Mirrors, Breadcrumbs, and a Wolf Who Wants In
Fairy Tale and the Uncanny in Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining”
Clad in a red hooded jacket, Wendy leads her son Danny into the Overlook’s hedge maze as Jack, wolf-like and haunting, peers down over the miniature hedge maze model from inside the hotel. Later, he will break down the door leading into their quarters, wielding an axe and shouting “Little pigs, little pigs! Let me in!” with a grotesque grin.
While in Stephen King’s The Shining, the reader’s sense of the uncanny is awakened by our not knowing whether or not an object is truly alive (the hotel is inanimate but behaves like it is not; the hedge animals outside and the fire hose in the hallway are inanimate but behave like they are not), Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of the novel creates uncanniness by referencing fairy tales through motifs such as breadcrumb trails, giant-slaying, and entrances into forbidden spaces. Kubrick’s use of mise-en-scène such as costuming and production design as well as dialogue ladens The Shining with numerous elements of fairy tale lore, both overt references and subtle allusions to fairy tales contributing to the film’s overall sense of the uncanny.
In adapting King’s novel, Stanley Kubrick and Diane Johnson[1] referenced Sigmund Freud’s 1919 essay “Das Unheimliche” in conjunction with Bruno Bettelheim’s 1976 novel The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales. “Das Unheimliche” (“The Uncanny”) is an exploration of the subject of the uncanny, a province of the kind that belongs undoubtedly “to all that is terrible — to all that arouses dread and creeping horror…that class of the terrifying which leads back to something long known to us, once very familiar” (Freud 1).
Freud explains the difference between the words heimlich, “familiar, native, belonging to the home,” and unheimlich, which is supposedly the opposite of that: something that is unfamiliar (2). Yet, the word heimlich can also mean “concealed” or “kept from sight” and thus refer to something that other people do not know about, like a love affair or a hidden place (3). In that way, what is considered heimlich can thus come to be unheimlich, as the uncanny is “something that ought to have remained hidden and secret, and yet comes to light” anyway (3).
In considering Kubrick’s The Shining as an exemplar of the uncanny, we can conjure the myriad elements of the film that should be secret and yet come to light regardless: the contents of Room 237 or Jack’s manuscript pages, for example. Many of these elements trace back to fairy tale.
The unheimlich is at the source of human cognition in much the same way that fairy tales are; for this reason, filmmakers use folkloric characters, topoi, and motifs in order to address psychological phenomena in their original work (Zipes 14). Though The Shining is not a direct adaptation of a specific fairy tale, it features enough references to them that the film becomes folkloric in turn. In The Uses of Enchantment, Bruno Bettelheim explains that “if there is a central theme to the wide variety of fairy tales, it is that of a rebirth to a higher plane,” as stories encourage children to reach a “higher form of existence” that is integral to their individual development (179). While the adult may consider this idea of rebirth to be uncanny in and of itself because “our unconscious has as little use now as ever for the idea of its own mortality,” children are able to experience this integral idea behind the buoyant nature of the fairy tale quite easily (Freud 13).
“The child knows intuitively that Little Red Cap’s being swallowed by the wolf — much like the various deaths other fairy-tale heroes experience for a time — is by no means the end of the story, but a necessary part of it,” explains Bettelheim. “The child also understands that Little Red Cap really “died” as the girl who permitted herself to be tempted by the wolf; and that when the story says “the little girl sprang out” of the wolf’s belly, she came to life a different person” (179). Indeed, Danny experiences a similar rebirth in the film after he has a seizure that, once finished, enables him to reach this higher form of existence. He sits upright in bed, drooling and shaking vehemently as Jack explores Room 237, the point-of-view shot taking the viewer into the room and through to the bathroom where the disguised hag lays in the tub. Danny’s seizure is considered an uncanny event, categorized as such because it shows viewers the inner “workings of forces hitherto unsuspected in his fellow-man but which at the same time he is dimly aware of in a remoter corner of his own being” (Freud 14). This seizure connects Danny with the innermost workings of his own bodily functions and, as it finishes, functions as a means of Danny’s rebirth into the conscious mind and out of a previously animistic, childlike worldview. This transformation is triggered by an uncanny event that, once completed, allows him to progress as the fairy tale’s hero, the Giant-Killer able to outwit the Giant.
