We may begin by specifying the topic of the upcoming pages, namely a peculiar relation between the human body—as has been fashioned and hence conceived by cinema—and the fossil, where this latter is taken as a natural form that lends itself, by way of a conceptual reinterpretation, to throwing light on the creation of certain filmic forms and, in the case in hand, of the elaboration of the character of Jack Torrance in Stanley Kubrick's 1980 film The Shining.

From the fossil to the fossil form

A first move towards constructing this hypothesis about fossil forms is a distinction between two types of natural fossils: fossil traces and fossilised organisms. The former present themselves, so to say, as mere imprints that have become permanent through the process of fossilisation, as in the case of the footprints preserved in volcanic ash for just under four million years at Laetoli in Tanzania. By contrast, the fossilised organism is made up of the remains, either complete or more often fragmentary, of an ancient organism that was conserved after its death by complex processes that involved a greater or lesser change in its very substance through exchanges with its geological or ecological surroundings. Thus, for instance, we have the ammonite in a sedimentary bed, the insect trapped in amber, but also the mammoth frozen in Siberian ice (this last case representing less change of substance than the others).