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This chapter examines the relevance of Stanley Kubrick’s 1971 film A Clockwork Orange in light of the revival of torture during the global war on terror. The film’s casting choices, musical inventiveness, and cinematic experimentation made it a complex, multilayered text without crudely drawn lines between good and evil. Some questioned the clarity of its message, whereas others welcomed Kubrick’s critique of the liberal state’s capacity to justify rights violations. This chapter argues that A Clockwork Orange operates as “art against torture” and that it indicts state terror. It describes the Ludovico Technique—used to domesticate the film’s main character Alex DeLarge—as an example of techniques employed by the state (including drug therapy) to “control the deviant, the criminal, and the mentally ill”.

Stanley Kubrick had settled in England to film big pictures that revolutionised the genre and indeed cinema itself. Located in London, the self-exiled Jerzy Skolimowski tended to live from hand to mouth, was nomadic like Polanski, and chased money and producers everywhere for independent, on-the-hoof projects. Yet both were to the 1970s what Michel Angelo Antonioni, Joseph Losey and Roman Polanski had been to the 1960s in British cinema: visionaries with an expatriate eye who got under the skin of the indigenous culture and its many complexities. While Kubrick and Skolimowski are at opposite ends of the modernist spectrum, they both play a crucial part in the evolution of British cinema. In the relativistic world of artistic modernism, it is surprising that what drives Kubrick much of the time is something absolute: the existence in human affairs of original evil. This chapter looks at Kubrick's films A Clockwork Orange and Barry Lyndon as well as those of Skolimowski such as Knife in the Water, Deep End, The Shout, Moonlighting and Success is the Best Revenge.

Trumbo’s major breakthrough occurred when he was assigned to adapt Howard Fast’s historical novel about the great slave uprising against the Roman Empire. To maintain his vision of the movie, he waged a series of battles against director Stanley Kubrick and some of the actors. As part of that campaign, he wrote some of his most scintillating analyses and employed some of his best maneuvers to earn a screen credit.

This chapter describes Spielberg’s support for Democratic candidates, especially Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama; his family life; the movies made by DreamWorks; his friendship with Stanley Kubrick; and his work on A.I..

Chapter 4 explores numerous steps and facets in Kubrick’s working process regarding music in Barry Lyndon, with special attention to the slow movement of Franz Schubert’s Piano Trio in E-flat, op. 100, a work which Kubrick’s producer Jan Harlan recomposed and had re-recorded for the film. Schubert’s piece is also considered with relation to its status as a late-style work, a tack that views late style as both an articulation of the composer’s cognizance of mortality and an answer to it. This strategy emphasizes the role of Schubert’s music in the estrangement and ultimate destruction of the central characters.

This chapter examines the process of adapting Stephen King's book The Shining. Looking at how and why parts of the book were adapted (rather than just focusing on what changed) allows for a coherent appreciation of Stanley Kubrick's film as a significant horror movie. Moreover, The Shining provides an ideal case study for more nuanced theories of adaptation which consider films ‘in relation to the history of generic conventions within which both the film and its source text are situated. In other words, a film participates in—and should therefore be conceptualized as part of—a sequence of adaptations of which the “original” text, in turn, constitutes a segment’. Changing the story's horrific nature does not result in it being less suited to the horror genre, it just offers a different take on its conventions. Comparing the film directly to its equally iconic source text results in inevitable competition in which the original will often ‘win’, even when then the two serve different functions. In addition to analysing adaptation, considering the film within the context of its production and its creators' filmmaking style, and looking at its position within the genre and its themes, offers a fuller picture of The Shining's effective approach to horror.

This chapter discusses Stanley Kubrick's relationship with the horror genre. The Shining (1980) is a clear example of Kubrick's status as ‘an artist of complex and popular work’—rather than being exclusively one or the other. Many approaches to understanding the film see it as a ‘serious’ work by a master filmmaker operating without commercial imperative, or elevated above a disreputable genre. This overlooks a number of important contextual considerations, not least the fact that Kubrick had been clear in asserting that he wanted to make a supernatural film and liked a number of horror films. Moreover, Kubrick, whose films ‘repeatedly mix the grotesque and the banal, the conventions of Gothic confessional morbidity and the self-conscious involutions of modernist parody’, was ideally placed to make a horror film. If The Shining is in many ways typical of the Kubrickian style, then it surely follows that the Kubrickian style was ideal for horror. His auteurist style—the use of black comedy, his artistic approach to mise-en-scène and cinematography, an interest in the uncanny—all lend themselves to the genre.

