How Saul Bass Designed the Strange Original Poster for Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining

With Hal­loween just days away, many of us are even now ready­ing a scary movie or two to watch on the night itself. If you’re still unde­cid­ed about your own Hal­loween view­ing mate­r­i­al, allow us to sug­gest The Shin­ing, Stan­ley Kubrick­’s “mas­ter­piece of mod­ern hor­ror.” Those words come straight from the orig­i­nal poster hung up at the­aters when the film was released in 1980, and pre­sump­tu­ous though they may have sound­ed at the time — espe­cial­ly con­sid­er­ing the mixed first wave of crit­i­cal recep­tion — the decades have proven them right. Even if you’ve watched it for ten, twen­ty, forty Hal­loweens in a row, The Shin­ing remains fright­en­ing on both the jump-scare and exis­ten­tial-dread lev­els, while its each and every frame appears more clear­ly than ever to be the work of an auteur.

One could hard­ly find a more suit­able fig­ure to rep­re­sent the notion of the auteur — the direc­tor as pri­ma­ry “author” of a film — than Kubrick, whose aes­thet­ic and intel­lec­tu­al sen­si­bil­i­ty comes through in all of his major pic­tures, each of which belongs to a dif­fer­ent genre. Kubrick had tried his hand at film noir, World War I, swords-and-san­dals epic, psy­cho­log­i­cal dra­ma, Cold War black com­e­dy, sci­ence fic­tion, dystopi­an crime, and cos­tume dra­ma; a much-reworked adap­ta­tion of Stephen King’s nov­el, The Shin­ing rep­re­sents, of course, Kubrick­’s for­ay into hor­ror.

Despite the famous­ly quick-and-dirty ten­den­cies of that defi­ant­ly unre­spectable cin­e­mat­ic tra­di­tion, Kubrick exer­cised, if any­thing, an even greater degree of metic­u­lous­ness than that for which he was already noto­ri­ous, demand­ing per­fec­tion not just on set, but also in the cre­ation of the mar­ket­ing mate­ri­als.

Accord­ing to the new Paper & Light video above, famed design­er Saul Bass (who’d pre­vi­ous­ly cre­at­ed the title sequence of Kubrick­’s Spar­ta­cus) did more than 300 draw­ings for The Shin­ing’s movie poster. The only con­cept that met with the direc­tor’s approval placed a ter­ri­fied, vague­ly inhu­man vis­age inside the let­ter­ing of the title. We don’t know whose face it’s sup­posed to be, but Paper & Light haz­ards a guess that it may be that of Dan­ny, the young son of the Over­look Hotel’s doomed care­tak­er Jack Tor­rance, or even Dan­ny’s invis­i­ble friend Tony. (Note the con­tain­ment of all of its fea­tures with­in the T.) Though Kubrick cred­it­ed Bass’ final design with solv­ing “the eter­nal prob­lem of try­ing to com­bine art­work with the title of the film,” The Shin­ing’s bright yel­low poster now sits some­how uneasi­ly with the movie’s lega­cy, more as a curios­i­ty than an icon. Nev­er­the­less, it does evoke — and maybe too well — what we’ll all hope to feel when we press play this, or any, Hal­loween night.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Saul Bass’ Reject­ed Poster Con­cepts for The Shin­ing (and His Pret­ty Excel­lent Sig­na­ture)

Who Cre­at­ed the Famous Show­er Scene in Psy­cho? Alfred Hitch­cock or the Leg­endary Design­er Saul Bass?

Watch Saul Bass’s Trip­py, Kitschy Short Film The Quest (1983), Based on a Ray Brad­bury Short Sto­ry

The Invis­i­ble Hor­ror of The Shin­ing: How Music Makes Stan­ley Kubrick’s Icon­ic Film Even More Ter­ri­fy­ing

40 Years of Saul Bass’ Ground­break­ing Title Sequences in One Com­pi­la­tion

Saul Bass’ Advice for Design­ers: Make Some­thing Beau­ti­ful and Don’t Wor­ry About the Mon­ey

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.