Stephen King Was Not a Fan of 'The Shining' Doc 'Room 237'
Stephen King doesn't want to hear your theories about The Shining — especially if they involve "faked" Apollo landings or Native American genocide: According to a new Q&A in Rolling Stone, the 67-year-old horror master wasn’t a big fan of last year’s Room 237, the acclaimed documentary that explored the alleged meanings of Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 film version of The Shining. “I watched about half of it and got sort of impatient with it and turned it off,” he tells the magazine. “These guys were reaching. I’ve never had much patience for academic bullshit. It’s like Dylan says, ‘You give people a lot of knives and forks, they’ve gotta cut something.’ And that was what was going on in that movie.”
King, by the way, still hates Kubrick’s take on his 1977 novel — despite the film becoming one of the best-reviewed adaptations of the author’s work. "People absolutely love [the film version], and they don’t understand why I don’t," he says. "In the book, there’s an actual arc where you see this guy, Jack Torrance, trying to be good, and little by little he moves over to this place where he’s crazy. And as far as I was concerned, when I saw the movie, Jack was crazy from the first scene. I had to keep my mouth shut at the time. It was a screening, and Nicholson was there. But I’m thinking to myself the minute he’s on the screen, ‘Oh, I know this guy. I’ve seen him in five motorcycle movies, where Jack Nicholson played the same part.’"
For the record, King does love a few of his movies, including Stand by Me, Shawshank Redemption, Green Mile, Misery, Dolores Claiborne and Cujo. Somewhere, the little troll from Cat’s Eye is hanging his jingle-jangle hat in shame.
Watch the trailer for Room 237 below:
