The Shining = House of Leaves

Mental Floss posted a great series of videos exploring the spatial impossibilities that riddle the film sets for The Overlook Hotel in Stanley Kubrick's classic horror movie The Shining.  While watching, I couldn't help but think about Mark Danielewski's horror novel House of Leaves, which chronicles a family's life inside of a house that is larger on the inside than on the outside.

While the disorienting effect is much more subtle in The Shining, the device used by Kubrick and Danielewski is the same.  I wonder what it is about these spatial violations that is so unsettling.

Upon closer comparison I also notice that these impossible buildings aren't the only plot devices shared by The Shining and House of Leaves.  Other elements the two stories have in common are:

• mazes
• an isolated nuclear family 
• nonsensical manifestos
• a protagonist who slowly but inevitably descends into madness.

It seems that Kubrick and Danielewski were plumbing the same depths, so to speak.

Part 1

Part 2

I highly recommend both the movie and book.  I can't comment on Stephen King's original novel, never having read it, but I'm sure it's very enjoyable if you're into that sort of thing (personally I can't seem to get into King's stuff—too dark even for me).

As a bonus, here is the climactic river-of-blood scene from The Shining.  I've only seen this movie once, and it definitely got under my skin, but this 30 seconds of film is forever burned into my memory for reasons I don't completely understand.

Of course I don't want to leave you with that in your brain, so here's the cleverly edited trailer for Shining, which made its way around the internets a while back, and proves that Peter Gabriel can suck the scary out of anything.

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(Untitled Fragment)

Little solace comes
to those who grieve
when thoughts keep drifting
as walls keep shifting
and this great blue world of ours
seems a house of leaves 

moments before the wind.