Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining: Kubrick vs. King

Seeking a critical and commercial hit after the cool reception for Barry Lyndon, Stanley Kubrick turned to the bestselling horror stylings of Maine’s most famous resident, Stephen King.

One of my first jobs was working at a hotel to make a little extra cash while I was in Sixth Form. It was one of those humdrum, dated, supposedly four-star places that catered mostly to budget-seekers and David Brent/Alan Partridge types visiting the town on business. It was never deserted but rarely busy either.

My task was maintaining the swimming pool and leisure centre, which mostly involved sweeping, mopping, polishing, and occasionally scraping human grease off the tiles in the sauna. Sometimes I’d help the maids on their rounds, which was at least entertaining because they’d tell me about all the gross stuff that guests left behind for them to discover.

I always found working the hotel corridors really creepy, however: hushed liminal public spaces where nobody ever lingered, silent doors along either side, each leading into an identical box rented by strangers to do whatever they do once they’ve dumped their bag and hung the “Do Not Disturb” sign on the handle. No doubt my feelings about those hotel corridors were influenced by The Shining, my favourite Stanley Kubrick film. Few movies, if any, have so accurately captured the innate uncanniness of a working hotel, with or without ghosts.

Even for a director who was never chained to one particular genre, The Shining was perhaps the sharpest left-turn of Kubrick’s career. Barry Lyndon had underwhelmed at the box office, a modest profit providing scant reward for all the painstaking craft that went into filming it. So, seeking something that might provide a return to his usual commercial success, Kubrick detoured from 19th-century literature to a modern horror page-turner.

Horror was suddenly hot in the ’70s, elevated to respectable status by the likes of The Exorcist, Jaws, The Omen, and Carrie, hugely successful flicks that proved a well-made horror could attract Oscar nominations as well as large crowds. The story goes that Kubrick sat down in his office with a stack of horror novels looking for the ideal source material for his first and only foray into the genre. His secretary heard regular thumps as he read a few pages and rejected a book by flinging it at the wall. Then, there was a spell of silence. Checking in on him, she found Kubrick engrossed in The Shining.

King’s third novel was a departure for the author as well as the filmmaker. While many of his stories are set in his native Maine, The Shining was inspired by the Stanley Hotel in Colorado, where King and his wife found themselves the only guests during a stay in October 1974. The isolation and the long empty corridors made a deep impression on King, and he claimed that he had the whole novel mapped out after he awoke from a nightmare about the place involving his three-year-old son.

The Shining has strong autobiographical elements. King referred to it as a “confessional”, reflecting his own angry feelings towards his kids when they were young. It also touched upon his own struggles as a writer before he made it big, and his problems with alcohol around the same time. That’s arguably the strongest part of the book because it feels like it comes from a very real place.

Heavily influenced by Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, The Shining is a chilling exploration of an ailing psyche - in this case, wannabe author and recovering alcoholic Jack Torrance - coming into contact with a building that is born evil. Taking a job as caretaker, he moves into the remote Overlook Hotel over the long winter close season with his wife Wendy and young son Danny, who is plagued by terrifying premonitions. The Overlook has a long and chequered history, and the hotel works its malign influence on Jack as it seeks to make the Torrance family its next permanent guests.

The Shining grabbed Kubrick’s attention because it tapped into his usual scepticism about the nature of humankind:

There’s something inherently wrong with the human personality. There’s an evil side to it. One of the things that horror stories can do is to show us the archetypes of the unconscious; we can see the dark side without having to confront it directly.

King wrote an early screen adaptation of his novel, but Kubrick rejected it, preferring to co-write the film with Diane Johnson. In the book, the Overlook’s supernatural phenomena are unambiguously real. Kubrick was more sceptical of a straight-up ghost story and wary of making anything that too neatly confirmed life after death.

Instead, Kubrick and Johnson took a more Freudian approach to the material, suggesting that the terrifying visions encountered by Jack, Wendy, and Danny may be symptoms of mental deterioration and perhaps cabin fever. This notion is presaged by the legend of the ill-fated Donner Party, who were trapped in the Sierra Nevada mountains by snow and reportedly resorted to cannibalism to survive. The incident is mentioned in the novel, but Kubrick gives the story a more prominent position as the Torrances talk about it on the drive to the hotel.

