Nobody tell Stephen King, but The Shining is coming back to theaters. A new IMAX trailer released on Oct. 28 heralded the Stanley Kubrick-directed adaptation’s debut on the extra-big-screen format. Starting on Dec. 12, The Shining will be playing in IMAX theaters for a limited run, meaning if you’ve ever wanted to watch a 50-foot-tall wave of blood flood out of an elevator, this is your chance.
Aside from being considered one of the greatest horror movies ever made, The Shining is also infamous for the fact that King really hates it. The prolific writer has critiqued and bashed Kubrick’s vision countless times in the decades since its 1980 release, ranging from complaints that the director chose the wrong hotel to film in to issues over casting and tweaks to the plot.
Specifically, King has complained that the topic of alcoholism, which the author was suffering from while he wrote the book, was stripped out of the movie. He also worried that casting Jack Nicholson, fresh off One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, as Jack Torrance would give away the twist that his character loses his mind, suggesting a more everyman actor be given the role instead.
Speaking to the BBC, King argued that Kubrick also ruined the character of Jack’s wife Wendy, reducing her to someone who is “basically just there to scream and be stupid, and that’s not the woman that I wrote about.” (Here, I have to say that King is wrong, and Shelley Duvall’s performance as Wendy is one of the best parts of the move.)
Image: Warner Bros.
Perhaps most interestingly, King complained that Kubrick shifted the source of evil in the story from the Overlook Hotel itself to the people inside it. In a particularly cutting statement, King suggests this was due to a character flaw within Kubrick himself:
Parts of the film are chilling, charged with a relentlessly claustrophobic terror, but others fall flat. Not that religion has to be involved in horror, but a visceral skeptic such as Kubrick just couldn’t grasp the sheer inhuman evil of the Overlook Hotel. So he looked, instead, for evil in the characters and made the film into a domestic tragedy with only vaguely supernatural overtones. That was the basic flaw: because he couldn’t believe, he couldn’t make the film believable to others. What’s basically wrong with Kubrick’s version of The Shining is that it’s a film by a man who thinks too much and feels too little; and that’s why, for all its virtuoso effects, it never gets you by the throat and hangs on the way real horror should.
Image: Warner Bros.
Don’t worry, King eventually came around on The Shining. Sort of.
When he wrote its sequel book, Doctor Sleep (2013), he took the chance to bash Kubrick again, writing in his afterword, “If you have seen the movie but not read the novel, you should note that Doctor Sleep follows the latter which is, in my opinion, the True History of the Torrance Family.”
However, when Mike Flanagan directed an adaptation of Doctor Sleep and managed to blend both King and Kubrick’s visions, it finally set the author at ease. After the sequel movie’s release in 2019, King was quoted as saying, “Everything that I ever disliked about the Kubrick version of The Shining is redeemed for me here.”
So perhaps King has softened a bit over the years when it comes to Kubrick’s The Shining, but we still don’t expect to see him lining up at his local IMAX to see it on the big screen this December.