Prior to investigating epilepsy and madness as evocative of the uncanny feeling, Freud refers to the story of “The Sand-Man” in Hoffman’s Nachtstücken as a guiding text to explain the concepts of the uncanny elements of doubling, omnipotence of thought, attitude towards death, and the castration complex. Of all of these, doubling plays the biggest role in creating the uncanny through fairy tale in The Shining. Freud defines doubling as “dividing and interchanging the self,” a division that becomes evident when one “possesses knowledge, feeling and experience in common with the other, identifies himself with another person, so that his self becomes confounded, or the foreign self is substituted for his own” (9).
This seems to perfectly encapsulate the relationship between Tony and Danny: a doubling that confounds selfhood and revolves around a possession and exchange of knowledge. The novel sets up the expectation that Tony is a future Danny, but the film turns Tony into an almost spirit-like figure that Danny says lives in his mouth and hides in his stomach, speaking to him through his index finger. Tony and Danny portray a sort of supernatural telepathy, an omnipotence of thought that turns something fearful (like seeing the Grady sisters in the game room) into something uncanny (like seeing them in the halls, alive in one moment and slaughtered in the next). Thus, this doubling leads to omnipotence, and the uncanniness is intensified.
In the realm of fairy tale, Tony functions as an archetypal donor or mentor figure, the talking animal in the woods or the fairy godmother come to help the protagonist along their journey or otherwise offer a wise warning. And, much like in a fairy tale, Danny makes the mistake of not listening to his doubled mentor by going to the Overlook anyway despite Tony’s admonitions. He is shown dark blood bursting out of the elevator, an image of the Grady sisters, and a quick look at himself in the near future, open-mouthed and screaming; unfortunately for this young fairy tale hero, the future is unavoidable.
The uncanny feeling arises from myriad physical elements of the film; props and staging especially create an uncanny feeling as the Torrance family moves through spaces and interacts with them. One of the most prevalent physical sites of the folkloric uncanny in the film is the hedge maze. Audiences first interact with the hedge maze when Stuart Ullman walks Jack and Wendy around the Overlook’s grounds, introducing it as “our famous hedge maze” as he brings them to its edge. “It’s quite an attraction around here,” he explains. “The walls are thirteen feet high and the hedges are about as old as the hotel itself. It’s a lot of fun, but I wouldn’t go in there unless I had an hour to spare to find my way out.”
Later, an over-the-shoulder shot of Jack dipping bacon into his runny eggs fades to a shot of the typewriter and cigarettes at his desk. The camera slowly zooms out and rises to show him playing handball against the wall in the atrium that has become his private office, play place, and lair. Meanwhile, Wendy takes on the role of primary caretaker for Danny as the ebullient pair jogs from the hotel to the hedge maze. They enter at the opening and the camera tracks backwards in front of them and then behind them as the shot cuts. Next, we fade to Jack wandering through the hotel near the reception area, throwing his ball recklessly through the space. He meanders to a table upon which sits a miniature model of the Overlook’s hedge maze. The shot cuts from a medium shot of Jack looming over it to a medium close shot of his small, eerie smile. Kubrick’s adaptation of King’s novel becomes especially noticeable in this scene; rather than featuring the novel’s animate hedge animals that stalk Danny through the grounds and pose a threat to Hallorann as he tries to rescue the family, the film presents us with a labyrinthine fairy tale horror: albeit one still made of sticks and leaves.
Those who read Stephen King’s novel before watching the film might find the hedge maze uncanny due to their expectation that it will function as a malevolent, animated presence with an uncanny ability to think for itself because it replaces the voracious topiary garden that serves as a source of great physical danger for the characters in the novel. In other words, we might expect one uncanny element to replace another.
Though no one in the film is at risk of death by topiary garden, our fear for Wendy and Danny is piqued by the shot of Jack looking down over the model maze and smiling. The medium close shot of Jack then cuts to an aerial view of the true hedge maze with Wendy and Danny’s bright, shadowed figures moving around the center. This leaves the audience with the impression of Jack watching over them, god-like, an immortal soul hovering over the maze while the doubled body hovers over the doubled model.
