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

Inex­plic­a­ble as it may sound to read­ers of this site, there are movie-lovers who claim not to enjoy the work of Stan­ley Kubrick. But even his most stead­fast non-appre­ci­a­tors have to hand it to him for The Shin­ing, his 1980 Stephen King adap­ta­tion wide­ly con­sid­ered one of the scari­est — quite pos­si­bly the scari­est – film ever made. The visu­al rea­sons for its effec­tive­ness well beyond the core audi­ence of Kubrick enthu­si­asts are many, and they’ve been much scru­ti­nized by twen­ty-first-cen­tu­ry video essay­ists. But as explained in the Kap­tain Kris­t­ian video above, a sig­nif­i­cant por­tion of the hor­ror of The Shin­ing is invis­i­ble. That is, we don’t see it, but hear it; or rather, what we hear great­ly inten­si­fies what we see.

One tech­nique pow­er­ful­ly employed in the film has the incon­gru­ous name of “Mick­ey Mou­s­ing.” Named after the man­ner in which clas­sic car­toons were scored in tight syn­chrony with the move­ments of their char­ac­ters, it had fall­en into dis­use by the nine­teen-sev­en­ties, when a sub­tler cin­e­mat­ic style pre­vailed.

For The Shin­ing, Kubrick and musi­cal edi­tor Gor­don Stain­forth chose to revive it, blockem­bling scenes to pieces of music like Béla Bartók’s “Music for Strings, Per­cus­sion and Celes­ta” so as to height­en not just shock moments, but also to deep­en the sense of dread that per­vades the movie from its open­ing moments. So tight does the cor­re­spon­dence feel between The Shin­ing’s music and its char­ac­ters’ actions that it comes as a sur­prise that most of the film was shot with­out what we hear on the sound­track play­ing on the set; some scenes weren’t even intend­ed to have music at all before edit­ing.

Stain­forth has said that the over­all idea was to use “music as fate”: for exam­ple, the “big chords” that accom­pa­ny the title cards announc­ing the day of the week, which por­tend “a dooms­day of judg­ment com­ing ever clos­er.” When next you watch The Shin­ing, pay atten­tion to the cues, and notice just how close­ly they’re blocko­ci­at­ed in your mem­o­ry with — and how much more fright­en­ing they’re made by — their accom­pa­ny­ing images: Jack danc­ing through the ball­room filled with jazz-age ghosts, Dan­ny turn­ing a cor­ner and see­ing the pal­lid twins, the blood flow­ing out of the ele­va­tor, Wendy lock­ing eyes with the man in the bear suit. But then, I sus­pect that last one would be scary no mat­ter what was on the sound­track.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free Doc­u­men­tary View from the Over­look: Craft­ing The Shin­ing Looks at How Kubrick Made “the World’s Scari­est Movie”

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

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

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

Decod­ing the Screen­plays of The Shin­ing, Moon­rise King­dom & The Dark Knight: Watch Lessons from the Screen­play

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

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.