Our Xmas List: Taschen’s New “Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining” Is The Perfect Gift For Fans of The Overlook

It’s big (nearly 1400 pages!) and in two volumes…AND, a SLIPCASE! SWOOOOOOOON! It’s the ultimate gift for fans of The Shining, the 1980 film by acclaimed filmmaker Stanley Kubrick and based on Stephen King’s 1977 novel. “Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining” is the mammoth new book from art book publishing house Taschen and it has just been released BARELY in time for Christmas!!! It’s obviously a terrific stocking stuffer for fans of the film…but, only if you have a really, really big stocking that needs stuffed!!!!!

It’s an exhaustive look at the making of the seminal film starring Jack Nicholson as alcoholic writer/psycho dad Jack Torrance and the late and great Shelley Duvall who passed away earlier this year as chain smoking battered wife, Wendy Torrance. There are exclusive interviews and never before seen behind the scenes photos from the making of the film at Elstree Studios just outside London (The Muppet Show was being filmed at the same time! There are cute photos of little Danny Lloyd who plays psychic son Danny Torrance, on the set of The Muppet Show hanging out with Statler and Waldorf…adorbs.) The Shining has been called “The World’s Scariest Movie”…I’m not sure if that’s the case but it’s certainly one of the CREEPIEST films ever made. Kubrick was a master of creating a sense of horror and dread though he was also aided by the brilliant cinematography and ground breaking camera work not to mention trans composer Wendy Carlos’ fantastic score and music choices.

Oddly enough, author Stephen King notoriously disliked Kubrick’s version of his novel; he objected to the casting (Nicholson was too over the top menacing and Duvall was too much a victim) and other changes made to the story. But, King has questionable taste…he remade The Shining as a puerile TV miniseries in 1997 and cast bland Steven Weber as Jack Torrance and superhot Rebecca DeMornay as Wendy with the truly repulsive child actor Courtland Mead as son Danny. It’s a ghastly enterprise but “true to King’s vision”….of banality and schmaltz.

Anyway, Kubrick’s The Shining is a must have coffee table book…even if you have to SELL your coffee table to afford the $125 price! You can snatch your copy at https://www.taschen.com/en/books/film/08085/stanley-kubrick-s-the-shining/

More on the book:

“The Shining may be the first movie that ever made its audience jump with a title that simply says, ‘Tuesday,’” proclaimed The New York Times. Never has a film evoked so much dread in its audience with so little gore than Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of the 1977 novel by the master of terror himself, Stephen King, where true horror lies in the darkest corners of domesticity and isolation.

Equally a study of the intricate mechanics of Kubrick’s genius as an in-depth look at the making of a visual masterpiece, Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining gathers hundreds of hours of exclusive new interviews with the cast and crew in an unprecedented look at the 1980 cult classic. Slip in through the back door of The Overlook Hotel to witness Kubrick’s endless rounds of script rewrites, his revolutionary use of the Steadicam, the mechanics behind the infamous blood elevator, the mysterious mid-filming fire at Elstree Studios, and the countless takes needed to satisfy the meticulous force that was Kubrick.

Conceived and edited by Academy Award-winning director Lee Unkrich, dubbed by The Hollywood Reporter as “the world’s foremost Shining aficionado,” with text by best-selling author J.W. Rinzler and a foreword by Steven Spielberg, this is the definitive compendium of the film that transformed the horror genre.

The two-volume collection designed by M/M Paris includes hundreds of never-before-seen production photographs from the Stanley Kubrick Archive and the personal collections of cast and crew, rare documents and correspondence, conceptual art, an exclusive look at deleted scenes, and more.