The fact that Wendy enters the maze donning a red coat à la “Little Red Cap” intensifies our feeling of uncanny dread as we associate Wendy with a helpless child meandering through a thick wood as the Wolf watches her, biding his time until he is able to pounce. Kubrick’s decision “to change the topiary garden of Stephen King’s novel into a maze” is ultimately successful (Hoile 8). The audience experiences an uncanny psychological horror as the camera zooms in from a long shot of the maze in full, the ornate, near-perfect symmetrical twists of the hedges suggesting that if one is not lucid enough, they can be trapped forever within only slightly varied versions of the same hedge walls. The twists and turns of the hedge maze invoke Little Red Cap’s trek through the woods to her grandmother’s house over and over and over again, her arrival at the center unable to console us because she is not out of danger until she is out of the woods.
As the Wolf watching Little Red Cap as she enters the forest, as the Wolf who roars to be let in by the little pigs barricaded in their house, as Bluebeard[2] forbidding his charge to go into a locked room hidden deep in his castle: Jack is always positioned as the villain of the fairy tale. Meanwhile, both Wendy and Danny play fairy tale victims, those that become heroes as they learn to outsmart their enemy. Wendy is a child abandoned in the woods by her family, a little girl who suffers when she places her trust in someone who has truly been evil all along, leaving breadcrumbs behind her as she walks through the Overlook because she knows she will eventually have to escape; she is a little pig cowering in her home as the Big Bad Wolf uses deception, cunning, and brute force to reach his prey. Later, she is the woodsman arriving just in time to knock the Wolf out and lock him in the pantry. When he escapes, she slices his hand with a knife.[3]
Danny takes on the role of the Giant Killer as he outsmarts his father in the hedge maze, ultimately abandoning him and reuniting with his mother in an oedipal embrace, reborn to the “higher plane” that solidifies his role as fairy tale hero (Bettelheim 179). He is Tom Thumb outwitting the Giant by “hiding in the kitchen and then cleverly backtracking in the snow in the penultimate scene when Jack chases him through the maze in a murderous rage and eventually becomes exhausted, sits down, and freezes to death,” the hero of his fairy tale who vanquishes his enemy so that his innocent damsel may live without fear (McAvoy 356).
In this final hedge maze scene of the film, the audience is faced with “the constant recurrence of similar situations” that becomes steadily more and more uncanny: whereas earlier Danny entered the maze with his loving mother in broad daylight, he now is pursued through the maze at nighttime, chased by an axe-wielding father (Freud 9). Jack dissolves into his animistic worldview as he pursues Danny, losing grip on the reality of the maze so fully that when his prey cleverly escapes him, he is unable to situate himself within “the unavoidable entrapment of our minds in archetypal relationships and modes of thought” (Hoile 8). The maze-like twists and turns of the Overlook for which Jack has felt ownership since he first stepped foot into the hotel during his interview[4] have finally trapped him too, now so deeply ingrained into his mind that no escape is possible. Jack Torrance’s mental landscape transforms him into a fairy tale creature lurking in a labyrinth, waiting to kill or be killed.[5] He is stuck within the animistic worldview that he has been regressing into ever since he started to become one with the Overlook.
Here, it is worth mentioning that while many cast Jack in the role of the Giant of the Maze or the Minotaur of the Labyrinth with Danny in the role of Jack the Giant-Killer or Theseus, the elder Torrance’s identity can be codified as fulfilling both the archetypal Villain and Hero roles in folklore. His mind has been corrupted by his own psychological issues as well as those projected onto him by the ghost of the former caretaker, so his experience within the maze is exemplary “of man’s duality and mortality” without any other protagonists included (8). In the maze, he is the folkloric Giant being hunted by a much smaller, much cleverer Giant-Killer, but he is also Theseus pursuing a Beast to whom all fairy tale Evils have been attributed: his son, who Grady tells him must be “corrected.”
