If Wes Anderson Directed 'The Shining'

Here’s that Wes Anderson version of The Shining we never knew we always wanted. In the intro for his mashup of two Wes Anderson and Stanley Kubrick classics, Steve Ramsden, a self-described “Papua New Guinean-born, English-sounding filmmaker,” explains that he was inspired to make the video when he “noticed how Wes Anderson and Stanley Kubrick frame their shots in a similar way.” Thus, "The Grand Overlook Hotel" was born, and the results are surprisingly cool.

The Shining (1980) and The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014) both take place in isolated, old hotels and both technically involve murders, but beyond that, most viewers would be hard pressed to see the connection between Kubrick’ tale of psychological horror and Anderson’s stylized, whimsical comedy. Ramsden ingeniously splices together the two films to create a cohesive preview for a movie that appears to be a quirky, bloody horror comedy. (Becket Mufson at The Creator’s Project also suggests that Ramsden has color corrected The Shining to match Grand Budapest’s aesthetics.) One reason that these two films work so well together may be that Kubrick and Anderson, though very different filmmakers, both use symmetry frequently in their visual styles. Kubrick often used “one-point perspective” in his films, meaning that many of his shots are framed so that all lines lead toward a single point, like this:

Wes Anderson is similarly famous for the precise symmetry of his shots, framed around a center line, like this:

Visually, the resonances that Ramsden catches between the films is pretty fascinating, but here’s the real question: Does Jack Nicholson become more or less terrifying when placed within Anderson’s retro-kitsch universe?

I’m going with more.

Images: Warner Bros; Fox Searchlight Pictures(2)