I don’t know what the weather was like in Seattle last weekend, but as the rattling shuttle bus began to climb the slope of Oregon’s Mount Hood, up the winding, narrow fistulas of US Route 26, as seen in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, the snow changed from a sparse little rumor to a dense, sky-blurring reality. To calm myself, I quietly hummed Wendy Carlos and Rachel Elkind’s opening title score for the film. It was the right note.
Then, at the top of the rise, in the lobby of the majestic Timberline Lodge—built in 1936–37 by the Works Progress Administration, according to a legend carved into a stone by the entrance—they were playing Roy Noble’s rendition of “Midnight, the Stars and You,” from the Shining‘s creepy final sequence, on a loop. An excellent touch. But this wasn’t meant to be a Stanley Kubrick convention (though I would indeed be interested in attending such a gathering). I came here to get scared in the present tense.
