Darkness alternates with blinding light as the walls of a maze flicker by Danny Torrance, a small boy running for his life. His monstrous father, Jack, the maze's minotaur, lopes after him through the snow-covered alleyways, waving his axe and bellowing. Suddenly, Danny stops running and starts to move with slow deliberation. His extrasensory ability to ‘shine’, which enables him to perceive the traces of past and future events, makes him change the direction of his footprints in the snow. This short sequence near the end of Stanley Kubrick's The Shining (1980) serves as what Deleuze calls a ‘diagrammatic component’, a recurring image which acts as a map or diagram to condense the affects, percepts and concepts of the film (Deleuze and Parnet 2002: 122). I will contend that both Danny's entrapment by his domineering father and his psychic ability to ‘shine’ past and future link him to the Gothic tradition, both in his victimisation and in his ability to reimagine the world.

The blue-tinged dazzle as spotlights glance off snow renders the maze too bright to see the paths clearly. Kubrick's expressive use of lighting makes the Overlook hotel itself shine in ways congenial to Jack's own ‘visions’ and the quality of light is crucial to our encounter with the film. The multivalent operations of light are also fundamental to Deleuze's wider philosophy of images moving in time. Encompassing physics and metaphysics, and including thought, memory and intuition, this image-based approach has special relevance to his film-philosophy. Deleuze aligns the metaphysics of Gothic cinema with the ‘infinite forces of light and darkness’ and demonstrates the ‘intensive movement’ of their combat in F. W. Murnau's Expressionist Gothic Nosferatu (1922), when ‘the movement-image and the light-image are two facets of the same appearing’ (1992: 49).

Forces in combat across Kubrick's film are rival ‘shines’, internal and external. The customary darkness of the Gothic mode is sidelined as the ubiquitous light of the Overlook absorbs all evil forces, including Jack's malevolence, into itself.