Why does stephen king hate the shining

Finally, King's book ends with a satisfying but bittersweet climax in which Jack fights off his madness long enough to allow his family to escape, before causing the Overlook to explode. In Kubrick's film, Jack simply freezes to death. Naturally, this version was much closer to King's book, although in many ways that became a detriment, as the miniseries runs for over 4 hours in length and includes small bits from the book that really don't add much when told visually.

Plus, while Weber is a generally fine actor, he doesn't have nearly the screen presence of Nicholson's Jack, and fails to convey the same sense of menace. King may prefer the miniseries adaptation of The Shining , but most fans consider it vastly inferior. Michael Kennedy is an avid movie and TV fan that's been working for Screen Rant in various capacities since In that time, Michael has written over articles for the site, first working solely as a news writer, then later as a senior writer and associate news editor.

Most recently, Michael helped launch Screen Rant's new horror section, and is now the lead staff writer when it comes to all things frightening. A FL native, Michael is passionate about pop culture, and earned an AS degree in film production in He also loves both Marvel and DC movies, and wishes every superhero fan could just get along.

When not writing, Michael enjoys going to concerts, taking in live professional wrestling, and debating pop culture. According to King, the differences started even before production began.

Kubrick believed that the admission of spirits implies the film has a more optimistic tone because the presence of ghosts suggests the existence of heaven. King respectfully disagreed and said, "What about Hell? Instead, the film showed Jack Nicholson's Jack Torrance as a vessel for these spirits to feed off of. Jack became another focal point for King's unhappiness.

In the book, Jack was a warm and sympathetic character who had relatable flaws. These same flaws allowed him to become a puppet to the Overlook's spirits, who only wanted his son, Danny, because of his powerful psychic abilities.

In the film, Nicholson played an unsettling character who acted as if he had been awakened by entering the Overlook rather than corrupted. King later described the fundamental difference between the cold and warmth of the two creator's visions by how they destroyed the Overlook.

This same mindset is built into the Overlook hotel which is sharing it with Jack — and Grady and the past incidents of violence. This all adds up because of the killing of the natives that leaves behind a psychic energy in the hotel — which, again, gets passed on to Jack. The hotel also shares this energy by showing us images that are part of our primitive conscious and that we can identify such as blood, decay, and death. This is also called an ancestral experience and is probably why we see the blood, the decaying old woman, and the skeletons in the ballroom.

And this own battle happens within our own minds. So why did Stephen King hate it? The good news is we have a lot of answers from his own mouth. He believes this specifically with the character of Jack. In the book, Jack Torrence starts out as a normal guy and then has a real descent into horror and madness.

In the movie, it appears that Jack is unhinged right from the get-go. I understand this point, but that will always be the issue in a feature film. They have around 2 hours to tell the story and not a lot of time to devote to character development. If this was a ten-part Netflix series, you could fully flesh out the characters. Anytime you go into a movie based on a book you have to think of it as an adaptation rather than a recreation. This is probably the best thing you can do to enjoy each thing as its own separate entity.

The average book may take you 8 to 10 hours to read, so obviously, there is so much more detail that can go into it. With a movie, they have to pretty much throw you right into the story and the world.

I mentioned this before, but King thought that Nicholson was too famous an actor to be in the movie. King thought this would detract from the movie they were now watching this star perform as opposed to watching Jack Torrance. This was a big reason why Stephen King hated The Shining. I can understand this issue as I often see the same problem when big-name actors are cast in certain roles.

This is the issue I have with Tom Hanks, for example. A good exception to this would be actors like Daniel Day-Lewis or Gary Oldham, but a lot of that is done with makeup and costumes. This one is tough to see eye-to-eye with him on. He believes the striking images are surface and not substance.

Again, I have to disagree, and I think this is based on not letting the movie sink in and make an impact like it first did with audiences. It took the public a while to buy into the themes and tone of The Shining as many did not love it at first either.

Now that time has passed, you can see how much substance there is in every frame of this movie. The themes run so deep just with the ones I mentioned earlier. This movie will be open for interpretation for as long as movies exist, and no one will ever be able to land on a definitive explanation to fully explain it. A movie will always have to be a visual spectacle because it is a visual medium. This might have been the biggest issue separating the movie from the book, and it may come down to the ideological difference between King and Kubrick.