{"id":216133,"date":"2021-03-15T15:09:28","date_gmt":"2021-03-15T15:09:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/gamerant.com\/shining-movie-better-book\/"},"modified":"2021-03-15T15:09:28","modified_gmt":"2021-03-15T15:09:28","slug":"the-shining-the-movie-is-better-than-the-book-game-rant","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/itteacheritfreelance.hk\/wordpress\/index.php\/2021\/03\/15\/the-shining-the-movie-is-better-than-the-book-game-rant\/","title":{"rendered":"The Shining: The Movie Is Better Than The Book | Game Rant"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Both Stephen King\u2019s The Shining<\/strong><\/em> and Stanley Kubrick\u2019s 1980 film adaptation are monumental works in their respective fields. King\u2019s book is an engrossing read and one of the bestselling horror novels ever written, while Kubrick\u2019s film is a masterpiece of horror cinema, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with the genre\u2019s most iconic works<\/a>. While both the novel and the movie have a lot of merit, the movie is arguably a much stronger work of horror. Kubrick\u2019s changes to the source material added new layers of terror and ambiguity to the downfall of Jack Torrance and the result is a darker, more unnerving, and ultimately more effective horror story.<\/p>\n

King famously hated Kubrick\u2019s movie. Kubrick had gone on record saying that he thought the novel itself was pretty weak, and that his interest in adapting it came from his appreciation for the premise alone. The director departed drastically from King\u2019s telling of the story in coming up with his own take on the premise of a struggling writer turning on his family while working as a winter caretaker at the snowbound Overlook Hotel<\/a>. King, in turn, hated the movie, despite its widespread acclaim, because he thought its unfaithfulness to the source material missed the point.<\/p>\n

RELATED:\u00a0The Shining Spin-Off Series in Development for HBO Max<\/a><\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

The opening scenes of Kubrick\u2019s movie set up the premise similarly to King\u2019s novel, although the dark secrets of the Overlook are withheld from Jack before he takes the job in the book and they\u2019re revealed to him in the interview in the movie. The job interview scene in the movie with Mr. Ullman is a masterclass in horror exposition<\/a>, conveying all the necessary information to foreshadow the Torrances\u2019 inevitable terrifying fate in a Q&A setting that allows for blunt, long-winded explanations of things. Then, once Jack and his family are on their way to the Overlook, Kubrick deviates wildly from King\u2019s story.<\/p>\n

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In the book, Jack is an inherently good man who loves his family. He only turns evil and violent when the ghosts of the Overlook get their hooks in him. In the movie, thanks to the pitch-perfect casting of Jack Nicholson<\/a> to angrily grin his way through every scene, Jack is pretty clearly insane or close to insane from the offset. He isn\u2019t a loving family man, because he\u2019s easily frustrated by his wife and son. He isn\u2019t inherently good, because he doesn\u2019t regret hurting Danny. This Jack is dark and disturbed. If his son didn\u2019t have telepathic powers and there weren\u2019t ghosts manipulating him to axe-murder his family, Jack would still be a terrifying character.<\/p>\n

In the book, there are clearly paranormal forces influencing Jack\u2019s behavior, but in the movie, it\u2019s feasible that he\u2019s doing it all on his own. In the movie\u2019s early scenes, he looks like he\u2019s about to snap. It\u2019s possible that the on-screen horrors are all in Jack\u2019s head brought on by being stuck in isolation with a wife and son he can\u2019t stand. King\u2019s version of Jack leads a standard haunted house story; Kubrick\u2019s incarnation is much more unsettling.<\/p>\n

Kubrick and screenwriter Diane Johnson are credited as having written the script for\u00a0The Shining<\/em>, but they didn\u2019t finalize a shooting script before filming began. Instead, they figured out the story as they went along. Jack Nicholson eventually threw out his own pages, because they were constantly being replaced. Kubrick saw The Shining<\/em> as \u201cthe story of one man\u2019s family quietly going insane together,<\/a>\u201d and wasn\u2019t as interested in hitting precise plot beats as charting that disturbing psychological journey.<\/p>\n

