The Shining’s Bear Man Is The Film’s Biggest Mystery: What It Means

The Shining is full of allegory and mystery, but none are as wild and potentially insidious as the meaning behind The Shining bear scene. Stanley Kubrick’s iconic Stephen King adaptation is intentionally dense and even nonsensical at times. The scene with the bear suit seems absurd and grotesque even by the standards of the rest of the movie, but The Shining bear man does have a disturbing and specific implication. At first glance, the scene in which the bear appears seems brief and somewhat inconsequential given all the other intense imagery in Kubrick’s classic. The bear in The Shining has a lasting legacy, though — an especially unsettling moment in an already unsettling film.