스탠리 큐브릭의 <샤이닝>에 나타난 공간과 공포

Space and Fear in Stanley Kubrick's The Shining

Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, which is adapted from Stephan King’s famous literature of genre, challenges the ‘grammars’ itself of horror cinema, like the others films of this director do in different genres. In the process of the adaptation, the characteristic elements of genre in King’s novel, for example the haunted house’s motif or the unhappy past of the protagonists, are systematically excluded or at least attenuated. Instead, the spatial aspects of the Overlook hotel are strongly focused and exploited in Kubrick’s film. One of these is a great labyrinth in the hotel’s garden, which has no place in King’s novel. (The latter ends up with the explosion of the hotel, which is its consequent denouement, because the veritable protagonist of the novel is the hotel, an animistic being.) Kubrick’s film, of which main concern lies in veritable human’s fear, needs a different ending and finds a solution in labyrinth. Moreover, the vastness of the hotel, of which the total aspect is not referable for the viewer, makes the building another labyrinth. The narrative time, articulated by ten anarchic small titles, is also a labyrinthine element, which makes the viewer fall into a fearful disorder. This motif of labyrinth is often combined with an impressing gaze. The famous opening sequence of the film, shot from a helicopter, is already presented in this principle. Besides, a shocking montage which combines Jack, which finds himself indoors in front of the miniature of the garden’ labyrinth, with his wife and son in the outdoor real labyrinth is another example. In this montage, three meanings of the name of the hotel, “Overlook”, are realized: “to look over, as from a higher position”, “to look upon with the evil eye” and “to look after, or supervise”. The realistic construction of the setting and no use of an expressionist lighting mark the style of the film. On this point, we can find Kubrick’s persistent challenge against the convention of horror genre. This mise-en-scène is reinforced by the introduction of new shooting technique, Steadicam, which facilitates the viewer’s identification into the filmic world by respect for the real space and time. Isolation from the outsider world and insupportable vastness of the hotel is the situation which drives the protagonist of The Shining into the madness. By presenting the problem of fear in the perspective of the spatial problem, Kubrick’s film transgresses a mere genre movie.