Homely But Not At Home

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In preparation for the writing of his 1980 horror screenplay, The Shining, adapted from Stephen King’s original novel, Stanley Kubrick and novelist Diane Johnson read Sigmund Freud’s seminal paper ‘The Uncanny’

Kubrick’s intention was to create a film in which the entire aesthetic and architectural construction was guided by Freud’s text. The result is an artifact of cult horror cinema laced with hidden tropes such as; patterns and figures, duality, symmetry, reflections, continuity and intentional subliminal errors, spacial impossibilities, foreshadowing and symbology.

The publication ‘Homely but Not at Home’ pays homage to Kubrick’s genius and looks to explore, interrogate and subtly visualise all of these tropes in the context of Freud’s work. ‘The Uncanny’ is described as being a complex human experience stemming from repressed infantile and animalistic beliefs, differentiated from fear it is determined by a feeling of disquiet or unease when the familiar, taken out of context, suddenly becomes strange and deeply unsettling. In Freud’s native tongue the term uncanny can be translated to the eerie ‘homely but not at home’ a phrase of odd ambiguity.

The numbers 12 and 24, and their mirrors 21 and 42, are integral to the subliminal themes of Kubrick’s film and the document has been intentionally crafted to reflect this. Margins, page widths, column sizes, the number of images in each chapter and type sizes all adhere to the strict code of figures, in addition to the entire publication bearing 12 leaves of Fedrigoni Sirio Lampone red stock placed at exacting intervals to denote the beginning of chapters. The folios run uncomfortably down the spine of the book and range from 1 to 42, at the centre, before reflecting and decreasing back to 1 towards the end of the publication. This allows each chapter page to be marked on one of the significant figures 1, 12, 21, 24 and 42 and then the same numbers mirrored from the centre.

Spreads are often designed to be symmetrical across the book’s spine and many images are doubled and overlayed to create intense and unnerving collages of cinematography. Four different Fedrigoni paper stocks have been implemented to subliminally suggest central concepts, such as a centre tip-in chapter about mirrors printed on a reflective gloss paper. A sense of foreshadowing has been compounded by a very thin ultra-white paper which allows text, images and mirrored page headers to bleed through onto other spreads.

Futura was selected and used purely on the basis of it’s symmetry, though research transpired that it was in fact Kubrick’s favourite font, and hue has been used to delicately make reference to colour symbology prevalent in the film. Every minute decision has been rationalised for a specific purpose and the resulting document successfully reflects the unnerving and subliminally challenging nature of The Shining.