The Shining Returns to HBO Max

Stephen King has never been shy about his opinions. The Master of Horror has published more than 65 novels and novellas, countless short stories, and five nonfiction books since the mid-’70s. His work has been adapted into TV shows and films, and he voices complaints and praise in equal measure. One adaptation grudge towers above the rest.

The Shining, published in 1977, is one of King’s most personal works. The novel follows Jack Torrance, a struggling writer who takes a job as caretaker of a cursed hotel. There he slowly loses his mind and puts his family in danger. King has called the book a reflection of his own struggles with alcoholism and his fears about parenting.

Three years later, Stanley Kubrick adapted it into a film. Kubrick’s The Shining is one of the most enduring works of horror in cinema history. It’s cold and nihilistic, and it showcases his omnipotent camera at its best. King is famously not a fan.

What is The Shining about?

Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) is an aspiring novelist and former teacher. He takes a job as caretaker of the Overlook Hotel in the Colorado Rockies and moves in with his wife Wendy (Shelley Duvall) and their son Danny (Danny Lloyd) as the hotel closes for the winter.

The family is locked in alone as the weather grows colder and the snow piles up. Ghosts and inexplicable occurrences haunt them, and isolation forces each of them to face their deepest demons. Jack tries and fails to write. Wendy blinds herself to her husband’s true nature. Danny has a psychic gift that plagues him with terrifying visions.

Why Stephen King hates The Shining

Kubrick makes it clear the hotel is haunted and is actively pushing Jack toward murdering his family. Even so, his Jack carries an undercurrent of violence from the start. King objected to exactly that.

One of the film’s most impactful moments comes early and sets the stage for the horror Wendy and Danny will face. After Danny’s first fainting episode, a pediatrician comes to check on him. Wendy, chatty and upbeat, smokes a cigarette as she explains how Danny dislocated his shoulder. Jack had come home drunk and found Danny amid scattered bits of paper. He pulled on Danny’s arm and dislocated it.

“Just one of those things,” Wendy says, laughing. “Purely an accident.” The camera cuts to the doctor, who looks shocked, and the scene ends. It’s one of Duvall’s great moments of acting and evidence of a misunderstood performance. After the film’s release, critics attacked Duvall sharply, and she was nominated for worst actress at the Razzies.

King and Kubrick approached the film’s lead characters in fundamentally different ways. “Shelley Duvall as Wendy is really one of the most misogynistic characters ever put on film,” King told the BBC in 2013. “She’s basically just there to scream and be stupid. That’s not the woman that I wrote.”

Kubrick cast Duvall deliberately. In an interview with critic Michel Ciment, he called her “eccentricity” a key element of his Wendy. In the same interview, he described his approach to Jack. “Jack comes to the hotel psychologically prepared to do its murderous bidding. He is bitter about his failure as a writer. He is married to a woman for whom he has only contempt. He hates his son,” said Kubrick.

King saw Jack as a good man who loves his family and is driven insane by malignant forces in the hotel. “Jack Nicholson, though a fine actor, was all wrong for the part,” King told Playboy in 1983. “His last big role had been in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and between that and his manic grin, the audience automatically identified him as a loony from the first scene.”

Most of King’s criticisms are understandable, especially for one of his most personal stories. Still, Kubrick’s The Shining is hard to deny. The terrifying opening shots glide over the mountains. The Steadicam drifts through the hotel like a ghost. Kubrick’s aloof, distancing symmetry builds the dread into something frightening and lasting. Jack is unsympathetic to Wendy, but the film and its viewers aren’t. By the end of the family’s horrifying stay, Wendy saves her son and fights back against her husband despite overwhelming and understandable fear. She becomes the film’s most human element.

With The Shining, Kubrick does what any great adaptation should. He makes the material his own.

The Shining is streaming on HBO Max.

Source: Polygon