“In The Shining, you never hear any noises like those in classic horror films. Not a single door squeaks, no windows slam shut, the floors never creak, loud winds don’t howl through the halls. There’s never a moan or a ghostly whine, and we never hear a clock tick. The Overlook Hotel never makes so much as a single sound.”

The Shining, 1980

It is Sir Michael Caine’s opinion that Heath Ledger beat the odds and topped Jack Nicholson’s Joker from Batman.

“Jack was like a clown figure, benign but wicked. Maybe a killer old uncle. He could be funny and make you laugh. Heath’s gone in a completely different direction than Jack, he’s like a really scary psychopath. He’s a lovely guy and his Joker is going to be a hell of a revelation in this picture.”

Caine bases this belief on a scene where the Joker pays a visit to Bruce Wayne’s penthouse. He’d never met Ledger before, so when Ledger arrived and performed, he gave Caine such a fright he forgot his lines.

For the scene in which Jack Torrance breaks down the bathroom door, the props department built a door that could easily be broken down. However, Jack Nicholson had worked as a volunteer fire marshal and tore it apart far too easily, so the props department was forced to build a much stronger door.

Schindler’s List is the most expensive black and white film ever made to this date. The previous record was held for over 30 years by another film about World War II, The Longest Day.

Stanley Kubrick decided that having the hedge animals come alive, as they do in the novel, was unworkable due to restrictions in special effects, so he opted for a hedge maze instead.

The maze was constructed on an airfield near Elstree studios, by weaving branches to chicken wire mounted on empty plywood boxes. The maze was shot using an extremely short lens (a 9.8mm, which gives a horizontal viewing angle of 90 degrees) which was kept dead level at all times, to make the hedges seem much bigger and more imposing than they were in reality.

The photograph dated 1921 at the end of the film was a genuine 1920s photo, with Jack Nicholson’s head airbrushed onto the body of another man. Stanley Kubrick originally planned to use extras and shoot the photo himself, but he realized he couldn’t make it look any better than the real thing.

At the time of The Shining’s release, it was the policy of the MPAA to not allow the portrayal of blood in trailers that would be approved for all audiences. Bizarrely, the trailer for The Shining consists entirely of the shot of blood pouring out of the elevator. Stanely Kubrick convinced the board that the blood flooding out of the elevator was actually rusty water.