Streamin’ King: ‘The Shining’ Is All The Things A Horror Movie Should Be

Welcome to Streamin’ King, a series grave-digging through the myriad Stephen King adaptations available on your favorite streaming services. This time we’re watching Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 film The Shining, the second King adaptation, following ’76’s Carrie.

STREAMIN’ KING: THE SHINING

THE GIST: Semi-recovering alcoholic writer Jack Torrance accepts a winter caretaker job at the Overlook, a Colorado luxury hotel with a violent past and haunted present, with his son, Danny, and wife, Wendy. The boy shares a telepathic ability with the hotel’s head chef, Dick Hallorann, who refers to it as “the shine.” One snowy month in, Jack slides into madness just as/because he starts engaging with the hotel’s ghosts and its cruel history, tries to kill his family, and ends up in an icy hedge maze.

PEDIGREE: Routinely dubbed one of the best horror movies of all time, and not infrequently declared the best. Directed and co-written by Stanley Kubrick, 51 at the time of its release, his 11th of 13 features, spent longer making it than he had any film at the time. Co-written with novelist and essayist Diane Johnson, in her one and only dalliance with screenwriting.

Stars Jack Nicholson, 43 on release, coming off directing himself in Goin’ South and heading into The Postman Always Rings Twice. Also stars Shelley Duvall, coming off Robert Altman’s 3 Women, where she shared top billing with Sissy “Carrie White” Spacek, the first lead actress in the cinematic Kingverse. Duvall starred in Altman’s Popeye six months after screaming her head off here. Also features Scatman Crothers, who did One Flew the Cuckoo’s Nest with Nicholson.

WORTH WATCHING FOR CONSTANT READERS? Know going in—because you must go in—that it differs greatly from the text, and that King doesn’t like it. So much so that he wrote his own miniseries 17 years later, hewing super closely to his book, which paints Jack’s meltdown so carefully and elicits pure, prolonged supernatural terror and melancholy. Kubrick brings a lot for a devotee to adjust to: the immediacy of Jack’s freefall, the brutal diminishment of Wendy, the lack of backstory and explanations and hauntings, narrative subtleties abandoned for auteur flair. If more than a couple of the disparities rub you the wrong way, you may have a bad time.

But you should really suck it up and watch The Shining a few times in your life. Get stunned by the uber-meticulous visuals and perfectly sculpted performances, ingest the singularly isolating and stomach-wrenching moments millions have before you; it’s tough to argue any King property is more well-known. It’s all the things a horror film should be, in ways only this one can. And what King story can’t use paring down?

WORTH WATCHING FOR KING NEWBIES/AGNOSTICS? It feels icky to dignify this with a response. The Shining, Shelley Duvall, Stanley Kubrick, Jack Nicholson, and the kid, Danny Lloyd, all fucking rule and you have to, HAVE TO watch this classic. You can go in with a standard horror movie warning that it starts kind of slow but gets crazy by the end, if your modern day temperament and dual-screen lifestyle requires. (The opening credits are sooo long…although they do acquaint you with the supremely unsettling score.) But yeah, it’s everything it’s made out to be.

13 STEPHEN KING TIES, REFERENCES, AND MISCELLANY:

1. Hulu’s 2018 anthology series Castle Rock—not an adaptation but an extension of the SK multiverse set in one of his most popular locales—went to The Shining as a reference point and easter egg basket more than any other King property. A woman named Jackie Torrance is revealed to have legitimately awesome ties to the family, there’s a corpse in a bathtub, a boy retraces his footsteps in the snow to fool a murderous father. A protagonist with a species of the shine abuses substances to tamp down the intensity, as does grown-up Danny in Doctor Sleep. One episode opens with a familiar-feeling 10-minute vignette about an unhinged academic who assaulted someone at work before relocating to a nice, calm, insanity-enhancing home.

2. King’s first-ever sequel (discounting the Dark Tower saga and his two books with Peter Straub) was 2013’s Doctor Sleep, about an adult Danny Torrance still scarred from his father’s frankly disappointing behavior at the Overlook. The best part is spending years with adult Danny; the worst is that the action has to arduously cross the country so good and even can face off at the site of the burned-down Overlook. Now writer/director Mike Flanagan is filming a Ewan McGregor-starring version for a January 2020 release, having in 2017 achieved a lifelong dream of fantastically adapting Gerald’s Game. Though set in King’s canon, Flanagan’s movie will nod to Kubrick’s. “I think you do have to acknowledge that,” Flanagan recently said. “There is no version of the world where I am trying not to acknowledge one of the greatest films ever made. There’s no upside in shying away from that reality.” He also says they got in touch with Danny Lloyd, who did exactly one bit part post-Shining before never acting again. He gave no more info.

   In addition to the new Danny, we’ll get a new Wendy Torrance and Dick Hallorann. (If It: Chapter 2 includes the Black Spot flashback, we might get another Hallorann there, too.) Three-time King actor John Cusack (Stand by Me, 1408, Cell) said in 2014 that he’d love to play Danny.

3. In King’s 2018 novel The Outsider, a character watches Paths of Glory. “It’s one of Mr. Kubrick’s finest. Much better than The Shining and Barry Lyndon, in my opinion,” she explains, “but of course he was much younger when he made it. Young artists are much more likely to be risk-takers, in my opinion.” King wrote the book at age 70; he was 29 when he published The Shining.

