11. C9 Incorporating Monsters

The films of Stanley Kubrick, particularly since 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), have been characterised by their innovative approaches to the use of music. Even by Kubrick’s standards, however, The Shining (1980) exemplifies a level of both sophisticated interaction of music and moving image, and general reliance on music for contextual, characterisation and narrative purposes, rarely equalled in his output. The film’s almost exclusive use of pre-existent music not only sets it apart from many other contemporaneous and subsequent works in the horror genre but also raises important questions surrounding Kubrick’s conceptual and constructive film aesthetic, and his crucial collaboration with music editor Gordon Stainforth, hitherto rarely acknowledged in the published literature. With the support of material supplied to the author by Stainforth, this essay will reinvestigate the historical context, methodology and aesthetic and structural consequences of Kubrick’s use of the modernist and avant-garde music of Bartók, Ligeti and Penderecki in the film — stylistic repertoire some of which he first explored in 2001 and admired in Friedkin’s The Exorcist (1973). It will examine ways in which the music is employed to project climates of primarily psychological (rather than physical) horror and to embody the omnipresent but unseen malevolence of the alien ‘Other’, whether through propelling the narrative in visually static scenes or underpinning passages of vivid action and subverting dialogue in precisely matched scenes of varying length.