The Shining: Book vs Movie
The Shining, released in 1977, is Stephen King’s third published novel after Carrie and Salem’s Lot, both of which took place in small towns in Maine. According to King he wanted a new backdrop for his third novel and so he opened up an atlas of the United States and randomly pointed to a location. That location turned out to be Boulder, Colorado which reminded King of the night he and his wife Tabitha stayed in The Stanley Hotel.
Located in Estes Park, Colorado; about an hour outside of Boulder, The Stanley Hotel is a famously haunted location and back on October 30, 1974 King and his wife were the only two guests to be booked at the hotel. They had dinner in the grand dining room by themselves, theirs being the only table set and pre-recorded orchestral music playing in the background. He was quoted as saying:
“It was like God had put me there to hear that and see those things. And by the time I went to bed that night, I had the whole book in mind.”
The Stanley Hotel was such an inspiration that the 1997 TV movie adaptation used it as its Overlook.
Fair warning, there will be spoilers for the book and the film version of The Shining.
The Shining tells the story of The Torrance family; Jack, Wendy and Danny. Jack, a recovering alcoholic, has been hired as the winter caretaker of The Overlook, an isolated hotel way up in the Colorado mountains. There has been a string of violent events at the hotel since its opening, the most recent involving the last caretaker, Delbert Grady, who murdered his wife and children before taking his own life.
Danny Torrance, Jack and Wendy’s son, has special abilities that are referred to as “having the shine” or “shining.” He gets premonitions and can read people's minds or get a feeling for their emotions. Over the course of their stay, the hotel (wanting to add Danny’s powers to its already robust special skills section) the hotel begins to torment the family…trying to get at Danny through Jack (who may or may not have some shine himself). The Overlook drives Jack mad/possesses him until he goes on a murderous rampage, trying to kill his wife and son.
And hot damn, he did it again. The Shining is a terrific book. Since I started this a lot of people have told me that King’s work, as a whole, can be hit or miss for them, but you can’t deny how impressive it is that he published Carrie, Salem’s Lot and The Shining all within three years of one another. All of the supernatural stuff makes The Shining a fun horror book, but it’s the way King uses the supernatural to enhance some of the deeper themes that makes it a great book.
Jack is a man that is literally and figuratively haunted by past demons. He was raised by a violent and, probably, narcissistic father who has shaped him into a bitter and angry man. He’s a failed writer that feels emasculated by his lot in life and is constantly taking that out on his family;
“Want some water?” she asked brightly.
(No I just want you to GET THE FUCK OUT OF HERE)
“I’ll get some at the drinking fountain when I go up. Thanks.”
and people that he feels are looking down on him;
“Jack’s dislike for that cheap, self-important little prick Ullman came flooding back”
It’s implied that it’s literally the hotel bringing this out of him, but even that is a little more ambiguous earlier in the book, which I think works really well because it accents another big theme in the book, generational trauma.
There’s a horrific scene about halfway through the book where we get a glimpse of a traumatic moment from Jack’s childhood and see how abusive his alcoholic father was:
“The can had been drawn back, had come down again, this time on the top of her head, splitting the scalp. Momma had dropped to the floor. He had been out of his chair and around to where she lay dazed on the carpet, brandishing the can, moving with a fat man’s grotesque speed and agility, little eyes flashing, jowls quivering as he spoke to her just as he had always spoken to his children during such outburst. “Now. Now by Christ. I guess you’ll take your medicine now. Goddam puppy. Wehlp. Come on and take your medicine.”
But even through all that Jack has an attachment to the good memories he had with his father:
“...there had been nights when his father in his drunkenness had not stopped the upward lift of his slab-muscled arms soon enough and Jacky had gone right over his father’s flat topped head like a human projectile to crash-land on the hall floor behind his dad. But on other nights his father would only sweep him into a giggling ecstasy…”
And so even though his father is long gone he still holds a lot of sway over Jack, in his alcoholism and his temper, he even parrots the words he says:
“‘Now you’ll take your medicine,’ Jack grunted. ‘Now by God, won’t you. Young pup. Young worthless cur. Now by God, right now. Every drop. Every single damn drop!’”