Danny’s transformation this Giant-Killer is made possible because of the maze, which becomes “the central image of the ‘residues and traces’ of a previous animistic world-view” that Jack is unable to escape from as he follows these residues and traces of Danny’s footprints in the snow throughout the maze (8). Danny has already grown accustomed to and out of this animism, separating thought and action so that he may trap the Giant-like, Minotaur-like Jack within the freezing maze and use “these ‘traces’ to gain freedom and maturity” (11). As Hoile explains, “the child begins with this world-view and comes to surmount it; the madman through obsession returns to it; the adult re-experiences it in the ‘uncanny,’ when what is imagined and real seems inseparable” (11). Danny grows out of his animistic worldview alone in the maze without Tony appearing as his double, while Jack’s obsession with “correcting” Danny (an obsession that is aligned with the Overlook’s need to save itself from threat) becomes uncanny, his duality and mortality made manifest by his rage juxtaposed against Danny’s calm. When that childlike doubling stage has been left behind, “the double takes on a different aspect. From having been an assurance of immortality, he becomes the ghastly harbinger of death” (Freud 9).
If we consider a point that Freud makes about the “Sand-Man” story — the fact that we can try to deny connections in stories about fear and vision and castration, but they will ultimately remain — we can think about Kubrick’s attention to the male pairing in this scene as an example of “the dreaded father at whose hands castration is awaited” (8). After all, Jack trudges through the hedge maze brandishing an axe; if he is successful in killing (or, at the very least, maiming) Danny, the young boy would be unable to achieve his oedipal desire of reuniting with Wendy. This fear is both folkloric (as the stakes in a fairy tale often involve an Evil that might be insurmountable) and uncanny (as, if Jack succeeds, Danny would be both literally and psychologically castrated from her at the hands of his murderous father).[6]
James Naremore explores the film’s “uncanny emotional atmosphere” as “reinforced by its visual design, which everywhere invokes the symbolic/allegorical implications of a maze” (199). We see these visuals in the patterning of the carpet upon which Danny plays with his toy cars, through the labyrinthine hallways of the Overlook Hotel, and via the route one must take to arrive at the Overlook in the first place, but the uncanny visuals of the Overlook are not limited to those that evoke the hedge maze on its grounds. Indeed, one of the most obvious recurring visuals in The Shining is literally the recurrence of a visual: a reflection.
Mirrors are of immense relevance to the plot of the film and act as frequent sites of the uncanny, the reflected illusions of mirror images asserting their connections to “a corporeality that corrupts the image from within” (Peucker 668). Danny’s encounter with Tony that leads to his blackout takes place in his bathroom mirror before he moves to the Overlook; we view Jack and Wendy in their room’s mirror in the hotel as she brings him breakfast; the famous “Redrum” reveal takes place when Wendy sees the lipstick writing in the mirror.
One of the most shocking mirror reveals is that of the hag in Room 237: as Jack embraces the nude young woman, he looks into the mirror behind her to see that her body is old and decomposing, her skin sagging and rotten, the once desirable supernatural maternal body turned abject and horrific in just a few moments’ time (668). One cannot forget the relevance of The Mirror from “Snow White”; this most famous fairy tale mirror functions as a signifier of truth, a portent of future evil, and the homeland of the perceptible uncanny double. Each reflection in The Shining becomes a revelation of truth, “something that ought to have remained hidden and secret, and yet comes to light” anyway (Freud 3).
Though most mirror doubling in the film (especially via Room 237 and the “Redrum” reveal) is shocking and horrific, other motifs of doubling are successfully uncanny without being similarly frightening. For example, the doubling that Danny experiences — whether we consider it to be linked to him through actual supernatural abilities or as an element of Freud’s definition of the childlike mind — is mostly innocent, especially when we compare it to the other double we see in the film: Jack the recovering alcoholic father and husband versus Jack the hotel caretaker, the latter of whom is shown to us in a 1921 photograph at the end of the film.
This photograph of Jack challenges the audience’s attitude to death and creates an uncanny feeling, especially given that the photograph is a direct juxtaposition to the shots that immediately precede it: a long shot of Jack in profile collapsing to the ground in the hedge maze cutting to a medium close shot of him covered in a layer of snow and ice, frozen to death in the hedge maze, his eyes rolled under the icicles forming on his eyebrows and his mouth in mid-grimace.