For her part, Diane Johnson was hardly reverential about King’s novel, perhaps adding another reason why the Maine author famously hated the film:

The Shining [the novel] is not a part of great literature. It is scary, it is effective, and it works, without further ado… but it is precisely interesting to see how a very bad book can also be very effective… It’s quite pretentious. But it is also true that one has less scruples when destroying it: one is aware that a great work of art is not being destroyed.

“Destroying” is perhaps a strong word but, in typical fashion, Kubrick certainly turned King’s tale into something distinctly his own, taking the premise and the parts he liked and discarding the rest. For him, it was “just the story of one man’s family quietly going insane together” even as he maintained the scariest element of King’s book: that the one person who should traditionally serve as his wife and child’s greatest protector goes mad and becomes their greatest mortal threat.

That’s a murderous betrayal that really stings as a father reading the novel and watching the movie, and the tragedy of Jack Torrance is that the seeds of his downfall are already sown by his failures as a dad and husband long before he reaches the Overlook Hotel.

Stephen King had plenty to say about the casting of The Shining, disliking most of Kubrick’s potential picks - reportedly including Harrison Ford, Robert De Niro, and Robin Williams - as he preferred actors like Michael Moriarty and Jon Voight who might bring a more Everyman quality in keeping with the novel. He also didn’t like Kubrick’s first choice, Jack Nicholson, later claiming that the star played Jack as if he was already completely insane before the family rocked up at the Overlook.

I can sympathise with King, who voiced his concerns well before the film hit theatres: “[Jack Nicholson] is not an ordinary man. So far as I know, he’s never played an ordinary man and I’m not sure that he can.” I really enjoy Nicholson’s performance and he gave us some iconic horror moments, but he definitely goes cartoonishly big with it.

That’s in keeping with other larger-than-life turns that Kubrick liked to go for in some of his films, from Peter Sellers’ triple role in Dr. Strangelove to R. Lee Ermey’s drill sergeant in Full Metal Jacket. Nicholson leans hard into the crazy angle, and that choice informs the heightened sense of madness that builds into a crescendo throughout the film.

King also disapproved of Shelley Duvall in the part of Wendy Torrance, calling the casting choice “grotesque” in an interview with Cinefantastique prior to the film’s release. He didn’t explain why at that point, but he later described Kubrick’s version of Wendy as “one of the most misogynistic characters ever put on film” - “basically just there to scream and be stupid” - in contrast to the more grounded and resourceful Wendy in the novel.

For the other main roles, Kubrick cast newcomer Danny Lloyd from a pool of 5,000 boys as Danny Torrance. To date, it is Lloyd’s only feature film appearance apart from a cameo in the belated sequel Doctor Sleep. Amusingly, Kubrick approached Slim Pickens - Major Kong in Dr. Strangelove - to play the Overlook’s head chef, Dick Hallorann, but Pickens reportedly turned it down because Kubrick couldn’t guarantee his scenes would be shot in less than 100 takes. Scatman Crothers landed the part instead.

Barry Nelson played the small but important expository role of Stuart Ullman, the Overlook’s general manager, and two former Kubrick actors were cast as Lloyd the bartender and Delbert Grady the butler respectively: Joe Turkel from Paths of Glory and Philip Stone from A Clockwork Orange and Barry Lyndon.

The Shining was another long and arduous shoot for Kubrick and his cast and crew, taking over a year between May 1978 and April 1979. The director’s penchant for making his actors perform an outrageous number of takes was a big part of this. The much-repeated figures are astonishing: the Hallorann / Danny scene reportedly required 148 takes, while Crothers also endured dozens more as he simply walked across a street and then as his character is killed with an axe in the last act. Jack Nicholson reportedly busted through around 60 doors in order to nail the famous “Here’s Johnny!” moment.

More harrowingly, the scene in which Wendy fends off Jack with a baseball bat on the Colorado Lounge staircase is often cited at 127 takes. Shelley Duvall looks genuinely exhausted on screen and she was left with a sore throat, dehydration, and raw hands from screaming and swinging the bat over and over.

Duvall suffered more than any actor during filming, with Kubrick intentionally keeping her in a state of high anxiety and emotional distress throughout the shoot. She later spoke about how gruelling the experience had been, although she also maintained in later life that she still had fond memories of working with the director.