And even though it’s not very fleshed out, even Wendy is suffering from that generational trauma:
“Had she wanted to think Jack was to blame? Was she that jealous? It was the way her mother would have thought, that was the really horrible thing…Wendy felt her face burn yet knew with a kind of helpless finality that if the whole thing were to be played over again, she would do and think the same way. She carried part of her mother with her always, for good or bad.”
I want to say that this feels like King’s most “adult” book? Dealing with themes of addiction, child abuse and the legacy that that abuse can have as it works its ways through generations. You could take out all of the supernatural elements from the book and be left with a really compelling and emotional story.
Which brings us to Kubrick…
Allegedly after coming off of the commercial and critical flop that was Barry Lyndon, Stanley Kubrick was looking for his next project to be something, not only artistically fulfilling but also commercially viable. And apparently after making his way through a slew of horror books Kubrick was finally intrigued by The Shining.
I’m not going to be able to say anything about the film version of The Shining that hasn’t been said before. There’s a whole documentary dedicated to just people’s theories about this film. I’ll add my voice to the people talking about how terribly Shelley Duvall was treated during production and agree that hurting people whether it be physically or emotionally does not make your art better. Watch Maggie Mae Fish’s great video where she talks about auteur theory…links below.
BUT I will say this…something I don’t think many people talk about.
I don’t think that the film version of The Shining is all that different from the book!
Yes, Kubrick stripped away all of the back story…and arguably the emotion…but he hits all the same beats as the book. Grady the former caretaker, who killed his daughters. We don’t know why that woman drowned in the tub, but the book tells us explicitly what happened to her. Tony, Redrum, the man in the bear/dog costume makes sense when you’ve read the book. Wendy even explicitly mentions the carpet in the book:
“Wendy glanced down at the hall runner herself. Pretty, but definitely not anything she would choose for her own home.”
There are small changes, of course, the hedge animals are a hedge maze (Thank God!), the roque mallet is an axe, Halloran is killed, but we still get Jack “drinking” at the bar. The ghostly party guests. The film doesn’t explain any of what’s going on and I think the film is better for it…but in my opinion, it’s a fairly straightforward adaptation. Y’all are really overcomplicating things.
Are you ready for my final controversial take? I think the film version of The Shining is overrated. Now, before you head to the comments to tell me how dumb I am, I didn’t say it was bad, I said it was overrated. I still really love the film, but I was never overwhelmed by it like some people seem to be (it just made the BFI top 100 Films of All Time List) and I think it’s because I was missing that emotional core that you get from the book. It feels as cold and clinical as any other Kubrick film.
Stephen King famously does not like this adaptation, there’s been a lot said over the years, but my interpretation of his opinion is that the book’s Jack is a good man made bad by evil forces while the film’s Jack is an evil man whose mask is taken off. And I think I agree with that sentiment because I don’t think Kubrick has any interest in humanizing Jack Torrance. Having said that, I think it’s kind of what makes the film great…we see him in this moment and get no more context than what the characters say and how we see him act. And wrestling with who he is, is part of what makes the character and film frightening. And what keeps people talking about it forty years later.
Having said THAT! I like having that little empathy the book allows me to have for Jack. Jack Torrence is an abusive alcoholic AND he is a man trying to do his best with a complicated and traumatic past, who lets his feelings of self-loathing and failure fester into bitterness and rage and ends up lashing out at the outside world. This is a male character that is very relevant for a contemporary audience and I think it’s worth seeing his struggle.
And yes I have seen the 1997 TV movie adaptation starring Steven Weber and Rebecca De Mornay and…it’s a much more faithful adaptation of the book. I think Steven Weber is pretty good in it. I will always have affection for these kinds of TV movies. They’re cheap. The effects don’t hold up. But this aesthetic is so nostalgic for me I refuse to say anything bad about it. But yes, this is what happens when you lean too heavily into the emotional core and stay too faithful to the book. There are things that just don’t work well on screen that work really well in a book. I don’t think hedge animals have ever worked anywhere, ever.