His presence in the photograph (in which he stands with his arms outstretched in the center of the action, grinning happily at the camera from within a frame centered underneath one of the hotel’s many decorative sconces) confronts the audience with our primitive fear of the dead, one that Freud says is “always ready to come to the surface at any opportunity” because it is so strong (14). It is an example of the material uncanny, the “macabre “frozen” moment and arrested action of the photograph” foreshadowed by the “ice sculpture that Jack’s body — very much a material image — will become as it continues to freeze within the hedge maze (Peucker 667). Unlike the uncanny effect of the mirrors, which acts as a diegetic horror that directly affects characters in the film, the uncanny effect of the photograph is possible because of the audience’s reaction to it, as our own attitude to death is altered by the image proving that, indeed, Jack has always been at the Overlook.
The Overlook’s evil is one that refuses to be vanquished even when its possession of a human host fails; rather than allow him to escape its evil, it consumes him entirely. “How fitting, then, that the film camera, moving ever closer,” Peucker explains, “will discover Jack at the center of the group photo of Overlook guests at a 1921 ball. Now himself a ghost, Jack has been exorcised into the space of photography” (667). This is a folkloric transformation.
Freud explains that in a fairy tale, “the world of reality is left behind from the very start, and the animistic system of beliefs is frankly adopted” (18). This is the reason that all of the fairy tale elements contribute to the overall horrifying uncanny effect of the film; The Shining is not an adaptation of a fairy tale, but it still plays with our understanding of the things we believe to be real and the things we think are make-believe.
For example: the scrapbook that Jack finds in the boiler room serves as background context for the novel, revealing the sordid history of the Overlook. After the ghost of Grady tells Jack that the scrapbook was left by “the manager” for Jack to find, Jack’s interactions with the scrapbook begin to symbolize his alignment with the hotel and resultant ostracization from his family.
The scrapbook itself is an inanimate object that grows uncannily animate, a relic in a fairy tale that, once interacted with, becomes the source of the character’s suffering or newfound villainy. In the novel, Jack finds the scrapbook in the boiler room, which later becomes the locale of his death as the boiler overheats and the hotel explodes with him inside of it. In the film, we see the scrapbook on Jack’s writing desk in the hotel’s atrium, which becomes the hub of his descent into madness; in either case, the uncanny scrapbook exists in the place of Jack’s downfall. It serves as a fairy tale element because it instigates the otherwise-illogical purpose of linking Jack and the Overlook, turning the human man into a mythical, inhuman immortal villain.
Ultimately, the reason that this film’s fairy tale elements become so successfully uncanny is because the genre of film allows for uncanny “presences to ‘pass through’ in a way that sets our nerves pleasurably on edge” (Kavka 228). The audience watches the film close on Jack’s photograph and begins to understand the permeability of boundaries: those between real and unreal and between life and death. Perhaps one of the most significant choices in adaptation that Kubrick makes is the closing shot of the film: unlike in the novel, the Overlook does not explode with Jack inside of it but instead goes on existing, Jack’s spirit now intermingled with those in the photograph and elsewhere in the hotel. We lack a succinct happy ending.
By closing the film on Jack’s grinning visage in the photograph and not on Wendy, Danny, and Hallorann enjoying the calm following summer, Kubrick deprives the audience of the standard “and they lived happily ever after” sentiment that fairy tales often end with. In each of the fairy tales directly or indirectly referenced (“Hansel and Gretel,” “Little Red Cap,” “Bluebeard,” and “The Three Little Pigs” as the primary four), the Big Bad is ultimately vanquished in the end. The Shining keeps the Big Bad alive, perhaps forever, the auteur’s choice to close with the doubled frozen and photographic Jacks creating an uncanny, uncomfortably marred attitude to death.
Through its references and allusions to fairy tale via both mise-en-scène and dialogue, The Shining achieves the uncanny affect and leaves its audience feeling that “familiar, native, belonging to the home” sort of dread that arises when “something that ought to have remained hidden and secret” comes to light, like all of the elements of fairy tale lore dismembered and scattered throughout a film.
[1] For the sake of brevity, from this point forward I will refer to the decisions of the auteurs as Kubrick’s.
[2] In the novel, Danny recalls being read the story of Bluebeard at age 3 when he is standing in front of Room 217. He leaves the hallway without entering the room and soon finds himself in the corridor with the snake-like fire hose, one of the book’s most prominent elements of the uncanny uncertainty that arises when one cannot tell whether or not an object is animate (King 248–250).
