Script To Screen: “The Shining”

This notable scene from the 1980 movie The Shining, screenplay by Stanley Kubrick & Diane Johnson, based on a Stephen King novel.

A family heads to an isolated hotel for the winter where an evil and spiritual presence influences the father into violence, while his psychic son sees horrific forebodings from the past and of the future.

Setup: Wendy has growing suspicions about the sanity of her husband Jack…

Here is the movie scene:

Note how closely aligned the movie is to the specific camera shots in the script.

I’ll see you in comments for a discussion of this scene from The Shining.

One of the single best things you can do to learn the craft of screenwriting is to read the script while watching the movie. After all a screenplay is a blueprint to make a movie and it’s that magic of what happens between printed page and final print that can inform how you approach writing scenes. That is the purpose of Script to Screen, a Go Into The Story series where we analyze a memorable movie scene and the script pages that inspired it.

For more Script To Screen articles, go here.