James Lee

Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining” has become nothing short of a cult classic, with the iconic, tilde-shaped eyebrows of Jack Nicholson wormed into the psyches of multiple generations. The movie has become one of the most renowned and culturally significant adaptations of one of Stephen King’s horror novels, an author with over 40 of his books adapted into either shows or movies.

Despite its widespread praise, King famously despised Kubrick’s adaptation of his book, so much so that he called it “a maddening, perverse, and disappointing film,” likening it to “a great big beautiful Cadillac with no motor inside,” eventually remaking the adaptation himself into a teleplay to finally “correct” Kubrick’s version. King has gone out of his way to vocalize his distaste for the Kubrick adaptation since its release, prompting many to speculate about any deeper-seeded, personal reasons behind his unrelenting criticism of the film.

Notably, prior to the film’s conception, King had written a script of the film for Kubrick, who turned it down, instead opting to explore his own vision of the story. Instead of King, Kubrick collaborated with writer Diane Johnson due to her expertise as a professor of Gothic novels at the University of California, Berkeley, and her contributions to The New York Times Book Review.

Johnson’s background fits the bill of those “avatars of high culture,” as King once called them, who often critiqued his works for being pulpy and formulaic. To add insult to injury, Johnson even remarked, “I thought his books were the sort you find in airports,” as soon as she had finished her work on “The Shining.” Kubrick’s choice of Johnson as screenwriter over King, a hands-on expert in the genre of horror, could have heightened King’s general aversion towards the film and those involved.

Another layer to King’s aversion towards the film could stem from the personal nature of the story, which originated from the memories — “scars,” as King called them — of how life was before selling his first novel. King had been extremely poor at the time, supporting two children with his wife and battling alcoholism, which caused significant tension at home. “By making Jack Torrance a drinker who was trying to quit and by making him a part of the insidious child-beating syndrome that is passed from father to son to grandson,” King said, “I found myself able to look around a dark corner and to see myself as I could have been, under the right set of circumstances.” King further claimed that Jack Torrance was as autobiographical as he’d ever approached in a character. In Jack Torrance’s portrayal, he saw a face that hypnotized him because it was, to a large extent, his own.

King wrote the book as a kind of cathartic release, describing it as “a ritual burning of hate and pain” that offered him a sense of closure, putting his troubled past to rest. However, Kubrick and Johnson’s script depicts Jack less as a protagonist battling and eventually overcoming the darkness within his own mind and evil influences of the Overlook Hotel, and more as an outright psychopath from the very first scene. King’s criticism of the film, particularly regarding Jack’s lack of character development, could have been a protest against the happier ending Kubrick denied him.

Many of King’s criticisms of the film largely arise from the fundamental differences in the intentions behind the book and the movie. The two versions of “The Shining” strive for distinct emotional impacts, occupy similar yet occasionally divergent sub-genres and explore their own thematic territories. King’s version was more of a traditional horror story, with supernatural elements designed to create suspense and escalate terror. Kubrick’s adaptation, on the other hand, was a deep exploration of the mind of a psychopath and the horrors such a mind can inflict on those closest to them.

In King’s perspective, Kubrick’s adaptation was a botched attempt at traditional horror, leaving King with the impression of “a guy who doesn’t know how to tell a joke.” Many of King’s disparaging remarks about the film seem to stem from his struggle to reconcile his perspective on the movie with his long-standing expectations within the horror genre. These expectations, shaped by the demands of his readers and his own years of experience, include a realization of the unbelievable and a disjunction between what we expect to see and what we do see.

Unlike many horror narratives that rely on subverting expectations, “The Shining” builds from an atmosphere of tension and discomfort that is present from the film’s first few scenes. Its horror doesn’t hinge on surprise, but rather on the inevitability, terror and anxiety embedded within the situation.

King’s criticisms, rooted in differences of genre expectations, illuminate the potential for film adaptations to shift and further redefine the boundaries of genres like horror. By doing this, filmmakers can continue to challenge conventional notions of fear, creating films that do not rely on the constraints of predefined conventions and serve to further expand what we perceive as the limitations and possibilities of the horror genre.