[3] Some consider The Shining to be a domestic abuse narrative, citing Wendy’s calm explanation of Jack breaking Danny’s arm, the doubling/split personality between Danny and Tony, and Jack’s treatment of Wendy as evidence of both former and current bodily terror (Hornbeck 689). I do not find the narrative to be clear cut in any direction: as fairy tale, ghost story, domestic abuse narrative, or otherwise, though it is certainly clear that Jack is a danger to himself and his family. The “undercurrent of violence” within The Shining functions as an aspect of the film’s psychologically uncanny storytelling, a storytelling that presents the fear of castration at the hands of the father (696).
[4] “When I came up here for my interview, it was as though I had been here before. We…we all have moments of déjà vu, but this was ridiculous. It was almost as though I knew what was going to be around every corner,” he says to Wendy when she brings him breakfast in bed.
[5] An uncanny “double horror” grows as Jack becomes both the Wolf from “The Three Little Pigs” and “Little Red Cap” (Hubner 26). In each fairy tale, Jack’s character is an animalistic villain who seeks entrance into a forbidden space and familial relationship; what makes this particularly uncanny is that prior to his transformation into the Wolf, Jack belonged in these spaces and within this family dynamic. His transformation places him outside of the very dynamics he wishes to force himself into as the Wolf.
[6] In the oedipal relationship between Danny and his parents, Danny “experiences the anxiety of being annihilated, and Jack experiences the anxiety of being overtaken and abandoned” (Wang 117). That is to say: I do not believe that Danny’s interest in reuniting with Wendy is inherently, straightforwardly sexual. Instead, the oedipal anxieties he faces arise from the possible future in which he is cut off from his chosen parent. The archetypal anxieties that Danny experiences throughout the film are necessary for his growth and development into a character that can surmount the Overlook Hotel’s inherent, embodied evil: “Danny encounters psychological anxieties concerning his childhood relationship to his parents and other family members. These are anxieties often seen in fairytales and include separation anxieties (feelings of being rejected), authoritarian anxieties (feelings of being oppressed), Oedipal rivalry anxieties, and sexual anxieties to acquire his autonomy (Jung, 1990). For Danny, then, his experiences in the Overlook Hotel are an attempt to acquire his autonomy” (Wang 112).
Works Cited
Bettelheim, Bruno. “Little Red Riding Hood.” The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales. 1st ed., Knopf: Distributed by Random House, 1976, pp. 166–183.
Freud, Sigmund. “Das Unheimliche.” Sammlung: Fünfte Folge. Translated by Alix Strachey, Hogarth Press, 1919.
Hoile, Christopher. “The Uncanny and the Fairy Tale in Kubrick’s The Shining.” Literature Film Quarterly, vol. 12, no. 1, 1984, pp. 5–12.
Hornbeck, Elizabeth Jean. “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?: Domestic Violence in The Shining.” Feminist Studies, vol. 42, no. 3, 2016, pp. 689–719.
Hubner, Laura. “Fairytale Roots and Transformations.” Fairytale and Gothic Horror. Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2018, pp. 13–41.
Kavka, Misha. “The Gothic on Screen.” The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2002, pp. 209–228.
King, Stephen. The Shining. Anchor Books, 2013, pp. 248–251.
McAvoy, Catriona. “The Uncanny, The Gothic and The Loner: Intertextuality in the Adaptation Process Of The Shining.” Adaptation: The Journal of Literature on Screen Studies, vol. 8, no. 3, 2015, pp. 345–360.
Naremore, James. “Stanley Kubrick Presents: V. Horrorshow.” On Kubrick. BFI Publ., 2008, pp.196–200.
Peucker, Brigitte. “Kubrick and Kafka: The Corporeal Uncanny.” Modernism/Modernity (Baltimore, Md.), vol. 8, no. 4, 2001, pp. 663–674.
Wang, Ya-huei. “Archetypal Anxieties in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining.” Kata (Surabaya), vol. 13, no. 1, 2011, pp. 112–122.
Zipes, Jack. “Filmic Adaptation and Appropriation of the Fairy Tale.” The Enchanted Screen. 1st ed., Routledge, 2011, pp. 7–15.
