With estimated sales of 400 million books worldwide, Stephen King is one of the most successful authors in history. Among his 80 or so published books, many have been adapted into highly-acclaimed films, including The Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile, and Stand By Me.
While often associated with the horror genre due to works like Pet Sematary, The Dark Half and It, King’s writing actually spans multiple genres. However, one of his most famous horror stories, The Shining, was even dubbed the “scariest horror film ever made” after its cinematic adaptation.
But King himself was not impressed with the film, directed by Stanley Kubrick and starring Jack Nicholson.
In an interview with Deadline, published in 2016 but actually conducted years before that, King expressed his disappointment: “I think The Shining is a beautiful film and it looks terrific and, as I’ve said before, it’s like a big, beautiful Cadillac with no engine inside it. In that sense, when it opened, a lot of the reviews weren’t very favourable and I was one of those reviewers. I kept my mouth shut at the time, but I didn’t care for it much.”
Even years after the film’s 1980 release, King’s opinion remained unchanged: “I feel the same because the character of Jack Torrance has no arc in that movie. Absolutely no arc at all. When we first see Jack Nicholson, he’s in the office of Mr Ullman, the manager of the hotel, and you know… he’s crazy as a sh**house rat. All he does is get crazier.”
King expressed his disappointment with Kubrick’s adaptation, Mirror.com reports, stating that the character’s tragic descent into madness, as depicted in the book, was absent in the film: “In the book, he’s a guy who’s struggling with his sanity and finally loses it. To me, that’s a tragedy. In the movie, there’s no tragedy because there’s no real change.”
King also recalled a conversation he had with Kubrick before filming began, during which they discussed the theme of ghost stories. King recounted: “I talked to Stanley on the phone before he started and I remember I could feel him reaching, trying to find his way into the book, and he said ‘Well, don’t you find that all ghost stories are optimistic? Don’t you think so? Because it means that the presupposition is that if there are ghosts, there’s an afterlife, we don’t just die, we go on’.
“And I said ‘Mr Kubrick, what about hell?’ There was a long pause at the other end and he said in a very stiff voice ‘I don’t believe in hell’. And I said ‘Well, OK, you don’t, but my feeling is that if there are ghosts, they’re as likely to be maligned as they are to be ‘come into the light”.”
In addition to his dissatisfaction with The Shining, King mentioned two other movie adaptations that were among his least favourite, saying: “I guess there are a number of pictures that I feel like, a little bit like, yuck. There’s one, Graveyard Shift, that was made in the eighties. Just kind of a quick exploitation picture. I could do without all of the Children of the Corn sequels. I actually like the original pretty well. I thought they did a pretty good job on that.”
On the the other hand, King has openly expressed his satisfaction with several film adaptations of his novels, singling out Carrie, The Dead Zone, Stand By Me, Misery, and Shawshank Redemption. He remarked: “I’ve had a lot of things where I felt… really pleased about the outcome. And if it doesn’t work so well, I can say ‘Well, they went out and they gave their best shot but I didn’t have anything to do with it’.”
The Shining, featuring Jack Nicholson in an early career-defining role as Jack Torrance, portrays a father spiralling into insanity while isolated by snow at a remote hotel, ultimately becoming a murderous threat to his own family.
In 2010, The Guardian honoured The Shining in its Horror category within the Greatest Films Of All Time list, while Empire placed it at number 35 in its ranking of the greatest films, describing Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of King’s novel as: “Stanley Kubrick’s elegant adaptation of Stephen King’s haunted-hotel story, starring a wonderfully deranged Jack Nicholson, is often cited as The Scariest Horror Movie Ever Made (perhaps tied with The Exorcist).”