The Shining Was Basically A Real-Life Horror Movie To Make — Here's The Proof

127 Takes. One Scene. We're Still Not Okay About It.

Kubrick made Shelley Duvall shoot the baseball-bat standoff with Jack Nicholson so many times it landed in the record books for most retakes of a dialogue scene. Duvall said the process left her hands raw and her body dehydrated by the end of each day, and she later called the role the toughest work of her life.

Stephen King Still Isn't Over What Kubrick Did To His Book

King publicly wanted actors like Jon Voight or Martin Sheen instead of Jack Nicholson, feeling Nicholson's unhinged screen persona killed the suspense of watching Jack slowly lose his mind. He's also been blunt for decades that the film turned Wendy into what he called "one of the most misogynistic characters ever put on film."

That Hedge Maze? Built From Absolute Scratch.

The Overlook's maze doesn't exist anywhere in real life — Kubrick's crew constructed it themselves, first as an exterior set made of pine boughs stapled to plywood frames on the Elstree backlot. For the snowy night finale, the whole thing was rebuilt indoors on a soundstage, buried under two feet of dairy salt with Styrofoam snow crusted onto the walls.

The Blood Elevator Was So Intense Kubrick Couldn't Watch It Get Filmed

Kubrick's longtime assistant Leon Vitali said the crew spent weeks and weeks just getting the shade and thickness of the fake blood right before pouring hundreds of gallons of it through the elevator doors. The pressure involved was serious enough that Kubrick himself skipped the set the day it was actually shot, worried the rig might blow.

Jack Nicholson Went Through 60 Real Doors For 'Here's Johnny!'

The bathroom-door axe scene took three full days to shoot and burned through sixty doors in the process. Kubrick started with a flimsy prop door, but Nicholson — who had actual training as a volunteer fire marshal — tore through it so effortlessly that the crew had to keep bringing in real ones just to slow him down.

Scatman Crothers Literally Broke Down On Set From Exhaustion

For the scene where Hallorann explains "the shining" to Danny, Kubrick reportedly ran it 148 times before Crothers finally burst into tears from the sheer grind. Things got so tense during the axe-murder reshoot that Kubrick wanted up to 100 takes, and it was Nicholson who stepped in to argue the shoot down to 40 for the sake of Crothers' health.