The German publisher Taschen is about to release what it calls the definitive account of  Stanley Kubrick’s 1977 film The Shining. The voluminous account, which will sell for $1500, is being written by J W Winzler and edited by director Lee Unkrich (Coco and Toy Story 3).

The book, to be released on March 7, includes a foreword by Steven Spielberg, who writes in part: “You must read this book. And then watch The Shining again the second you put the book down. And I don’t care if you’ve seen it 50 times, you will never see it the same way again.

It’s going to change everything.”

Included in the book are new interviews with both cast and crew as well as never-before-seen photographs culled from Stanley Kubrick’s archive. Readers will also be able to peruse behind-the-scenes accounts of incidents like the fire at Elstree studios and a narrative of the elevator-of-blood scene.

Lee Unkrich was quoted as saying that the project was inspired by The Stanley Kubrick Archives, a book published in 2005. It took the author 12 years to complete the manuscript, a period during which he tried to track down every member of The Shining’s cast and crew. As Unkrich put it: “In 2010, I had an opportunity to visit the Stanley Kubrick archive, it was extremely exciting for me. I saw a lot of things I’d never seen before, I learned things that I didn’t know. It was during that visit to the archives that I first had the thought that maybe there should be a book about the makaing of The Shining.”

Unkrich first posted some of his research on a theoverlookhotel.com, a website he created that inspired fans to submit their own memorabilia. The website ended up being an important resource for the material that ended up in the book.



Stanley Kubrick’s film The Shining is based on the eponymous 1977 best-seller by Stephen King. The film version differs from the original novel in some respects, however. A film sequel, Doctor Sleep, appeared on screens in 2019, written and directed by Mike Flanagan.

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