In The Shining (1980), Stanley Kubrick combines the three traditional associations of the hedge maze. The first is the ancient Greek labyrinth Minos commissioned Dedalus to build to permanently imprison the Minotaur in Crete. The labyrinth was considered impregnable and everyone sent there was doomed to death. Theseus was only able to defeat the half-man, half-beast and escape by using his wits, the art of memory, and the red thread Ariadne had given him to record his path.
     In the medieval world, labyrinths were re-envisioned as symbols of the wayward human journey of pilgrims yearning to reach the Celestial City. Journeying through a labyrinth was understood as a spiritual exercise and a way of training human experience and human memory to more fully align with the sacred coordinates of the universe.
     In the late 17th century, hedge mazes, such as the one at Hampton Court in England and the now-lost one at the Palace of Versailles in France, were introduced as part of elaborate spatial displays, as demonstrations of human rationalization of the landscape, and as ways of connecting space and vision to secular power.
    Kubrick builds upon all of these associations in the sequence below, associated by a long section from Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta (1936) by the pioneering modernist composer Béla Bartók (1881-1945).