"The Shining": a timeless classic torn between literature and cinema.

I have never been a big horror fan. I have actually always found movies that belonged to that genre never that appealing to me for one reason or another, the main one probably being that I plainly don't love big blood baths and jump scares. But, when in one of my University classes I found “The Shining” as an optional reading, I was immediately intrigued, since I had heard so much about it- or rather seen. I was familiar with the image of the infamous twins, the “all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” scene and, of course, the grinning face of Jack Nicholson swinging his ax. But I didn’t dare to go beyond these few images, probably because I didn’t quite know what I could find, but mainly because I had pretty much made my mind up and had somehow decided that that just wasn’t my thing. But, at that moment, I decided it was time to see -and read- for myself.

I began to venture into the wild, wild adventures of the Torrance family through the words of Stephen King and, after reading the first hundred pages, I started realizing what made this novel such a page-turner. The secret to its success must be hidden in the mixture of mystery, human emotions and, of course, fear which the novel oozes. I am by no means an expert of this genre, having just a read a dozen King’s novels, but, over time, I have managed to understand one thing about my experience as a reader. One, perhaps the main, reason that usually makes me come back to an author for more of his/her novels is, besides the sheer quality of the actual writing, the feeling of uncertainty it manages to deliver to me. I found myself enjoying books that were everything but predictable a lot more than the ones in which the plot seemed to be ruled out from page one.

Stephen King is, in my opinion, particularly successful at picturing pretty common situations, then taking one element to an extreme until we are no longer capable of considering it normal. This is mainly carried out by the introduction of a major uncommon element, which, in the case of “The Shining”, is the Overlook Hotel. When it comes to this place, the word ‘haunted’ doesn’t even cover it. Ghosts of all sorts (re)appear to the reader as well as to the protagonists to remind them of their inescapable past. Without going too much into detail, the book does a very good job at making the reader develop a sort of empathy, but not only towards the poor little Danny who, through his gifted mind, is the prey of many of the ghosts who animate the story. What actually surprized me as I was reading this novel is that, by the end of it, I was able to experience that same kind of feeling also towards the not-so-poor-and-little Jack Torrance (not without a sense of guilt for feeling sympathy towards a man who tries to murder his family). But, in the book, there comes a point when you’re no longer able to tell the difference between what’s wrong and right, and a feeling of uneasiness will most likely derive from it.

The main reason behind this, is that the reader has multiple occasions to take a look inside Jack’s mind and, by doing so, will get to the conclusion that this character is nothing but a puppet in the hands of unmerciful forces who want to subdue him at all costs. The memories of his never forgotten childhood and adult years, all so desperately hidden by him, come to life in the Hotel, the place he had chosen to escape from them all. In the words of Stephen King “it was not just Danny the Overlook was working on. It was working on him, too. It wasn't Danny who was the weak link, it was him. He was the vulnerable one, the one who could be bent and twisted until something snapped.”

Through a full range of internal monologues, carried out by Jack, his wife Wendy, their son Danny and one of the other protagonists Hallorann, we are able to take a good look at the deepest, darkest secrets they hold within themselves, and we get to connect the dots just in time for a major turn of events which takes place towards the end of the narration and which leaves us almost breathless because of its intensity. One of the main reasons which make King’s novels so hard to translate into a film is precisely this: the inability to deliver to the viewer the same level of introspective depth which the reader is able to benefit through several inner monologues.

It is perhaps this the reason behind the long process of rewriting which took place before Kubrick started shooting “The Shining” in 1980. He decided to use the novel as a starting point which would allow him to develop his own version of the story. With this objective in mind, he spent a year in England rewriting most of the story with the help of novelist Diane Johnson and, as a result of this process, the film ends up having just a few details of the original novel. For this reason, it makes no sense to watch Kubrick’s adaptation to try to find all those elements which we had read about in the book: the film is only loosely based on the work of fiction and constitutes a story of its own. The movie is so distant from the book that even I, once I had just finished the book, wasn’t able to tell what was going to happen next in the movie.

---

This choice made by the American director wasn’t exactly what King had had in mind and the movie that resulted didn’t satisfy him at all. As he stated during the 2011 TMC documentary A night at the Movies: the Horrors of Stephen King, “The film is extremely cold. Stanley Kubrick saw the haunting as coming from Jack Torrance, from the Jack Nicholson character, whereas I always saw it from outside, so we had a fundamental difference of opinion about it. 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. There’s a difference between warmth and cold. But the images are striking, there’s no doubt about it. I mean, Jack Nicholson’s face in the doorway, his bearded, crazy, grinning, face. And then he says ‘here’s Johnny’, which was his ad-lib and it became, you know, part of the movie. So, the images are striking but, to me, that’s surface, it’s not substance. So, I used to describe “The Shining” the film as something like a beautiful car that had no engine in it”.

This clear perspective outlined by King is pretty self-explanatory; the way the characters are perceived by an audience who hasn’t read the book is much different form the perception the readers get. The characters acquire such different characteristics in the two works mainly because in the movie, King’s version of Jack Torrance disappears and leaves space to the extraordinary performance of Nicholson, who manages to terrify the audience in a different, more sinister way than in the book, but, nonetheless, just as effectively. So, what’s truly remarkable about Kubrick’s movie is the iconic characters he manages to create, the decision to let the performance of one of the greatest actors of our generation shine in a confined spatial frame which ends up suffocating everyone, especially the audience.

Kubrick’s version may have cut out almost every important detail of the story but I should also mention the fact that perhaps choosing to transfer every single detail in the book into a movie may not be the best choice for this novel, since the latter is so filled with them that this choice might end up killing the course of the story. This perhaps happened in the other, less known, version of “The Shining”, a TV series, directed by Mick Garris, which aired in 1997 and which King wrote the teleplay for.

In conclusion, whether you preferred “The Shining” the book or its movie version, this cult work has mesmerized generations of people who have been witnesses of one crucial, fundamental lesson King keeps on teaching us: “monsters are real. Ghosts are too. They live inside of us, and sometimes, they win”.