Why Stephen King is Right To Hate Stanley Kubrick's Version of The Shining

 

 

Stephen King is one of the best writers of horror fiction but it may come as a shock to many to know that he’s always one of the better critics I’ve ever read.

Back in 2005 the magazine Entertainment Weekly would often invite Stephen King to write guest columns for their publication. King was as big a fan of Peak TV as I was and I always looked forward to his end of year criticism. King was a huge fan of Breaking Bad and when it finished compared it to The Godfather as a work of art. He was also a fan of certain other more eclectic shows such as Sons of Anarchy and Boardwalk Empire. I also have immense respect for him because he named Damages, a series I consider one of the underrated masterpieces of all time, one of the best shows of the year three times in 2009, 2010 and its final season in 2013. Many of his favorite series were mired in darkness but that didn’t mean he couldn’t appreciate optimistic shows: in 2011 he named Friday Night Lights the best show of the year.

I always knew King was a great critic because as a teenage I had sought out what I still consider one of the quintessential pieces of criticizing of horror: Danse Macabre. When it came out in 1981 Stephen King was famous but not yet the household name he would become within a few years and it was daring of him to write a book dealing with what was essentially criticism of a genre that was still struggling for mainstream success.

King does everything in his power to keep himself out of the story, save for a chapter called “An Annoying Autobiographical Pause”. Instead he looks at all the forms of horror that existed – and in 1980 there were far fewer of them then you’d think.

He spends a lot of time dealing with forgotten radio shows and not much time with television. Interestingly, he doesn’t think much of it as a medium in 1981: he has some respect for The Twilight Zone but frequently considered it preachy and has almost none for The Night Stalker now considered one of the most formative series in the history of TV. Where he shines is his discussion of literature, both in the novels he believes represent the three archetypes of horror – The Vampire, The Werewolf, and The Thing Without a Name. Those three novels are Dracula, Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde and Frankenstein. The penultimate chapter is more than a hundred and thirty pages long and deals with ten novels written by ten authors that he considers among the best who worked in horror. Some of them, such as Richard Matheson and Ray Bradbury I’d already read, some, such as Harlan Ellison, James Herbert and Ramsey Campbell I would begin to read based on his recommendation. He had not yet begun to collaborate with Peter Straub, but the first novel he discusses is Straub’s Ghost Story one of the most underrated novels in the genre.

And he knows very well he has not gone far enough in that chapter because at the back of the novel there is an appendix listing no less than one hundred books that at the time he considered among the greatest horror novels he ever read. Some writers such as Robert Bloch and Fritz Lieber are known to genre fans and some might not even fit what we consider the genre at all. But having read Joan Samson’s The Auctioneer and Ian McEwan’s The Cement Garden, I can assure you King knew horror when he read it. Had King never taken a career as a writer of fiction, he would have done just fine as a critic and I mean that as a compliment.

He also devotes two chapters to movies. Again in 1981, horror was not yet the staple it would be even five years later so King has some subjective definitions. He lists 20 films that he considers ‘the scariest movies ever made’ and after doing so he points out that only five of them, maybe six, have anything supernatural going on at all. Some of the movies have now been reclassified as horror (Alien is the most prominent example) but some of the others are worth reconsideration in this trope, most notably Wait Until Dark, Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, Deliverance  and Looking for Mr. Goodbar. It says a lot about how King even then had a perception of horror that he ranks these films as just as scary as just classics as The Omen, Night of the Living Dead and Halloween.

Now I mention all of this as a lead up to what amounts to about one page in the novel in which he refers to ‘the point where the horror novel touches the country of the black comedy. Stanley Kubrick has been a resident of this borderline area for quite some time” (italics added)

This may come as a shock to those who might consider The Shining the only horror movie Kubrick ever made. King makes the argument that some of Kubrick’s greatest films are horror movies and I’ll let him speak for himself:

“A perfectly good argument could be made for classing Dr. Strangelove as a political horror film without monsters (he uses the scene where Keenan Wynn reluctantly agrees to blow a Coke machine to smithereens with his gun to get change to stop a nuclear holocaust); for A Clockwork Orange as a political horror film with human monsters (Malcolm McDowell stomping a hapless man to death to the tune of ‘Singin’ in the Rain) and for 2001: A Space Odyssey as a political horror film with an inhuman monster (“Please don’t turn me off,” the murderous computer HAL 9000 begs as the Jupiter probe’s one remaining crewman pulls its memory modules one by one)…Kubrick has consistently been the only American film director to understand that stepping over the borderline into taboo country is an often apt to cause wild laughter as it is horror, but any ten year old who ever laughed at a traveling salesman joke would agree that it’s so.”