Interestingly, on the page, Danny\u2019s imaginary friend Tony can be \u201cseen,\u201d but in translating the story to the screen, Kubrick kept Tony off-screen. He\u2019s depicted as being entirely in Danny\u2019s head, speaking through his index finger \u2013 Danny even affects a growly voice to speak for Tony. Kubrick\u2019s movie avoids providing definitive answers to any of its big questions, instead allowing the audience to figure it out for themselves. This can often be ineffective, because audiences feel duped if they don\u2019t get definitive answers, but Kubrick\u2019s razor-sharp command of ambiguity<\/a> made The Shining<\/em>\u2019s mysteries timeless conundrums that audiences will continue to discuss for generations to come.<\/p>\n

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More so than any of Kubrick\u2019s other movies, The Shining<\/em> is an ambiguous work open to interpretation. While 2001<\/em> can be deduced to be about the next stage of human evolution, The Shining<\/em> truly can\u2019t be explained<\/a>. For every possible explanation (of which there are enough to fill an entire 102-minute documentary<\/a>), Kubrick sprinkled in a couple of small details to invalidate any given theory. Kubrick took the film\u2019s \u201ctrue\u201d meaning to his grave, but the true meaning, really, is that there is no clear explanation for the story, because that\u2019s a lot scarier than a cut-and-dried conclusion that wraps everything up in a neat bow.<\/p>\n

One of the most crucial differences between the book and the movie is the ending. At the end of the novel, the Overlook explodes. At the end of the movie, Wendy and Danny narrowly escape as Jack freezes in the hedge maze, then a photograph hanging in the hallway of the hotel from 1921 opens up all kinds of questions. Is Jack a reincarnation? Has he always been at the Overlook? Did anything in the movie actually take place? Is the Overlook a grand visual metaphor for Hell? This is recognized as one of the greatest endings in the history of horror cinema<\/a>. It\u2019s much more memorable and original and unnerving than the Bayhem explosion at the end of King\u2019s novel.<\/p>\n

King summarized his disagreements with Kubrick\u2019s adaptation by saying, \u201cThe book is hot and the movie is cold.<\/a>\u201d Literally, the book ends with the hotel engulfed in flames and the movie ends with Jack freezing to death in the snow, but thematically, the book is about a warm, passionate, loving man\u2019s spiral into insanity and the movie is about the repressed violent rage of a psychopath bubbling to the surface in snowy isolation. The latter is an undeniably more effective horror story<\/a>, exposing the ugliness of humanity\u2019s own dark side instead of focusing on the evil of some imaginary demons.<\/p>\n

MORE:\u00a0Unmade Stanley Kubrick Movie ‘Lunatic At Large’ To Become Feature Film<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n\n

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Stephen King famously hates Stanley Kubrick’s iconic 1980 adaptation of his book, but it’s arguably a stronger telling of the story.<\/p>\n<\/div>","protected":false},"author":1074,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"slim_seo":{"title":"The Shining: The Movie Is Better Than The Book | Game Rant - ITTeacherITFreelance.hk","description":"Stephen King famously hates Stanley Kubrick's iconic 1980 adaptation of his book, but it's arguably a stronger telling of the story."},"footnotes":""},"categories":[607],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/itteacheritfreelance.hk\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/216133"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/itteacheritfreelance.hk\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/itteacheritfreelance.hk\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/itteacheritfreelance.hk\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1074"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/itteacheritfreelance.hk\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=216133"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/itteacheritfreelance.hk\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/216133\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":216134,"href":"https:\/\/itteacheritfreelance.hk\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/216133\/revisions\/216134"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/itteacheritfreelance.hk\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=216133"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/itteacheritfreelance.hk\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=216133"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/itteacheritfreelance.hk\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=216133"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}