This raises an uncomfortable question about Kubrick’s methods. His goal with multiple takes was to push his actors to explore every possible dimension of a scene, but his cruel treatment of Duvall for the sake of realism is surely a step too far. She received a Razzie nomination for her performance in the film, which the alternative award body rescinded in 2022 on account of the gruelling treatment she endured.

As was the case for every film after Spartacus, Kubrick refused to leave the British Isles to make The Shining. While his second unit crew captured establishing shots on location in the United States and the Timberline Lodge in Oregon provided the imposing exterior for the Overlook, Kubrick’s team built the interiors and a life-size recreation of the Timberline facade at Elstree Studios in Borehamwood.

It was reported as one of the largest indoor sets ever built at the time, and it remains one of the most remarkable feats of production design in cinema. The key thing is that every aspect looks and feels like a modern working hotel with a touch of historical opulence, typified by the glorious Gold Room where Jack ends up selling his soul to the Overlook for a few stiff jolts of bourbon.

It looks so authentic that it’s easy to miss the fact that the layout of the hotel makes no sense at all: an outside window in the general manager’s office shouldn’t exist because a hallway is directly behind it; Room 237 overlaps neighbouring rooms; doors apparently don’t lead anywhere; impossible corridors lead where they shouldn’t; and the whole hotel is littered with spatial anomalies that largely go unnoticed unless you’re paying very close attention. We’re shown all this via Kubrick’s Steadicam as it prowls behind the characters as they navigate the hotel - it all looks real, but so many details are simply off.

Some might dismiss this as continuity errors, but Kubrick was notoriously so obsessive in every aspect of his filmmaking that it’s hard to believe that he’d miss so many inconsistencies. Jan Harlan, executive producer on the film, later confirmed that the disorientating quality of the Overlook’s design was deliberate, thus creating an Escher-like maze that doesn’t call attention to itself but evokes a subliminal sense of unease and confusion.

The interior of the hotel is mirrored by the Overlook’s hedge maze and both locations reflect one of the most important themes in the film. As the family unit disintegrates and insanity sets in, the hotel and its grounds become a labyrinth from which they may never escape - just as the seemingly sentient Overlook intends. The disorientation is further emphasised by Kubrick’s startling use of title cards - “The Interview”, “A Month Later”, “Tuesday”, and so on - which at first seem like a simple device to break the story into chapters, but increasingly create the sense that the Torrances have come unstuck in time.

That’s all before we talk about ghosts, of which there are several in the film. Most insidiously, we have Lloyd the bartender and Delbert Grady. Expertly played by Joe Turkel and Philip Stone, these guys serve as the Overlook’s henchmen, preying on Jack’s withdrawal symptoms from booze and suggesting that he “corrects” his family respectively.

Danny’s psychic ability is what the hotel really wants, but his premonitions give him something of an edge despite the fact that he’s only a little boy. That’s not to say the Overlook doesn’t try to lure him away - perhaps the creepiest manifestation is the Grady twins, Lisa and Louise Burns, who beckon him to play with them forever… and ever… and ever.

The Overlook only needs Jack in the sense that he has the physical power on the mortal plane to murder his son and deliver him to the covetous force of the hotel. The woman in Room 237, played by Lia Beldam and Billie Gibson as the young and old versions, serves to further drive a wedge between the family, attacking Danny and seducing Jack when he goes to investigate.

Wendy is a mere irritant for the Overlook’s plans, but even she isn’t immune to supernatural visions. Late in the film, she has visions of her own, including ghostly figures and the tidal wave of blood pouring from the elevator. This brings us back to what we said about how Kubrick didn’t want to make a literal ghost story: just about everything in the film could be waved away as figments of the imagination, but there is one scene that appears to suggest that the Overlook’s spirits are very much real.

After Wendy clobbers Jack unconscious with the baseball bat, she locks him in a storeroom. When he wakes up, Grady appears on the other side of the door, admonishes him, and lets him out on the promise that he’ll finish the job by murdering Danny and Wendy. We don’t see Grady, but we definitely saw Wendy slide the bolt to securely imprison her husband. If Grady isn’t real, then who opened the door?

The Shining eventually became a commercial return to form for Kubrick, even if its initial critical reception was lukewarm. Many critics were disappointed with the slow pacing and the director’s distant approach to the material. It seems that most of them were expecting a straightforward horror movie. The Golden Raspberries tended to agree, adding a nomination for Worst Director to Shelley Duvall’s controversial nod for Worst Actress.

