“I don’t get it”: why Stephen King doesn’t understand the cult of ‘The Shining’
Most people would agree that Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining is a masterclass in cinematic psychological horror. From the opening scene, the audience is instilled with a sense of unease that only burrows deeper and grows more ominous as the story progresses.
Thanks to the filmmaker’s immaculate shot composition, the sparse musical score, wringing a pair of powerhouse performances from leads Jack Nicholson and Shelley Duvall, and deliberately raising questions over what constitutes reality and fantasy, it’s an indisputable classic that’s been celebrated as a benchmark for spine-chilling storytelling.
However, The Shining has one notable detractor, and it’s the guy who wrote the source material. Stephen King famously disapproves of Kubrick’s masterpiece, having repeatedly pointed out his distaste for the sweeping changes to his original yarn and placing himself firmly in the very small camp of people who prefer the 1997 miniseries to its big-screen predecessor.
Mike Flanagan’s Doctor Sleep won him over much easier. Still, despite The Shining having spent decades as one of horror’s most iconic films, embedding itself into the pop culture consciousness through its imagery and dialogue and effortlessly navigating its way to the top of the pile when it comes to Hollywood’s page-to-screen adaptations of King’s bibliography, he still can’t see what all the fuss is about.
“I don’t get it,” he flatly admitted to Rolling Stone when asked about the cult appreciation for Kubrick’s snow-capped nightmare. “But there are a lot of things that I don’t get. But obviously, people absolutely love it, and they don’t understand why I don’t.”
Entirely reasonably, King’s major bugbear once again boils down to the changes made by Kubrick. “The book is hot, and the movie is cold,” he explained. “The book ends in fire, and the movie in ice. In the book, there’s an actual arc where you see this guy, Jack Torrance, trying to be good and little by little, he moves over to this place where he’s crazy.”
King was never on board with the casting of Nicholson, who he believed was too famous for playing wild-eyed maniacs to do justice to the gradual transformation of Torrance he’d put on the page. Duvall, meanwhile, was savaged as being completely wrong for the part of the beleaguered Wendy, with the author going so far as to boil the function of her entire character down to that of a “screaming dishrag”.
Not everybody is obliged to admire the movies enshrined in history as all-time greats, but it’s another matter altogether for King to suggest he doesn’t understand why. It’s an iconic film from an iconic director starring an iconic actor in the lead role, one that features several iconic scenes and ends on an iconic note. He’s allowed to dislike it, but it’s strange that he can’t comprehend why everyone else does.