4. King said in 2013, “Shelley Duvall as Wendy is really one of the most misogynistic characters ever put on film. She’s basically just there to scream, and be stupid, and that’s not the woman that I wrote about.” The year after: “I mean, Wendy Torrance is just presented as this sort of screaming dishrag. But that’s just me, that’s the way I am.” He also finds The Shining “extremely cold,” saying in 2015, “I always thought that the real difference between my take on it and Stanley Kubrick’s take on it was this: In my novel, the hotel burns. In Kubrick’s movie, the hotel freezes.” He added that “the images are striking, but to me that’s surface, it’s not substance.”

   Blumhouse tweeted in February 2017, “What’re your top 5 @StephenKing joints?” with a link to a piece championing The Shining. King replied, “Not this one.”

5. King is positively addicted to ending his novels—often the extra-long ones—with explosions and infernos. Which makes this 2017 remark from co-screenwriter Diane Johnson hilarious: “The ending was changed almost entirely because Kubrick found it a cliche to just blow everything up. He thought there might be something else that would be metaphorically and visually more interesting.” He also questioned the book’s “talkiness.”

6. The internet at some point got a hold of some pages from Kubrick’s annotated copy of the novel. Encountering “REDRUM,” he expressed confusion about why it wouldn’t be written the way “murder” would actually read backwards.

7. Room 237 premiered in 2012, a film dedicated to the decades of conspiracy theories and interpretations of Kubrick’s Shining. King “watched about half of it and got sort of impatient with it and turned it off.” How come? “These guys were reaching. I’ve never had much patience for academic bullshit.” It had a cool trailer where a VCR spills out blood like the elevators.

8. Stephen King’s The Shining, as the four-and-a-half-hour miniseries is officially named, hit ABC in 1997. It was filmed at the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, Colorado, the establishment that birthed the whole enterprise when King and his wife, novelist Tabitha King, visited on the last night of the season. As they dined on the one available entree, according to The Stephen King Illustrated Companion, “The chairs were turned upside down atop every table except theirs. The tuxedo-clad orchestra played for them and them alone. … [Stephen] encountered many of The Shining‘s iconic images as he wandered the corridors after his wife went to bed.”

   The miniseries’ best aspects are its Room 217 scene and Jack appearing as an actual demonic entity for a second; the worst was Tony as a floating guy with glasses who Danny grows up to be at the end. Director Mick Garris has adapted an astonishing amount of King, starting with one of SK’s few feature screenplays, 1992’s Sleepwalkers. He also did The Stand, Bag of Bones, Desperation, and Riding the Bullet.

9. The novel’s big bad room is 217. Stephen King at the Movies tells the simple tale of how it became 237: “When Kubrick was asked if there was any purpose in the change, he replied that the owners of the Timberline Lodge [used for exterior shots] had a room 217 and were afraid no guest would want to stay there after the film was released. However, there was no room 237—so the change was made for the benefit of the Timberline.”

10. King actively didn’t want Nicholson as Jack, going on to say he was “too dark right from the outset” and exhibited “no moral struggle at all.” He suggested Jon Voight and Michael Moriarty; the latter starred in 1987’s King-unaffiliated A Return to Salem’s Lot, which has a batshit plot that ends when “the master vampire is impaled on the American flag instead of the traditional stake.”

11. It was a person working on the film who wound up getting the novel renamed from the problematic title The Shine pre-publication. King wrote in the 1980 essay “On Becoming a Brand Name”: “Someone in Warner Bros.’ title department (perhaps the same half-wit who suggested–seriously or in jest, I don’t know–that ‘Salem’s Lot be retitled As Maine Goes, So Goes the Nation) felt that people would think the title a half-satirical gibe at my black character.”

12. The Children of the Corn movie has a cool Shining hat-tip when the words “NO GAS” appear backwards on a window, written in red.

13. Ullman tells Jack the Overlook was built on an Indian burial ground, a weak trope not used in the book, but deployed three years later in Pet Sematary.

CRITICAL CONSENSUS: Famously panned and quickly critically rehabilitated as the ’80s wore on. The New York Times‘ Janet Maslin gave a pretty good review but did say, “Even the film’s most startling horrific images seem overbearing and perhaps even irrelevant, like Mr. Kubrick’s celebrated monolith in 2001.” A fantastically overwrought New Yorker take from Pauline Kael said “we’re not frightened, because Kubrick’s absorption in film technology distances us,” but went on to offer, “Kubrick seems to be saying that rage, uncontrollable violence, and ghosts spawn each other–that they are really the same thing. He’s using Stephen King’s hokum to make a metaphysical statement about immortality.” Interesting/ouch.

One 2,000-degree Variety burn decreed, “The crazier Nicholson gets, the more idiotic he looks.”

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL CONTEXT FOR THE SHINING (1977): King’s third novel, following Carrie in 1974 and ‘Salem’s Lot in ’75. Less than eight months later came the first pseudonymous Richard Bachman book, the since-disavowed Rage, and The Stand arrived one year after that, in September ’78. Sequel Doctor Sleep came 36 years later.

NEXT TIME ON STREAMIN’ KING: Dolores Claiborne, the 1995 film adaptation of King’s magnificent ’93 novel. Taylor Hackford (Ray, The Devil’s Advocate) directed, with Kathy Bates following her iconic turn as Annie Wilkes in Rob Reiner’s 1990 Misery movie.

Zach Dionne is a North Carolina writer who saw the miniseries first.

Where to stream The Shining