drama, not a horror movie. In fact, when Wendy carries Danny away while shouting at Jack in the Colorado Lounge, she is actually carrying a life-size dummy so Lloyd would not have to be in the scene. Kubrick also created an alternate cut of the film to show to Lloyd which excised all the horror elements; Lloyd did not see the uncut version of the film until he happened to see it on TV when he was seventeen, eleven years after he had made it.
Actor-Inspired Element: The idea for Danny Lloyd to move his finger when he was talking as Tony was his own. He did it spontaneously during his very first audition.
Bury Your Art: The original theatrical cut of the film contained an epilogue where Stuart Ullman visits Danny and Wendy in the hospital and reveals that Jack's corpse couldn't be found by the police. A week into the film's theatrical run, Stanley Kubrick had the scene excised from all prints of the film and ordered that the footage be returned to Warner Bros., thus ending the movie with a cut from Jack's frozen body to his appearance in a photo from Independence Day 1921. Kubrick additionally suppressed the footage from appearing in any later screenings or home media releases, even as a Deleted Scene; it remains MIA to this day, with his estate continuing to withhold it from public availability.
Like all of Kubrick's later work, most of the filming was done in England even though the story's setting is Colorado.
The Timberline Lodge, the stand-in for the exterior of the Overlook Hotel in the film, is located in Oregon, with Mount Hood (of the Cascade range) standing in for the Rocky Mountains. Averted by the miniseries, which used Colorado's The Stanley Hotel (the very location that inspired King to write the book originally, and which King had unsuccessfully pressured Kubrick to use for filming).
The Dangerous Clifftop Road in the opening title sequence, called Going-To-The-Sun Road, is the main thoroughfare of Glacier National Park in Montana.
Deleted Scene: The final scene, in which Stuart Ullman visits Danny and Wendy in the hospital, informs Wendy that the police found nothing supernatural in their search of the hotel, and gives Danny Jack's tennis ball - implying that he knew about the evil in the hotel, and hired Jack to carry out the murders. Kubrick actually ordered projectionists to physically cut the scene from the film reel and send it to Warner Bros. a week into the movie's run.
Disowned Adaptation: Keyword being "adaptation." Stephen King had problems with the film as an adaptation of his work, feeling that his novel's important themes, such as the disintegration of the family and the dangers of alcoholism, were ignored or at least minimized. Jack Torrance was a stand-in for King himself as a way for him to process certain shameful elements from his personal life and soothe his desire for redemption, so Kubrick turning him into an unrepentant domestic abuser was sure to draw his ire. He was also opposed to the casting of Jack Nicholson and Shelley Duvall. It reached the point where he produced a TV miniseries that stays closer to the book — and it got derided for barely holding a candle to Kubrick's film. Having said that, King liked the movie, even calling it one of his favorite films; he just sees it as a movie that is more inspired by his novel than a straight adaptation, even likening it to a "big, beautiful Cadillac with no engine inside it", so his feelings are ultimately ambivalent.
Kubrick was rather abusive of Shelley Duvall during filming. He would gaslight her by having assistants tell her to take a break only to yell "ACTION!" just as she was relaxing or eating so she'd have to jump right into a scene without warning or preparation. (In the behind the scenes footage shot by Kubrick's daughter, Vivian, she catches Kubrick telling people to "Stop being nice to Shelley.") He'd also loudly berate her whenever the slightest thing went wrong and condescendingly shoot down any and all complaints she had about filming conditions, the script, or her health, all in order to make her feel as distressed as her character. Jack Nicholson realized this but resisted the urge to just give her a hug, which probably helped her freak out effectively when Jack came after her with an ax. When Duvall reflected on this experience, she eventually realized that Kubrick was actually getting the best out of her and admitted to having great respect for him for being such a calculating director, but admitted that she wouldn't want to go through a similar experience again.
Scatman Crothers was allegedly reduced to tears because of Kubrick's insistence on getting absolutely perfect takes - it's debatable whether to chalk this up to this trope or Kubrick simply being a Prima Donna Director. It got so bad that after one long series of takes, Crothers reportedly broke down and asked, "What DO you want, Mr. Kubrick?"
A documentary states that most takes with Jack Nicholson are among the 20th takes, after the actor got tired and started ramping up the madness of his performance even further.
Follow the Leader: Stanley Kubrick cited Eraserhead as a creative influence during the making of this movie, and screened it to put the cast and crew in the mood he wanted to achieve for the film.
God Never Said That: It's commonly mistaken that Stephen King's ambivalence toward the film version is actual hatred toward the adaptation when he's actually said that he likes the film — just as a work inspired by his writing, and not as an actual adaptation in itself.
Harpo Does Something Funny: The original script specified that "Jack is not working." The part in which Jack Torrance throws a tennis ball around the Overlook Hotel was Jack Nicholson's idea.
Method Acting: Jack Nicholson claimed that the scene where Jack snaps at Wendy for interrupting his writing was the most difficult for him, as he was a writer himself and had gotten into similar arguments with his girlfriend. Being a method actor, he drew on his memories of those arguments and added the line "Or if you come in here and you DON'T hear me typing, if I'm in here that means I'm working!"