An argument could be made that Kubrick’s penultimate film Full Metal Jacket would fit into this same trope: what was the entire Vietnam War but a political horror film with human monsters at the top and the country of Vietnam as well as the soldiers who lived through it the victims.

Now before I get to the obvious lead in, I must add I’ve seen many of the film adaptations of King’s novels over my lifetime and sometimes the classics come from the most unlikely of directors (Rob Reiner’s Misery) as the obvious candidates (David Cronenberg’s The Dead Zone). We must also acknowledge that those who seem like the best people for the job can fail miserably. George Romero and John Carpenter would have seemed to be the best candidates to handle a Stephen King novel, but their respective adaptations of Christine and The Dark Half are among the poorest adaptations of King’s novels. (Romero did a much better job with shorter King works: their collaboration on Creepshow is one of the greatest adaptations of King’s work.)

It’s worth noting that King has been willing to allow elaborations on his work if the end product is worth his time. He believed the changes Brian DePalma made to his first novel Carrie helped make it the classic that it was and he approved Lewis Teague’s decision to give an alternative and more optimistic ending of Cujo. King has never been the kind of creator like Alan Moore who finds any change to his work a violation so that he would disown it.

That is the case even now for the one work he has spent nearly half a century considering the worst adaptation of his work: Kubrick’s adaptation of The Shining. He has acknowledged Kubrick is a genius and he will admit that it is a flawed masterpiece but when he chose to make a TV mini-series for it in 1997, I completely understood why. Because for all those who consider The Shining a masterpiece and one of the greatest horror movies ever written, they seem to have decided to do something unthinkable and disregard the source material.

Because The Shining is one of the greatest novels King ever wrote; few would dispute that fact. And the story it chooses to tell bares no resemblance to the one that Kubrick made and that so many have celebrated for years.

Jack Torrance in King’s novel is a recovering alcoholic struggling from the loss of his teaching job when he had lost his temper and broke a students arms. He is nearly broke and has lost almost everything: the job he has been given as caretaker of the Overlook is essentially a last chance. He is trying to finish a play he’s been working on for a while and repair both his marriage and his relationship with his family. He knows what the story is going in when he takes the job, but he also knows he doesn’t have a choice.

The book unfolds in a five act structure (King wanted it to mirror the play Jack Torrance was writing). In the second part, the Torrance family arrives at the Overlook and Danny, who has a strange gift that he doesn’t understand, becomes aware that the Overlook is a place of his dreams. He’s been seeing ‘REDRUM’ for a while but he doesn’t realize the context until the end of the fourth section of the book. However he knows the Overlook is a bad place.

The second section takes place with Dick Hallorann introducing himself to the Torrance’s and showing them around the place. He senses the gift in Danny, but also in Jack. He tells them they’ll probably be safe but if things go wrong to send out a signal.

The biggest difference in the novel and the film – and it is the one that King has never forgiven Kubrick for – is that from the start of Kubrick’s movie he has Jack Nicholson play Torrance as if he is already insane. This is a critique that many have made over the years: that there’s no way to tell the difference between Nicholson before the Overlook drives him mad, during or after. I can’t understand even now why Kubrick chose to do it this way: Nicholson was an actor of great nuance, capable of showing progression by degrees and underplaying things as well as overplaying them. His work in The Shining may be the least subtle performance in the first twenty years of his career; he wouldn’t do a performance with so few guardrails until he took on the role of the Joker, and even then we see the before and after. You never believe for a moment that anyone would give Nicholson’s Torrance a job as a waiter, much less caretaker of a hotel, and you certainly don’t believe his wife and son would still be with him at this point.

By contrast in the book Jack degenerates slowly and is compassionate and concerned much of the way. It’s not until the last section of the book that he finally gives into the madness that has been driving him the entire novel and its almost a mark of tragedy more than it is insanity. And its critical that the madness comes when Torrance reluctantly makes the decision to start drinking again and then all of the ghosts of the Overlook have no trouble showing themselves to him.

