Why does Stephen King hate Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining so much?
The trailer for Doctor Sleep, a film adaptation of Stephen King’s The Shining sequel, is a treat for horror enthusiasts. The new movie appears to draw on both King’s novel and Stanley Kubrick’s iconic 1980 film, using King’s narrative about the adult Danny Torrance but featuring several callbacks to Kubrick’s version of the original novel.
Mike Flanagan’s adaptation of Doctor Sleep, which stars Ewan McGregor, was expected to distance itself from The Shining film, given that King has publicly slammed Kubrick’s movie on more than one occasion. However, the new trailer directly references the movie, including a pointed shot of Room 237 (in the novel it was labeled Room 217).
Discussing the new release, producer Trevor Macy explained, “It is an adaptation of the novel Doctor Sleep, which is Stephen King’s sequel to his novel, The Shining. But this also exists very much in the same cinematic universe that Kubrick established in his adaptation of The Shining.”
This diplomatic approach came as a shock, mainly because of King’s visceral dislike of Kubrick’s film. Speaking to The Paris Review back in 2006, he said the film was “Too cold” and that there was “No sense of emotional investment in the family whatsoever[.]” Further elaborating, King said that Shelley Duvall as Wendy was “basically a scream machine.”
“There’s no sense of her involvement in the family dynamic at all,” he argued, “And Kubrick didn’t seem to have any idea that Jack Nicholson was playing the same motorcycle psycho that he played in all those biker films he did [...]. The guy is crazy. So where is the tragedy if the guy shows up for his job interview and he’s already bonkers? No, I hated what Kubrick did with that.”
Unable to stem the flow of disdain, King continued: “My screenplay for The Shining became the basis for the television miniseries later on. But I doubt Kubrick ever read it before making his film. He knew what he wanted to do with the story, and he hired the novelist Diane Johnson to write a draft of the screenplay based on what he wanted to emphasize. Then he redid it himself. I was really disappointed.”
When King published Doctor Sleep in 2013 his stance was only clarified. The story, which depicts the adult Danny following in his father’s dangerous footsteps, purposefully ignores the plot changes that were made in Kubrick’s film version of The Shining. So how on earth did Flanagan persuade King to allow him to infuse the film adaptation with references to Kubrick’s version of the Overlook Hotel?
“The big conversation that we had to have,” Flanagan told Entertainment Weekly, “was about whether or not we could still do a faithful adaptation of the novel as King had laid it out while inhabiting the universe that Kubrick had created.”
He explained: “Stephen King’s opinions about the Kubrick adaptation are famous, and complicated, and complicated to the point where, if you’ve read [Doctor Sleep], you know that he actively and intentionally ignored everything that Kubrick had changed about his novel, and kind of defiantly said, ‘Nope, this completely exists outside the Kubrick universe.’ We really needed to try to bring those worlds back together again.
“We had to go to King and explain how [...] to get into the vision of the Overlook that Kubrick had created,” he continued.
Luckily, for fans of Kubrick’s movie, Flanagan was successful. “[O]ur pitches to Stephen went over surprisingly well,” he explained, “and we came out of the conversation with not only his blessing to do what we ended up doing, but his encouragement.”