Although Stephen King has said kind things about The Shining, telling David Letterman that parts of it are “flawless and beautiful” and initially praising Jack Nicholson’s performance in the same 1980 interview, the author has been one of the film’s most vocal critics. He bemoaned Kubrick’s approach as cold and Jack’s lack of a character arc - “All he does is get crazier” - and described it as “a big beautiful Cadillac with no engine inside it.”

It seems to me that both King and many of the film’s naysayers were disappointed because Kubrick’s movie wasn’t exactly like the book. That’s not always the point of an adaptation, however. It doesn’t necessarily mean you are switching the story from one medium to another.

The example I like to use is the scene in Amadeus when Salieri (F. Murray Abraham) has composed a “March of Welcome” to greet Mozart (Tom Hulce) to the Emperor’s court. To the crestfallen Salieri’s dismay, the young maestro overhears the tune as he enters the room, sits down at the fortepiano, and effortlessly improves it.

That’s what Kubrick has done with The Shining. He’s taken a good book and turned it into an enduring horror masterpiece. It’s a film far more ambiguous and thematically rich than King’s novel, dispensing with the author’s more on-the-nose haunted house story in favour of psychological terror and a momentous sense of escalating dread.

The main changes Kubrick made all work beautifully for the film he was making. On a very basic level, Kubrick changes the murder weapon from King’s croquet mallet to a good old-fashioned axe. It might be a cliché, but axes work in horror because they are big, heavy, scary tools made for splitting things apart. A croquet mallet simply isn’t scary, which is why you don’t get many horror maniacs wielding tennis rackets or pool cues either.

More importantly, dropping King’s creeping topiary animals in favour of the hedge maze was a major improvement. Kubrick felt that the technology required to convincingly animate shrubbery creatures wasn’t available at the time, and it’s hard to imagine how it could ever work in a feature film without looking ridiculous. Indeed, they were reinstated for the 1997 miniseries produced by King and it was pretty goofy stuff.

Aside from emphasising the labyrinth theme of the film, the hedge maze also provided the setting for one of the most suspenseful chase scenes in horror history as Jack pursues Danny through its snowbound pathways before becoming hopelessly lost. King went for a big climax with Jack improbably beating himself to death with the croquet mallet and the Overlook blowing up in a boiler room blaze, but Kubrick’s ending was far more enigmatic.

While King’s novel finished with an epilogue back in the real world after the horrors of the Overlook, the hotel in the film remains standing and presumably ready to claim future victims in a cycle of violence that repeats over the decades. We also don’t get to escape with Wendy and Danny, keeping Jack company as he freezes to death and gets his wish to stay forever.

Then the kicker. Like one of the hotel’s ghosts, we wander down the corridor past the Gold Room to the strains of “Midnight, the Stars and You” and focus on a photo on the wall taken at the July 4th ball in 1921. Front and centre is Jack, smiling at the camera in his tux.

What does it mean? Fans of The Shining love theorising about this haunting coda and poring over the potential symbolism hidden in the photograph. Kubrick himself said that the photo suggested reincarnation, which certainly fits in with Delbert Grady’s earlier insistence that Jack has “always been the caretaker.” But we also know that Delbert shares a surname with Charles Grady, a previous caretaker who murdered his family with an axe years before.

Coincidence, or are they one and the same? Although Delbert claims no knowledge of the killings, he states that he “corrected” his wife and daughters when one of the girls tried to burn down the hotel, implying that he did indeed murder them. So has the Overlook promoted Grady to butler in order to make way for Jack as the caretaker?

Maybe Kubrick just thought it’d be a cool way to end the movie. Whatever the case, it is elusive details like this and a hundred more that keep me returning to The Shining over and over again. The Overlook has a way of getting its hooks into you, and I find something new with each repeat viewing. The more you dig into it, the more you discover, and I’m always eager to return. To borrow the spirit of a certain Eagles song, the Overlook lets you check out, but it never really lets you leave.

For collectors, The Shining also has one of the most instantly recognisable poster campaigns of Kubrick’s later career: stark, strange, and built around Saul Bass’s unforgettable yellow-and-black face. You can explore our current original Stanley Kubrick movie posters here.

Next time: In the seventh and final part of this series, we take a look at Kubrick’s very different final pictures, Full Metal Jacket and Eyes Wide Shut.