In the movie Kubrick essentially moves the final act of the book to the movie’s midpoint, removing any buildup or rising action. I can’t tell even now why Kubrick chose to do this. He’d always been skilled at adapting complex works before (in addition to the novels King listed in his book, his previous film Barry Lyndon was one of the quiet masterpieces of adaption) and he’d always been willing to let his works move at a slow and gradual pace towards the climax. Here Kubrick seems almost impatient to get to the scary stuff immediately, when he lets Danny see an ocean of blood come out of the elevator and its as if he’s decided to throw nuance out the window entirely. If you didn’t know that this movie was adapted by Kubrick, you might very well think that it had a screenplay by the writers of Friday The 13^th or Texas Chainsaw Massacre;  all of the complexities that drive Kubrick’s characters in most of his previous works (and the two he’d finish afterwards) are completely gone in favor or a strange mix of Gothic and Grand Guignol.

And its worth noting that this comes at the expense of the two other leads in the novel as well. Much has been written about the way that Kubrick drove his actors in such a sense and terrified Shelly Duvall into given a performance of a woman terrified out of her head. But that’s a huge departure from the book where Wendy spends the novel slowly becoming aware of the threat to her family and the madness growing within her. She isn’t aware of how lost her husband is until its too late and even then she manages to keep a relatively cool head throughout.

Now I should mention that Kubrick never truly managed to do female characters well at all: almost all of his movies have very few major female leads and in his works they are almost always romantic interests. It’s worth remembering that before The Shining, Duvall was building up a career as one of the most gifted female actresses of the 1970s, a frequent collaborator with Robert Altman (she’d appeared in five of his films including Nashville to this point) and just prior to her work in The Shining seem poised to become the next great actress having starred in Annie Hall and 3 Women, another Altman film Roger Ebert named the best movie of 1977. But after the treatment of Duvall by Kubrick in The Shining, something fundamentally broke in Duvall and she basically stopped acting in movies all together, limiting her work to voiceovers and children’s programming, with the occasional cameo before more or less retiring in 2002. There’s an argument to be made that Kubrick’s decision to work her so hard drove one of the most talented actresses in Hollywood out of the business and its hard to forgive him for that.

Kubrick may have thought he was protecting Danny Lloyd, the six year old who played Danny in the film by not letting him know it was a horror film until years later. That said, much of his work seems like a child who doesn’t know what he’s doing half the time. I admit trying to cast someone to play Danny Torrance like he is in the book would have been difficult, given how calm he is but literate at times. But watching Danny in the movie I see a kid who seems clueless to what he’s going through, not someone who has a gift that is warning him of what to avoid.

And of course there’s the fact that Kubrick decides, for whatever reason to completely change the final act entirely from the fate of Dick Hallorann to that of the entire Overlook. I’m told Kubrick went through several drafts of the script before arriving on the final ending and I allow that an artiste like Kubrick might not want to end this movie on a somewhat lighter ending. (When Doctor Sleep was adapted into a movie in 2019, it’s clear that it is a sequel to Kubrick’s film not King’s book based on the final action of the novel as well as the ending.)

As of this writing The Shining is ranked number 67 on imdb.com of great movies  by fans and there have been constant documentaries and theories about it by fans to this day. I don’t deny that they are entitled to love The Shining; based on its own merits I can see why it is such a masterpiece when it comes to horror. But when King says that he hates this movie with a passion, this isn’t a case of sour grapes.  In a real sense Kubrick’s version is The Shining In Name Only, a film that has the character and settings of his novel, but no real resemblance to it at all. It must have seemed like a betrayal by a writer who’d praised him so highly in a manuscript before the film came out.

Now I’m not saying that if you love Kubrick’s version you should start hating it now but you do need to understand why King dislikes it so much to the point he made his own version of it. I’d also argue, as I have in a previous article, that it would be worth the horror aficionados’ time to seek out the limited series and watch it. You don’t have to necessarily like one more than the other; but you do need to understand that one of them is closer to the real novel than the original. I prefer the latter, but that’s what criticism is for. We’re all entitled to our own opinions, just as King is.