Steven Spielberg’s abandoned homage to ‘The Shining’: “A psychological drama of extreme darkness”
It is no secret that Steven Spielberg was a huge fan of Stanley Kubrick, with both directors being key players within the New Hollywood Movement, albeit for very different kinds of films. Spielberg was establishing the blockbuster in Los Angeles while Kubrick was shooting Barry Lyndon in Ireland, making films that appealed to a niche arthouse audience. But despite this, Kubrick remained as one of his heroes, falling in love with The Shining and even referencing it in his own work.
Many filmmakers have cited Kubrick as one of their ultimate inspirations, with countless fans pondering over the many hidden mysteries within his filmography and the sheer genius of his method. He was not one to half-ass his approach, something that Spielberg adopted into his own working philosophy, going balls to the wall with the production for Jaws, even when nobody else understood his vision.
As a result, Spielberg was keen to pay homage to one of his greatest inspirations, something that he did through hiring a writer to write a film similar in tone to The Shining. Spielberg was a huge fan of Kubrick’s adaptation of the classic novel, and wanted to create something along a similar vein and try his hand at a dark psychological horror.
Bruce Robinson was hired to write the screenplay for In Dreams, but after working on it for some time, Spielberg took a look at the script and realised that it was far too dark for him to make, with Robinson saying, “It was very heavy, and something in his head, or someone like his wife, may have said, ‘Look, Steve, you’re the man who does ‘E.T.’ Do you really want to do a film about a child-killer? Your public may be very unhappy about you doing a subject like this.’ It doesn’t immediately lend itself to mainstream cinema, and that was the great problem of writing the bloody thing.”
Spielberg decided to pass the baton to Neil Jordan, who cast Robert Downey Junior and Annette Bening in the lead roles, creating a disturbing story about a suburban housewife who learns she has psychic connections to a serial killer, predicting his next actions through her dreams.
While the film might not always deliver on the script, it is an extremely atmospheric and beautiful-looking film that is in a completely different ballpark to The Shining, making something that nods towards the beloved classic while doing its own thing. It’s quite tonally different compared to the rest of Jordan’s filmography, perhaps only sharing similarities with Interview with a Vampire, and is generally less known compared to his more commercially successful films.
It’s hard to imagine any challenge that Spielberg couldn’t rise to, but the subject matter was a little too taxing for Spielberg, and he shortly went on to make Artificial Intelligence and Saving Private Ryan instead. Ultimately, while there are darker moments within his work, especially in his war stories, the director excels when making heart-warming spectacles that don’t immediately eliminate half their audience, with the director having a huge younger audience after making nostalgic stories that scare children to death for very different (and less extreme) reasons.
