Space As The Source Of Dread

The Overlook was built almost entirely as interiors at Elstree, and Kubrick made the layout deliberately incoherent: a window where there should be rock, a corridor that cannot connect to the room it leads into, furniture that moves between shots. Audiences do not consciously notice, which is exactly why the building feels wrong. Garrett Brown's newly invented Steadicam is what makes it legible, gliding a few inches above the carpet behind a child on a tricycle and through the hedge maze at night. Stephen King disliked the result and has said so for four decades, mainly because Kubrick drops the alcoholism and the redemption and leaves a man who was already like this before he arrived.