Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 film The Shining was an adaptation of Stephen King’s book of the same name, published in 1977. The book was by all accounts one of the most frightening of King’s books to date and continues to hold the place of honour in many a reader’s compendium of terror. In both the film and book versions, Jack Torrance, his wife Wendy, and son Danny arrive at the end of autumn to take over care of the Overlook Hotel for the upcoming winter. Trouble, of course follows. Jack is insane—or is he? The hotel is haunted—or is it? And Danny can see ghosts. Kubrick’s adaptation freely added and subtracted various elements from King’s book and manipulated a number of the book’s horror- and fear-inducing moments, offering viewers an arguably qualitatively different experience, one that many viewers and critics at the time found lacking. One of the significant differences that, upon reflection and with time, has been found to be one of the film’s redeeming factors is Kubrick’s use of visual mirroring, best exemplified by the dead Grady sisters who appear in corridors of the hotel seemingly at random and only to Danny. He—and audiences—are terrified. In large part this is due to the fact that Kubrick’s Grady sisters, unlike King’s, are nearly identical in height, hair colour and style, clothing, and expression. They are twins, doppelgängers of each other, and while their presence presages horrific possibilities and dangers to come, their more important function is to produce the particular dread connected to their uncanny nature. Thematically, the concept of doppelgänger runs through this film. From the many mirrors and mirror images and doubling to the inexplicable appearance of Jack’s doppelgänger—or perhaps Jack himself—in a photograph from the Overlook in 1921, Kubrick exploits the uncanny in physical reflections, repetition of images, mirroring of colour and pattern, and the Grady twins themselves. With the concepts of the doppelgänger and the uncanny as supporting elements, I explore how the film version of The Shining offered a proliferation of symbols that allowed for a profusion of theories about its meaning, all of which taken as a group provide a lens through which we can look at the culture of the filmgoing public, reflected through the silver screen.