Stephen King is one of the bestselling writers of all time, a publishing sensation since Carrie arrived in a shower of pigs’ blood and adolescent rage in 1974. His remarkable storytelling abilities and prodigious output have provided nightmare fuel for multiple generations, whilst indelible cinematic adaptations of his work (both of his novels and some of his outstanding shorter fiction) have served to underline his commercial supremacy. It is also arguable that the affable, refreshingly down-to-earth phenomenon has bucked the trend of aging literary heavyweights and diminishing returns by producing some of his very best work in the last decade or so. This remarkably diverse recent output includes his topical, Edgar award-winning police procedural Mr. Mercedes; Revival, a skin-crawling ode to his horror forebears Lovecraft and Shelley and Full Dark, No Stars, a sensational collection of dark-hearted novellas that rivals his magnificent Different Seasons as his greatest collection of stories. With a well-received remake of Pet Sematary in cinemas and the upcoming sequel to the inconsistent megahit It sure to bust some blocks later this year, King’s stock has never been higher. But in this article, I want to reassess an earlier novel of King’s that tends to be eclipsed in the popular imagination by its extraordinary filmic adaptation.
I’m talking, of course, about The Shining. Stanley Kubrick’s mesmerising, enigmatic foray into horror cinema is imprinted upon the minds of anybody who has dared to follow Danny Torrance’s hypnotic Big Wheel ride through the Overlook Hotel’s sinuous corridors. In this advertisement to staying home for the holidays, a struggling writer (not to mention a severely flawed husband and father) accepts a job as winter caretaker at the lavish Overlook Hotel in the Colorado Rockies only to descend into an all-consuming madness that threatens to add to the eerie resort’s already thriving ghost population. Kubrick’s film is a marvel of shimmering paradoxes: intimate yet epic in its vision of familial terror, claustrophobic yet expansively gorgeous in John Alcott’s pioneering use of the Steadicam, brightly lit but indisputably terrifying in Roy Walker’s inimitable production design. It is difficult to think of many cinematic locations that are as integral to their film as the Overlook itself, with its impossible architecture and recurring labyrinth imagery drawing us deeper into the hotel’s corrupted heart. It is a film that repays multiple viewings in the perverse oddities lurking in the corners, from evocative Native American art designs to stairways that make no structural sense (well documented in the slightly bonkers documentary Room 237, a testament to the multiplicities of meaning buried in Kubrick’s visual subtext). And of course, there is Jack… All lunatic grin and simian shuffle, Jack Nicholson’s rampaging patriarch storms through the Overlook’s elegantly constructed interiors like a primitive force unleashed in an art-deco nightmare. Equally impressive (although much-maligned) is the emotionally frazzled Shelley Duvall as Wendy Torrance, who appears genuinely terrified by the scenery chewing, wild-eyed husband stalking her and her telekinetically gifted son through the Overlook Hotel.
So an instant classic, right? Not so much, as it turns out. Initial reception to the film was extremely mixed, with the fledgling Razzie awards (a sarcastic anti-Oscars dedicated to ‘honouring’ the worst films released every year) nominating Duvall for worst actress and Kubrick (!) for worst director. Steven Spielberg admits that he felt Nicholson was wildly overacting the first time he saw the film (although he came around upon multiple viewings and even used the Overlook Hotel as an integral backdrop to Ready Player One’s most audacious sequence) and no less a cinematic luminary than the brilliant Canadian auteur David Cronenberg has argued that Kubrick did not understand the horror genre and therefore approached the film with a condescending view of the material. Perhaps most damning is Stephen King’s frosty reaction to Kubrick’s interpretation of his material.
Famously, King was less than impressed with Kubrick’s jettisoning of critical character development from the novel and his transformation of a bloodcurdling haunted house story into a strange new amalgam; a kind of arthouse horror film less interested in traditional scares than in creating a dread-inducing mood that allowed Kubrick to express his obsessions with alienation and the limitations of human communication. In an interview with schlock-meister Eli Roth, Stephen King compared the film (in a typical automotive metaphor) to a beautiful car with no engine, its narrative power stripped by avowed atheist Kubrick’s religious scepticism. For King, there were always malevolent forces at work on Jack Torrance, driving a flawed yet decent man into the maw of madness, whereas Kubrick’s fundamental distaste for the notion of supernatural forces compelled him to locate the story’s demons within Jack Torrance himself.
Having recently reread The Shining for the first time in a frankly distressing number of years, I feel that I can at least understand King’s contentions, even though I maintain the conviction that Kubrick’s film remains a masterful alternative version of the source material. Of course film is a very different medium to the written word, and Kubrick’s two-hour feature could hardly contain all of the novel’s chilling tableaux and rich biographical digressions about the Overlook’s turbulent history. Some of the film’s more tantalising mysteries (like the dinner guests dressed in fluffy animal costumes that Wendy spies in one of the Overlook’s bedrooms) are more fully explored in the novel, as King details the hotel’s debauched history of gangland murder and bizarre orgies featuring the alcohol-soaked elite of early capitalist America. In addition, some of King’s most hair-raising set-pieces, including the animate, misshapen hedge animals inching closer to Jack Torrance in his peripheral vision and a ghostly child forever trapped in the playground, scratching at the inside of the jungle gym, are excised from the film version.
These are minor matters, however. What is more unfortunate is the unfair general perception that Kubrick’s film is a high-brow intellectualisation of a scary yet superficial rollercoaster ride when many of the underlying themes present in the film are beautifully delineated in King’s book. The Torrance family’s breakdown in communication is brilliantly conveyed through rich characterisation and a nuanced understanding of human psychology that King is not often credited for by detractors who perceive him as a writer of slick penny dreadfuls. Jack Torrance’s mental disintegration is a gradual and inevitable descent into insanity made richer by King’s depiction of his brutalisation at the hands of his father and his sense of imperilled masculinity. This depiction of inherited trauma and its destructive impact on Jack’s psyche was a massive development for King, whose previous work (Salem’s Lot and Carrie) was distinctly less complex in terms of theme and characterisation. King refers to The Shining as a ‘crossroads novel’ in which he self-consciously pushed himself beyond his comfort zone as a writer. From this perspective, I can certainly sympathise with King’s criticism of Kubrick’s Jack Torrance. In Kubrick’s film, it is evident that Nicholson is knocking at the doors of madness long before he arrives to winter at the Overlook. King’s delicately structured motivations for Jack’s behaviour are abandoned in favour of a more abstract evil that robs the story of emotional impact even as it adds to its mysterious appeal. When Nicholson dies at the end of Kubrick’s film and is reclaimed by the Overlook, the emotional impact is virtually non-existent. He is where he was always meant to be, a dapper gentleman trapped in the Overlook’s eternal time-warp. When Jack Torrance dies at the end of King’s novel, we feel like a three-dimensional human being has perished and left a gaping void in his shattered family. For this reason, I would argue that King’s The Shining deserves to be reappraised for its own unique qualities and its stunning, emotionally wrenching depiction of a family in crisis.
