How Saul Bass Designed the Strange Original Poster for Stanley Kubrick's The Shining

The Shining remains frightening on both jump-scare and existential-dread levels while each frame demonstrates meticulous auteur craft. The film's original poster branded it a "masterpiece of modern horror," a claim vindicated by decades of reassessment. The Shining showcases Stanley Kubrick's aesthetic and intellectual sensibility and confirms his status as a director-as-author. Kubrick worked across diverse genres, including film noir, World War I drama, swords-and-sandals epic, psychological drama, Cold War black comedy, science fiction, dystopian crime, and costume drama. The Shining represents Kubrick's major foray into horror and a significant adaptation of Stephen King's novel.

"With Hal­loween just days away, many of us are even now ready­ing a scary movie or two to watch on the night itself. If you're still unde­cid­ed about your own Hal­loween view­ing mate­r­i­al, allow us to sug­gest The Shin­ing, Stan­ley Kubrick­'s "mas­ter­piece of mod­ern hor­ror.""

"Those words come straight from the orig­i­nal poster hung up at the­aters when the film was released in 1980, and pre­sump­tu­ous though they may have sound­ed at the time - espe­cial­ly con­sid­er­ing the mixed first wave of crit­i­cal recep­tion - the decades have proven them right. Even if you've watched it for ten, twen­ty, forty Hal­loweens in a row, The Shin­ing remains fright­en­ing on both the jump-scare and exis­ten­tial-dread lev­els, while its each and every frame appears more clear­ly than ever to be the work of an auteur."

"One could hard­ly find a more suit­able fig­ure to rep­re­sent the notion of the auteur - the direc­tor as pri­ma­ry "author" of a film - than Kubrick, whose aes­thet­ic and intel­lec­tu­al sen­si­bil­i­ty comes through in all of his major pic­tures, each of which belongs to a dif­fer­ent genre. Kubrick had tried his hand at film noir, World War I, swords-and-san­dals epic, psy­cho­log­i­cal dra­ma, Cold War black com­e­dy, sci­ence fic­tion, dystopi­an crime, and cos­tume dra­ma; a much-reworked adap­ta­tion of Stephen King's nov­el, The Shin­ing rep­re­sents, of course, Kubrick­'s for­ay into hor­ror."

Read at Open Culture