ABOUT EYE SCREAM AND JOE GIRARD

SUPPORTING EYE SCREAM

First off, if you feel this site has given you $3 of information this year, please give back. There are no insignificant contributions. Each one counts. To the 2% who’ve made donations: thank you. Your help is what made this possible.

CONTACTING ME

eyescream237 (at) gmail (dot) com

Second, if you have an insight about an as-yet-unidentified piece of art in the film, please contact me at the above email. Include the phrase “Help Identifying Shining Art” in the headline, and if you can provide visual evidence, all the better.

If you’ve noticed an error, follow the same directions, but include a screenshot of the error, with a brief explanation of why you think it’s an error (nothing hypothetical, please, just typos or factual errors), and ensure that the headline of your email is simply “Correction” or if you’re feeling especially Grady-esque “Corrrrrection”. I appreciate your assistance.

UPDATES

(As of: July 2026)

To save anyone writing me about when new analysis can be expected, if you’re reading this, I’m still at work on my follow-up to Mourning Creation – Part One: The Truth… (watch it on YouTube now), Mourning Creation – Part Two: …and the Light, focusing on Eyes Wide Shut. I’ve rewritten my Decoding The Shining series into what will probably be called Eye Scream 2: Brick By Brick. I had hoped this process wouldn’t take 6 years, but it seems my completionism got the better of me.

At the moment, the script for MC2 is complete, recorded and awaiting being set to visuals. I hope this will see completion before 2026 is out. I’ve also written and recorded a script (a spiritual sequel to Mass Mirror) that will debut between MC2 and ES2.

I should say, I’ve come to regard these videos as what some have dubbed the Eye Scream Cycle, and would recommend they be viewed in chronological order.

I’m also toying with the idea of a final doc focusing on Full Metal Jacket, but it remains to be seen if I will muster the strength for one final rodeo.

I’ve had quite a lot of inquiries about whether the work I’ve alluded to in my videos will be made available at some point, whether or not the videos ever get done. The short answer is yes.

The long answer is that a health scare prompted me to devise some detailed instructions for how all that should be handled. I don’t mean to trouble any of you with this, except to explain something that I feel compelled to share. A disclaimer of sorts. My initial writing on The Shining was about a million words of notes that were condensed into the few hundred thousand words in the various essays one can right now find on the site. I didn’t make too many major discoveries during that editing process, so I basically had everything in mind that I needed in mind, to the point of avoiding redundancy.

The essays and analyses I hope to be making public within the next year or so (which cover everything between Lolita and AI: Artificial Intelligence) are more like those original million words of notes, than the synthesis that followed. For the best distillation of my work, I would point you to the videos (or the essays for the unfinished videos, if it comes to that). My approach with my notes has long been a “No Bad Ideas in Brainstorming” kind of thing, but it’s also true that the earliest notes were written before I made about 95% of the background art IDs I’ve made. My hope over the past 5 years of post-Shining analysis was to give everything a once-over before making it public. But, you know, I’ve probably written a million words per film, so such an editing chore might still be the work of a lifetime – there’s close to a thousand individual pages on the unpublished site. So, it’s certainly the work of years. I don’t want you all to have to wait that long. And who knows? Maybe it’ll be just the kind of hobby I’ll love to have for killing time in the checkout line. But for those of you who invest yourself in this work, my hope is to make it as accessible and enjoyable for you to experience as it was for me to discover. So, in the event that, for whatever reason, I can’t give it the editing it deserves, please send along any advice you have anyhow, and hopefully the caretaker of the day can put it to good use. Thanks for your concern.

