If the idea of spending a winter in a deserted and snowed-under grand hotel in the mountains with your family has ever sounded like a romantic idea, it must have been before Memorial Day Weekend in 1980 – that’s when Stanley Kubrick’s movie adaptation of Stephen King’s novel ‘The Shining’ first hit the screens in New York and Los Angeles. Set in the remote Overlook Hotel in the Colorado Rocky Mountains, which has recently closed down for winter, the film retells the story of winter caretaker Jack Torrance (played by a diabolical Jack Nicholson), his wife and their son who start having strange encounters and frightening visions, slowly realizing they have been trapped in a haunted house before things seriously start to go wrong. Frequently cited as one of the best horror films of all time, many of the movie’s most scary and emblematic scenes (who could ever forget the blood elevator, the twin girls in the empty hallway or Jack Nicholson-turned-madman wielding an axe through a bathroom door) turned ‘The Shining’ into one of the most revered and referenced icons of New Hollywood film-making and American counter-pop-culture.

Since ‘The Shining’ was released 45 years ago, generations of film students have obsessed over the every plot twist, hidden social reference, mirroring effect, set design detail – and a mind-boggling production history which, in retrospect, is even more of a page-turner than the screenplay itself. After all, Stanley Kubrick had told a friend that he wanted to make “The world’s scariest movie” already in 1966. A decade later Stephen King’s The Shining had landed on the director’s desk, and Kubrick took the first steps towards one of his greatest creations. 

Now Taschen has released the definitive compendium of the film that has forever transformed the horror genre, featuring hundreds of photographs, rare production ephemera, and extensive interviews with the cast and crew. 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, the two-volume book is equally a study of the intricate mechanics of Kubrick’s genius as an in-depth look at the making of a visual masterpiece. Readers are invited to open the book and 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 Stanley Kubrick.