Stephen King on the movie director he had given a “live grenade”
Any movie producer or director might have done well to get their hands on the rights to make a Stephen King novel into a motion picture. While there have indeed been a handful of dud productions, for the most part, King’s novel-to-film adaptations have provided some truly brilliant moments of cinema.
Whether it was Brian De Palma’s excellent version of Carrie, John Carpenter’s adaptation of Christine or Frank Darabont’s visionary The Shawshank Redemption, King’s writing has always proven to be good material for the cinema. And, of course, we ought not forget about Stanley Kubrick’s legendary 1980 psychological horror The Shining, based on King’s 1977 novel of the same name.
Starring Jack Nicholson, Danny Lloyd, Shelley Duvall, and Scatman Crothers, Kubrick’s The Shining focuses on the writer and recovering alcoholic Jack Torrance, who takes a job as an off-season caretaker of the Overlook Hotel and moves in with his family. Before long, though, it appears that the hotel is haunted, and Jack undergoes a descent into madness, leading to the danger of his family members.
The Shining is considered one of the best horror movies of the 20th century, but King himself seemed to have mixed feelings about Kubrick’s adaptation. King once told David Letterman, discussing his impressions of the film, “I feel both ways. I got to see it four times because there are an awful lot of things about that movie that I think are flawless and beautiful and just marvellous.”
However, King also felt that there are other facets of Kubrick’s The Shining where he felt that Kubrick took too many liberties with the novel source material, or as the author put it, “Then there are other times when I feel as though I’d given Stanley Kubrick a live grenade and he heroically threw his body on it.”
In a TCM documentary, King further explained his split emotions about the film version of The Shining. He found Kubrick’s movie to be a “beautiful film” that “looks terrific”, but even though the author “kept [his] mouth shut” when the film was released, he eventually thought it was “like a big, beautiful Cadillac with no engine inside it.”
As is the case with most of Kubrick’s movies, The Shining is a visual feast, and several moments stick long in the memory, like Jack bursting through the bedroom door with an axe, blood gushing out of the hotel’s elevators, and Jack finally being frozen in time in the hotel’s extensive maze at the film’s conclusion.
In that light, it’s easy to see why King thought the film was “beautiful” to look at. But, on a deep level, the legendary horror writer thinks that Kubrick’s movie was rather empty from a narrative and emotional perspective. “The movie has no heart; there’s no centre to the picture,” King explained. “I wrote the book as a tragedy, and if it was a tragedy, it was because all the people loved each other. Here, it seems there’s no tragedy because there’s nothing to be lost.”
While King certainly felt that Kubrick largely missed the point of his original horror novel, the fact remains that The Shining is a masterpiece of horror cinema. While it may lack the narrative framework of King’s writing, it remains a true classic of 20th-century film, even if it earned the distaste of the iconic author.