FRIENDS OF EYE SCREAM

  • DELTABUILDER: True to their name, the anonymous deltabuilder builds 3D renders of the Overlook hotel, which can be enjoyed from a variety of angles, including bird’s-eye-view, and 360-degree views. They also have a YouTube page, with videos that guide the viewer through the assembled spaces. They’ve been a supporter of Eye Scream since the beginning, helping me put names to a few of the obscure paintings seen throughout the hotel.
  • ALASDAIR SPARK: Famous now for being the one to correctly ID the photo of Jack at the end of the film, Spark and I spent an intense 2 or 3 months at the end of last year together IDing the other photos around Jack, which I call the F21 photos, and several others from other rooms. Much of the credit can go to Spark’s excellent work within the archive (which he’s detailed on reddit), but I was thrilled to be able to contribute a few IDs of my own, and to have my own take on these revelations, coming (not super) soon to a YouTube near you.
  • ARCHIVIOKUBRICK: As I’ve said dozens of times over on YouTube, I have this little agreement with myself not to look into the Kubrick theories of other analysts until I rest my own pen on the matter (a point of progress that feels forever elusive). But I also do keyword searches whenever I crack a new concept, and while this almost never turns up the work of other theorists, no two websites have turned up half so often as Filippo Ulivieri’s archiviokubrick.it, and Juli Kearns’s idyllopuspress.com. Ulivieri’s work is as focused on the concrete aspects of Kubrick’s life as mine is focused on the sometimes intangible nature of Kubrick’s art. Head here for his YouTube channel, which features the series Cracking the Kube.
  • SETH S.: An anonymous fan who’s provided innumerable edits and observations over the years that constellate the site in ways as invisible (to the casual reader) as they are invaluable.
  • STEPHANIE MCPEAK PETERSON: A Baconian economic theorist, Peterson holds the distinction of being the first YouTuber to make a response video to my own work, in which she considers The Shining from a monetary perspective.
  • DUSAN PAVLICEK: A Czech software engineer with a passion for photography and computer graphic design who was kind enough to send me some cleaner images of the Denver Stock Show poster in the games room (which I’d previously theorized to show the 1912 Denver flood), and who has since helped me identify several of the obscure books in the Torrance living room. I haven’t made visible yet my analyses of those books, but I hope to do so sooner than later. Hopefully by the end of 2026, but if you’re still reading this by then, larger life got the better of me.

Also, though I’m not acquainted with the writers at damagemag.com, they are the first journal to write about my work, comparing and contrasting it with the work of other Shining theorists.

SPECIAL THANKS

I owe a debt of gratitude to Joel Welsh and my several anonymous superfans who’ve helped put names to some of the Overlook’s photos and art pieces. The art analysis page would not be what it is without their contributions. Also, big thanks to reader Tony Gill, who acquired a copy of Orange Wednesday, and wrote a lovely synopsis for the site, as there hadn’t formerly been a coherent English-language review of the book online.

To all my fellow Stanleyphiles who’ve been sharing this site on Reddit, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, my thanks.

I really wouldn’t have started this without the incredible insights of the Room 237 gang, especially Juli Kearns and John Fell Ryan. This has long felt like a “shoulders of giants” thing to me, and I hope I did ya proud.

And this is where I formerly thanked a lot of the people in my life who helped encourage me in various ways, but recent events have inspired me to keep this a private matter between myself and the respective folks. To my partner, to my family, and to those of you who know who you are, my eternal gratitude.

ABOUT ME

As for myself, I’ve been operating in the shadows of the Canadian art scene for some years now, from sea to freezing sea. Eye Scream represents my first foray into a major publication of my own.

Subscribe to my YouTube channel for video versions of my theories.

MAIN PAGE ⎔ SITE MAP ⎔ GLOSSARY

OTHER MAIN PAGES FOR SHINING ANALYSIS

THE MIRRORFORM ⎔ THE BEATLES ⎔ THE RUM AND THE RED
BACKGROUND ART ⎔ OVERLOOK PHOTOGRAPHS ⎔ GOLDEN SPIRALS
PHI GRIDS ⎔ PATTERNS ⎔ VIOLENCE AND INDIGENA ⎔ ABSURDITIES
THE STORY ROOM ⎔ ANIMAL SYMBOLS ⎔ THE ANNOTATED SHINING

ABOUT EYE SCREAM

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