Danny's sweater in "The Shining" was a real thing

Many people count The Shining among their favorite horror films, and for some like me part of the joy in loving The Shining is obsessing over the many hyperspecific details, intentional or not, that Stanley Kubrick wove into his masterpiece interpretation of Stephen King's amazing novel.

As just one example, did you know there's an 800,000-word online guide by Eye Scream (Joseph "Joe" Daniel Girard) to all of the artwork that appears on screen during The Shining? The website is so labyrinthian that I suppose you could start either here ... or here. Or anywhere, and then circle round and round for more Kubrick analysis and connections. Don't go there expecting to spend only five minutes. You won't escape the hedge maze that easily. I especially like pondering the Alex Colville connections. (See also Idyllopus Press/Juli Kearns on that topic.)

Then there are the mind-bending analyses of mstrmnd's Physical Cosmologies of The Shining, which I mentioned way the heck back in June 2011. The links I posted then are now deader than Scatman Crothers' character at the end of the movie. But there's an Internet Archive link (bless those folks) that seems to have saved mstrmnd's musings for posterity. I may also still have the voluminous original printouts in an envelope somewhere. Can neither confirm nor deny.

All of which is a longwinded introduction to Danny Torrance's sweater.

At a key point in the film, Danny is shown wearing a blue sweater featuring an Apollo 11 rocket. That rocket carried the astronauts who first landed on the moon in 1969. Many suspect the sweater is Kubrick's sly nod to the ridiculous conspiracy theory, which emerged in the mid-1970s, that he assisted with (or even "directed") pre-recorded moon-landing footage shot in a movie studio. They believe we have never landed on the moon. It's not the only playful jab in The Shining from Kubrick toward the conspiracy loons, Screen Rant notes. 

Mostly, though, I just think the sweater is awesome. And it reminds me of how much I love the movie.

And it was a real thing, not something concocted solely for the film.

It's Lister N2163 Space Age and was published as a knitting pamphlet in 1970 by Lister & Co. in the United Kingdom. While there are a lot of knockoffs due to The Shining's popularity, Katherine Hajer wrote in 2021 about knitting an Apollo 11 sweater from the original specifications.

It's too hot for sweaters in Arizona, even in the winter. So when there was a Spook-O-Rama showing of The Shining last December in Tempe, I opted for a T-shirt version of Danny's outfit and tried to get the wide-collared underneath shirt correct, too. The hair was another matter, and I didn't even try.