One-Book Author: This is Danny Lloyd's only film and his only acting performance besides a brief appearance as young G Gordon Liddy in a 1982 TV film adaptation of his book Will and later a brief cameo in the sequel to this film. He chose to stop acting at ten and later became a teacher.
It's commonly claimed that Kubrick did up to 127 takes during filming (it's even in the Guinness Book of World Records for largest number of takes). Director Lee Unkrich (who is well known for being the director of Toy Story 3 and Coco), armed with unrestricted access to Kubrick’s archives, debunked this rumor while writing a book about the production of the movie and found out that it was reported by a crew member who wasn’t even on the set when it was shot and that in reality according to the shot logs, the most takes they did for a scene (which was the long dolly shot where the hotel manager walks with Wendy and Danny to the grand ballroom at the beginning of the movie) was 66.
For years it was speculated that Robin Williams was Kubrick's second choice for the role of Jack Torrance, this would later be debunked in a book written by Lee Unkrich. Even though this was never reality, the idea becomes Hilarious in Hindsight when you consider his roles in Insomnia and One Hour Photo.)
Production Posse: Stanley Kubrick notoriously did not often work with actors more than once, and only worked with a total of two actors as often as three times. This is the only film of his in which both of them appear: Philip Stone (Delbert Grady) and Joe Turkel (Lloyd the Bartender).
Special Effects Failure: Since the snow-covered Overlook and maze were entirely indoor studio sets, one detail that even Kubrick's legendary perfectionism was unable to create with the effects of that time was making the actors' breath mist when their characters are supposed to be outside in freezing cold weather.
In one scene, Jack Nicholson yells "Here's Johnny!" while poking his head through a door, and Stanley Kubrick, after having the joke explained to him (he'd been living in England since beforeJohnny Carson started hosting The Tonight Show), decided it worked. Jack's "Three Little Pigs" references were similarly improvised.
A somewhat more alarming example is the scene where Jack axes his way through the door to Wendy's room; typically it's standard practice for such a scene to use a weaker prop door so the actor can break it down in a way that looks realistic but with a much lower risk of injury. Jack Nicholson, former volunteer fire marshal, knocked it down in one swing. The crew had to set up a regular door in its place as a result.
Danny Lloyd came up with the idea of moving his finger while talking as Tony, as he spontaneously did it during his first audition.
The role of Lloyd the Bartender was originally to have been played by Harry Dean Stanton, who was unable to take the role due to his commitment to Alien.
John Williams was initially set to provide the score until Kubrick decided to go with a selection of music from different composers.
Wendy Carlos and Rachel Elkind composed music for the whole film, only to have the majority of it scrapped by Kubrick. What little remains in the film are the "Main Titles" and "Rocky Mountains".note Another composition, "Clockworks (Blood Elevator)" was used for the film's trailer.
The movie originally had an epilogue where Wendy and Danny explain their ordeal to police while in the hospital, then the manager visits them and asks Wendy to come and live with him in L.A. Kubrick had this scene cut following the film's premiere, and it hasn't resurfaced since then; Roger Ebert went on to state that the omission was for the better, as the scene ended up asking more questions than it could answer to the point of breaking one's Willing Suspension of Disbelief.
In the original screenplay, Jack Torrance was to say "That's all, folks!" (à laPorky Pig while breaking out of the drum at the end of the Looney Tunes cartoons) while breaking through the bathroom door instead of the improvised "Here's Johnny!".
Writing by the Seat of Your Pants: Stanley Kubrick seemed to be this for many of the cast members during production. He would often spend the morning before shooting on re-writing whole scenes that were to be shot that day, causing more than one of the actors to almost have a nervous breakdown, although that was a combination of this and Kubrick's perfectionism on takes. It has been argued, given his chess background, that this and other psychological tactics on the shoot were him being a Manipulative Bastard to get the performances he wanted.
The mini-series
The Cameo: Elliott Gould has a lengthy one as a much more antagonistic version of Stuart Ullman. Pat Hingle also appears for a lengthy scene as Watson, more in line with his description in the novel. Also, Shawnee Smith plays a waitress in a scene with Halloran right before Danny contacts him in Florida. However, this also could fall under Retroactive Recognition, as this minor role came almost a decade before her career-defining role of Amanda Young in the "Saw" franchise. Miguel Ferrer has a voice-only cameo as Jack’s father Mark in Part Two, uncredited.
Creator Cameo: Director Mick Garris appears as an Al-Anon member in Part Two, and writer Stephen King appears as bandleader Gage Creed in Part Three.
Self-Adaptation: Stephen King, unhappy with Stanley Kubrick's version, created his own TV miniseries based on The Shining. This version adheres much more closely to the novel and avoids the Kubrick adaptation's Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane approach, presenting the events as explicitly and unambiguously supernatural in nature.
What Could Have Been: Gary Sinise was the first choice to play Jack Torrance, but he turned it down, convinced that his performance would be compared negatively to Jack Nicholson's. Then it was offered to Tim Daly, who was unable to accept it due to prior commitments, but recommended his Wings co-star Steven Weber.
