Enjoy this 9 part interview with Stanley Kubrick, dated from November 27th, 1966 in which the enigmatic and visionary director discusses his life leading up to filmmaking.

It’s no secret that Stephen King was none too thrilled with Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of his novel. King openly objected to a number of changes to the original novel, including the casting of Jack Nicholson, as he deemed the actor already too maniacal to believably menace poor Wendy and Danny.

Stephen King’s novel The Shining may have been based on a real-life stay at the Stanley Hotel, but the story itself does have a literary predecessor: Henry James’s masterful 1908 ghost story “The Jolly Corner.”

Futura, Kubrick’s favored font, was designed in 1927 by German typeface designer, Paul Renner. Kubrick used the font in advertising 2001: A Space Odyssey and again in Eyes Wide Shut. When Kubrick didn’t use Futura, he typically favored similar sans-serif font types from the Arial and Helvetica families.

Stephen King is acutely adept at peering down the dark tunnel to the nefarious side of humanity. He creates characters that are capable of serious atrocities through innate evil nature: think of the clown in It or Cujo; or by developing into evil: Jack’s gradual decline into a homicidal maniac in The Shining.

For The Shining, the notoriously reclusive Stanley Kubrick opened his set for this fly-on-the-wall behind the scenes documentary. Who could float with impunity through the daily machinations of one of cinemas most fickle auteurs? It’s none other than Vivian Kubrick, daughter of Stanley, who directed this documentary and years later scored his film Full Metal Jacket.

Though the synthesizer provides a decidedly dated sound by modern standards, it’s easy to forget the indelible mark the instrument has made in the annals of film history. Many films of the 70s and early 80s were scored in part or whole with the use of synthesizers, including Tron, Scarface and Apocalypse Now.

This video from Collative Learning’s Rob Ager dissects the complex, M.C. Escher inspired architecture of Stanley Kubrick’s Overlook Hotel, and the subtle impact it has on your viewing of the film. It’s apparent through Rob’s exhaustive effort that Kubrick really intended to disorient audiences, lulling them into the pace and tone of the film.

There were a few less obvious reasons to pick The Shining for our October 2011 film of the month. The film, based on Stephen Kings novel, is in a class of its own when it comes to narrative complexity. It’s said that King flat-out hated the film, and perhaps with good reason. Under the tenacious eye of master auteur Stanley Kubrick, the novel was transformed from another handful of cheap scares into a haunting, maze-like film that has put viewers in a trance for the last three decades.