Stephen King explains why ‘The Dark Tower’ failed so miserably
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Why Stephen King hates Stanley Kubrick’s ‘The Shining’ but loves ‘Doctor Sleep’
Author Stephen King has made his thoughts on Stanley Kubrick’s movie adaptation of his novel The Shining clear at many points over the years, and largely, he is not a fan of the 1980 film. In short, he’s criticised Kubrick for hollowing out his original story into a cold husk, forgoing the warmth contained in it, and delivering versions of his characters that are one-dimensional and emotionless.
When speaking to the BBC in 2013, King explained why he’s not keen on Kubrick’s film: “I’m not a cold guy. I think one of the things people relate to in my books is this warmth, there’s a reaching out and saying to the reader, ‘I want you to be a part of this.'”
He continued: “With Kubrick’s The Shining I felt that it was very cold, very, ‘We’re looking at these people, but they’re like ants in an anthill, aren’t they doing interesting things, these little insects.'”
Elsewhere, when speaking to the Paris Review back in 2006, King paid particular attention to Shelley Duvall’s role as Wendy Torrance, a notorious role because of the harsh treatment Kubrick gave her whilst filming, which caused her to become so extremely stressed that her hair started falling out in large clumps.
Critical of Kubrick’s version of Wendy, King said: “I mean, talk about insulting to women. She’s basically a scream machine. There’s no sense of her involvement in the family dynamic at all.”
Whilst he isn’t a fan of The Shining, in a 2019 interview with EW King revealed that he loves Mike Flanagan’s film adaptation of his sequel Doctor Sleep, and even went as far as to say that a lot of this is to do with the way it tied his novel into Kubrick’s version of The Shining. He said: “Everything that I ever disliked about the Kubrick version of The Shining is redeemed for me here.”
In the same interview, Flanagan said that after he’d showed King his adaptation of Doctor Sleep, the writer told him: “Having watched this film it actually warms my feelings up towards the Kubrick film.”
King then showered praise on Flanagan and how he interpreted his story: “I don’t want to get into a big argument about how great the Shining film is that Kubrick did or my feelings about it. All I can say is, Mike took my material, he created a terrific story, people who have seen this movie flip for it, and I flipped for it, too.”
“He managed to take my novel of Doctor Sleep, the sequel, and somehow weld it seamlessly to the Kubrick version of The Shining, the movie. So, yeah, I liked it a lot”, he concluded.
