8 Hidden Secrets In Horror Movies That Will Blow Your Mind
3. The Number 42 Is Inescapable - The Shining
The Shining is full of Kubrick's bizarre filmic sensibilities, meaning there's plenty of weird secrets tucked away between his shots. By far the most interesting however is his obsession with the number 42, which is sprinkled throughout the film in all sorts of seemingly innocuous place. As a whole, we see it printed on one of Danny's shirt sleeves, there's 42 vehicles in the parking lot, Wendy watches The Summer of '42 on TV, Hallorann's license plate features the number, and the sum of Room 237 - where all the spookiest sh*t goes down - is of course 42.
Half of the number appears just as often, too. The number 21 can be spotted in the amount of photo frames there are on the wall, and in the year that Jack is trapped in the end. And its inverse, 12, is the result of adding 2, 3, and 7 together, as well as being the exact amount of stock The Overlook is populated with - 12 turkeys, 12-pound bags of sugar, and 12 jugs of black molasses. There's also 24 pork roasts, another inverse of 42, as well as plenty of other examples.
Why? No one knows except Kubrick really. Perhaps it's a comment on the lack of coincidence in The Overlook - everything unfolds almost exactly the way the hotel wants it to, after all, since it manages to keep Jack in the end.