The Best Stephen King Adaptation Is The One The Author Hated The Most
Stanley Kubrick's The Shining is regarded as one of the best horror films of all time, but don't tell that to Stephen King.
Adapting a book into a live-action film has a 50% chance of success – perhaps even less when it’s a Stephen King story.
The author’s tales feature layers and textures that don’t always translate onto the big screen. Half the story could be missing if the chosen director isn’t capable of digging through the narrative weeds to find the subtle nuances that make all the difference.
Stanley Kubrick, one of the greatest filmmakers of all time, tackled the 1980 adaptation of King’s The Shining, co-writing with Diane Johnson and directing the movie. The film also features the otherworldly talents of Jack Nicholson and Shelley Duvall as Jack and Wendy Torrance respectively. Yet, despite all the greatness attached to the project and it being widely regarded as one of the best horror films of all time, King famously hated this adaptation of The Shining.
‘The Shining’ is one of Stephen King’s most personal stories
There’s a reason that Jack Torrance is a writer in The Shining. Stephen King used him as an avatar to address a tough period in his life as an upcoming author. Before the release of Carrie, King found himself frustrated at a dream that was within his reach but somehow unattainable, so he spiralled into his vices and anger. Naturally, this affected his relationship with those closest to him – his family – much like Jack’s descent in the story. So, for King, writing The Shining was a catharsis to deal with a turbulent time in his life that still haunted him.
King penned a script for Stanley Kubrick, but the filmmaker turned it down. Instead, Kubrick sought out writer Diane Johnson, who wasn’t exactly the biggest fan of King and saw him as a commercial – not literary – author. Johnson and Kubrick wanted to create a more literary version of the story for the film adaptation. For King, he didn’t like the fact that Johnson and Kubrick’s script portrayed Jack as somewhat of a psychopath from the start rather than a man who battles against the darker impulses and influences burning inside of him.
Stephen King thought Stanley Kubrick’s ‘The Shining’ misses the point
Stephen King credited Stanley Kubrick as a visionary and auteur, but he felt as if The Shining adaptation chose moments of iconic visual imagery over the actual meat and potatoes of what the story is about. In other words, style over substance. In a past interview, King said:
“I think The Shining is a beautiful film and it looks terrific and as I’ve said before, it’s like a big, beautiful Cadillac with no engine inside it. In that sense, when it opened, a lot of the reviews weren’t very favourable and I was one of those reviewers. I kept my mouth shut at the time, but I didn’t care for it much.”
Once again, King elaborated how he believed Jack to have no arc in the movie. For King, Jack was meant to be a tragic protagonist who gets worn down by the Overlook Hotel’s evil – not someone who’s already a terrible guy to begin with. In addition, King didn’t like Wendy’s depiction in the movie, thinking her only purpose was to scream and act scared, which took away from the important role she plays in the novel.
In fact, King disliked Kubrick’s The Shining so much that he wrote and produced a 1997 miniseries that he had much more control over. While it did well at the time and won two Emmy Awards, it’s not considered in the same league as Kubrick’s adaptation.
‘The Shining’ proves that each person sees a story differently
Stephen King’s frustration over Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining is about what the filmmaker took away from the book, specifically Jack’s arc. However, this serves as a welcome reminder that everyone experiences a story through their own unique lens. Of course, as the author, King knows what the actual intent is meant to be, but he has no control over how someone perceives it. That’s the magic of storytelling, though, as it connects with people in unimaginable and different ways.
In the case of The Shining, both King and Kubrick can be right here. King is allowed to feel aggrieved by the fact that the filmmaker chose to depart from the themes and characterizations of the source material. Kubrick was also correct in interpreting the story in the manner that he did, since he saw another angle he wanted to explore and went down that path. It’s funny, though, how both versions of The Shining remain a staple part of pop culture to this day. Despite their differences, King and Kubrick both shaped the future of horror – one through his words on the page, and the other through his visual language on screen.
