Since its cinematic release on May 23, 1980, Stanley Kubrick’s horror masterpiece The Shining has terrified and perplexed audiences in equal measure. While the Stephen King novel it is based on is a classic example of what George Orwell called a “good bad book” — in other words, a superbly executed potboiler that has no higher ambition than to frighten its readers — Kubrick was one of the best-known and most respected filmmakers of his generation when he took on the considerable responsibility of adapting King.

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His task was simple: to create a film that promised to be, in his own audacious words, “the world’s scariest movie.” Few believed that he succeeded. When the picture was initially released, after a prolonged production that lasted for years, it was a box office success, which Kubrick needed after the relative failure of Barry Lyndon in 1975. But critics and cognoscenti alike sneered at the finished result. Pauline Kael described it as “a gothic horror that doesn’t deliver the shocks,” and she and others scornfully asked what a supposed maestro such as Kubrick was doing making a low-rent horror picture like this.

Admittedly, The Exorcist and Jaws were huge box office successes, showing that audiences were eager to pay to be frightened. But they were also Oscar-nominated pictures from young, fashionable directors. The Shining, on the other hand, was ridiculed for a histrionic and over-the-top Jack Nicholson lead performance, a protracted run time that killed any possible tension, endless plot holes that made it look as if Kubrick and his co-writer Diane Johnson had simply thrown up their hands and said “f*** it,” and a lack of respect, verging on contempt, for its source material. The latter led King to make frequent, slighting remarks about Kubrick and his adaptation, as in when he famously called it “a beautiful car with no engine.”

By the time the movie was nominated for two Razzies (worst director for Kubrick and worst actress for Shelley Duvall, cast as Nicholson’s horrified wife Wendy), The Shining was widely viewed as a swing and a miss from a gifted but arrogant filmmaker. Yet, like most of Kubrick’s oeuvre, its account of the failed writer Jack Torrance gradually being driven homicidally insane by the ghosts of the Overlook Hotel grew in stature over the decades. Upon the movie’s release, the critic Roger Ebert dismissed it as slow and detached. A quarter of a century later, including it in his “Great Movies” series, Ebert saw that what he initially saw as flaws could now be regarded as strengths, saying, “It is this elusive open-endedness that makes Kubrick’s film so strangely disturbing.” 

He was correct. What makes The Shining so terrifying and fascinating is that it is all but impossible to know the truth of what is going on. For most of its length, there are only three characters on screen — Nicholson’s Torrance, Duvall’s Wendy, and Danny Lloyd as their son Danny — and their oddly detached interactions with one another, something of a Kubrick specialty, give an unnerving tension to even the most banal domestic scene. The Overlook Hotel is brightly lit, warm, and haunted. But what constitutes the evil inside it remains tantalizingly unclear. Freud, Jung, Laing: Come forth, your insights would be invaluable.

The publication of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, a monumental two-volume compendium edited by Toy Story 3 director Lee Unkrich with text by the late J.W. Rinzler, surely offers the definitive opportunity to reflect on the picture’s contradictory legacy. Rinzler worked on the book for years and was granted access to the Stanley Kubrick Archives in London. Unkrich, who initially developed his own rival project, agreed to work with him on what both men intended to be the last word on all things The Shining. They surely succeeded. Taschen’s handsomely presented, if unavoidably pricey, box set features two volumes, one a brown-bound “scrapbook” that offers hundreds of rare behind-the-scenes images of Kubrick with his cast and crew on set, and the other a red-bound companion book that runs to over 900 pages and features numerous exclusive interviews with practically everyone involved in the film’s creation. 

Admittedly, it is unlikely that anyone who is not obsessed with the picture will be shelling out well over $100. Yet those who are deep-pocketed and curious in equal measure will relish the intricately detailed account that Rinzler and Unkrich offer of the conception, production, and afterlife of The Shining. The prose style is efficient and informative rather than poetic, and the book is generally stronger on the ”how” rather than the “why.” But memorable and never-before-told anecdotes abound, making this invaluable for aficionados. 

Nicholson’s hard-partying lifestyle off set saw him incapacitated and unable to film at one point (although he still managed to attend Wimbledon, to Kubrick’s fury). The residual pain that he felt, after a fall from a 12-foot wall, fed into the caged, at times manic, energy of his performance. In order to achieve something similar, Kubrick instructed Duvall to “bring [yourself] to a pitch of hysteria similar to an orgasm” to her lasting trauma. And the evocation of the film’s horrors at times went too far. When Scatman Crothers’s character Dick Hallorann, a kindly chef who shares the eponymous psychic ability with Danny, returns to the hotel, only to be murdered by Torrance, the scene as conceived and filmed (and of which an image exists) was so grotesquely violent that even Kubrick palled at its inclusion and asked that most of the scene be jettisoned. It was “one of the most shocking things I’ve ever seen on film,” the assistant editor Gordon Stainforth recalls.

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There are stories like these on virtually every page, adding up to a fascinating, often hilarious smorgasbord of information that offers genuine insight into the creation of a classic. Kubrick emerges well, as you might expect; a visionary filmmaker given to autocracy and high-handedness but also to unexpected receptiveness to his cast and crew’s ideas and to making the very best picture that he could, admittedly assisted by Warner Brothers’s apparently unlimited resources. Yet even he would have been bewildered by some of the more rococo conspiracy theories that have subsequently grown up around the film. These include everything from the film having been a feature-length confession that its director faked the moon landings to, more persuasively, a meditation on Native American suppression and associated violence. 

Every classic film is open to its own interpretation, and The Shining is now rightly regarded as the Citizen Kane of the horror genre. Yet what Rinzler and Unkrich have not attempted here, whether through choice or necessity, is to offer a definitive solution to any of its persistent riddles. The film famously ends with a perplexing shot of Torrance in the Overlook Hotel on July 4, 1921, which might suggest either that he has somehow been absorbed into the hotel after his death or, alternately, as the homicidal butler Grady suggests, that he has always been a part of it. Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining boasts deep-dive detail on everything that leads up to that moment, but shies away from any explanation of it. And that is surely for the best, as it allows this cold, frightening picture to remain as enigmatic as it was 4 1/2 decades ago. 

Alexander Larman is the author of, most recently, The Windsors at War and an editor at Spectator World.