The issue with Stanley Kubrick: the reason why Stephen King prefers the TV version of ‘The Shining’
The 1981 influential horror movie The Shining is one of American cinema’s most famous novel adaptations. Acclaimed filmmaker Stanley Kubrick took on Stephen King’s 1977 classic novel and directed a powerful cast including screen legend Jack Nicholson and the immensely talented Shelley Duvall against a brilliant terrifying landscape.
The adaptation follows relatively closely to the source material, as Nicholson’s Jack Torrance moves his family to the Overlook Hotel, where he plans to focus on his next novel. However, the cursed supernatural entities that haunt the building have other plans.
The Shining is a testimony to how diverse viewer stances can dictate the response to a film, as the movie can be viewed from three positions or reasons and generate distinct opinions. First, audiences can watch the feature strictly for its horror genre leanings, which garners relatively positive reviews. The film is an unnerving experience that recruits horror codes of tension and visual scares to terrify horror fans for over 40 years, maintaining its status as a genre staple.
In addition, The Shining attracted audiences upon release and so on for his directorial credits. Kubrick is a mighty name in cinema, revolutionising the technological aspects of 2001: A Space Odyssey and introducing trademark camera shots and images such as ‘The Kubrick Stare’ and the one-point perspective. In turn, The Shining showcases the director’s inspiration for cinematic stories residing in literature and understanding film genres as demonstrated through iconography and tones. It is an attentive and masterfully directed picture. Kubrick’s direction creates speculation about the meanings and actions in the film because of inconsistencies, ambiguities, symbolism, and alternative routes from the book. These factors cause positive reactions from Kubrick fans as it exemplifies the filmmaker’s skill at executing film properties and potentials.
However, the third stance a viewer can take when watching this film usually generates a negative response. A fan of Stephen King hoping to watch a faithful adaptation of one of the author’s most acclaimed and defining novels is usually let down by Kubrick’s adaptation, something the author himself agreed with in his dislike of the film. “I think one of the things that people relate to in my books is there’s a warmth they’re reaching out and saying to the reader I want you to be a part of this,” King explained to the BBC. “With Kubrick’s The Shining, I felt that it was very cold…looking at these people…Jack Torrance in the movie seems crazy,” which is not King’s intended vision of the leading character.
The author reportedly prefers the 1997 TV adaptation of his novel, directed by Mick Garris and starring Steven Weber as Jack Torrance, Rebecca De Mornay as Jack’s wife Wendy, Courtland Mead and Wil Horneff as different-aged versions of Danny Torrance. King also criticises Kubrick’s vision of his character Wendy. This performance was cited as one of the film’s worst upon release and stemmed from the director pushing his actor to her emotional limits to obtain his idea of a perfect genre-based performance. “Shelley Duvall as Wendy is really one of the most misogynistic characters ever put on film,” King said. “She’s basically just there to scream and be stupid, and that’s not the woman that I wrote about.”
In addition, the author discusses his stance on depicting and adapting written characters for movie adaptations, signalling a loss in the translation of genre, meaning and interpretation from page to screen. “I think that it’s still possible to scare people in a really honourable way if they care about the characters,” King says. “You can’t be afraid really for the characters if they’re just cardboard cutouts. What I want the audience to do is to fall in love with these people, and I only care about them.”
He adds: “that creates the suspense that you need. Love creates horror”.