This chapter looks at the release, reception, and cultural legacy of Stanley Kubrick's The Shining (1980). When The Shining was released, it did not immediately receive the acclaim that many expected, and which it has since garnered. It was met with lukewarm reviews, disappointing many fans of the filmmaker's earlier work. As with much of Kubrick's work, however, the film has been critically reappraised over the decades since its release. The Shining is now celebrated, not only as one of the greatest horror movies ever made, but a contemporary classic in its own right. Its place in pop culture has been enshrined by endless homage and parody, and the film's influence on contemporary horror is ubiquitous. Revisiting The Shining's release and promotion strategies, and examining the reception, reappraisal, and ultimate canonisation of the film, illustrate a number of critical reservations about the horror genre and the film's place within it—even as it continues to inspire genre audiences and filmmakers almost forty years later.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of The Shining (1980), Stanley Kubrick's adaptation of Stephen King's bestselling novel of the same name. The Shining is widely acclaimed as one of the greatest horror movies ever made. However, it took time for the film to become recognised as the essential and effective horror movie it is regarded as today. For many critics, The Shining was simply not frightening. The re-evaluation that has taken place subsequently has, to some extent, sought beyond considerations of genre in highlighting the film's value, focusing on the adaptation of King's book, Kubrick's auteur status and filmmaking style, and analysis of its ‘deeper’ meanings, rather than situating it—as much of its audience has—in the context of horror cinema. These approaches are significant, and they offer useful frameworks for a closer look at the film, but it is important that they are considered in parallel with its position as a horror film. The book brings together these ideas to offer a study of The Shining in its rightful place. The chapter then presents the synopsis of the film and looks at considerations of The Shining in previous studies of the horror genre.

This chapter focuses on games that use classical music to allude to the films of auteur director Stanley Kubrick, whether as homage, parody, or both. By invoking Kubrick’s work, these games aim to connect with his legacy as an artistically lauded filmmaker whose works also had wide appeal. The chapter explores connections between 2001: A Space Odyssey and the massively successful early space flight simulator Elite, which includes features explicitly modeled on Kubrick’s film. It continues by examining two very different games that make reference to Kubrick’s notoriously violent film A Clockwork Orange: Conker’s Bad Fur Day and Batman: Arkham Origins.

This chapter details the decade of the 1970s, during which Carlos remained in hiding but continued to release albums and written statements under her birth name. Most notably, she collaborated with Stanley Kubrick and created music on the Moog synthesizer for the 1971 film A Clockwork Orange. She and Rachel Elkind also released several additional albums in the mold of Switched-On Bach, as well as the proto-ambient album Sonic Seasonings. By the late 1970s, Carlos felt it was time to disclose her identity. She had missed a number of potential collaborations in the past decade, including several film projects and a meeting with Stevie Wonder.

This chapter explores the themes of Stanley Kubrick's The Shining (1980). The Shining, in its themes of family trauma and domestic violence, racial and class tension, all connected through the film's approach to the horror of history, has been criticised for seemingly reducing the supernatural focus of Stephen King's book and replacing it with a more human evil. Like these varied themes and any one of the potential alternative readings, however, the emphasis is ultimately left to the viewer's subjective interpretation. The result, as ever, is the uncertain tone which emphasises the film's horror. The Shining might not quite 'fit' with the independent, low-budget cycle of 1970s American horror cinema which saw the emergence of a new wave of genre auteurs, but it can nonetheless be aligned with a number of that cycle's social allusions, and it be would be remiss to remove the film from this context. Ultimately, Kubrick made The Shining with the intention of achieving commercial success, and looked to the horror genre to achieve this.

This concluding chapter explains that while many studies and critiques have continued to limit its status within the horror genre, audiences and filmmakers have embraced Stanley Kubrick's The Shining (1980), with all of its ambiguities and oddities, as an enduringly popular, effective horror film. It marked a turning point in horror cinema's history and confirmed that mainstream, commercial genre films could be smart, beautiful, and original. It was stylistically and tonally unusual, auteurist and technically accomplished, enigmatic and unapologetic, and its influence is evident in a range of subsequent works. Over time, it has continued to inspire artistic, atmospheric horror, and its endless recycled references have contributed to both its extraordinary impact on popular culture and its ultimate genre canonisation. Indeed, The Shining has staked its claim in horror history.

This chapter starts from the iconic 1960 Stanley Kubrick film version of Spartacus and it compares it with the other version to demonstrate how in the Kubrick version the political and ideological nature of the Spartacus figure re-emerges in the twenty-first century, reinvented and far more sexualized than its predecessor. STARZ Spartacus, the chapter argues, has an altogether different set of objectives, placing special emphasis on the glorified and eroticized image of mostly male—but also female—bodies. This chapter concludes that Kubrick's Spartacus is transformed from a political icon, representing freedom, equality, and independence, into a new Spartacus who also becomes the image of a hypersexualized masculinity.

This chapter looks at how the assemblages that characterise a society of control intervene at the level of speech and thought. It takes up Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange (1962), a meditation on control over language, expression, and thought, but also technoscientific control, namely, through the ‘Ludovico technique’ — an assemblage of cinematic technology and pharmaceutical innovation the State uses to resubjectivise the criminal class. The novel is as famous for its ultra-violent aesthete, Alex, as for its fabrication of Nadsat, a fictional argot spoken by delinquent youths. Though Deleuze never cited Burgess, he wrote at length about Stanley Kubrick, who adapted Burgess's novel in 1971. Hence, this chapter shows how Burgess and Kubrick illuminate Deleuze's thoughts on literature and language, cinema and control, and allows us to trace their affinities with SF criticism and the genre's linguistic creations.