Page vs. Screen: The Shining

Many people like to think of Stanley Kubrick's The Shining as one the greatest creations of horror of all time. Honoured by casual movie watchers and critics alike, you'd be hard pressed to find a film that builds tension better, with excruciating dialogue and camera shots that hang...and hang...and hang. You start wondering after a while if the cameraman couldn't handle the tension and bailed. Yes, just about everyone holds The Shining in an understandably high regard. And by just about everyone, I mean anyone not named Stephen King. Said King believes the film fails to capture the intention and message he laid out in his 1977 novel named, aptly enough, The Shining. Arguments have been as bloody and distressing as a Colorado elevator, with both sides having merciless defenders. But which one's better? There's only one way to find out!

...analysing them both and making an informed, objective decision. That's the one way.

Terrifying vision, or a victim of SEGA's Blast Processing? You decide.

To help see what the difference is between the novel and the film, one has to really find what Stephen King finds wrong with the film, and why he considers it so much worse than his message. The 1977 book was, at its roots, a haunted house ghost story. Evil hotel wants a psychic kid for his power, possesses loving but vulnerable father in order to get kid, psychic kid uses psychic powers to defeat evil hotel. Obviously, the characters and motivations are far more complex than that, this isn't Eli Roth we're dealing with, but that was what it all boiled down to. By far the most interesting part of the book is the character of Jack Torrance, who is pretty hard to categorise in terms of what kind of character he is. He doesn't feel like a bad guy, at least not at the beginning. He's a flawed protagonist, a lovable rogue just trying to Go Straight and Get His Kids Back. The book doesn't pretend he doesn't have a dark side, far from it; it appears to lay all of its cards on the table, explaining Jack's alcoholism and violent past and, in turn, explaining why he's changed. What makes Jack's transformation truly disturbing, however, is how you stick with his perspective and his way of thinking throughout and, in what truly makes it feel creepy, it always makes some level of sense. Just as the hotel influences, seduces and eventually possesses Jack, it seems to possess both the author and the reader along with it. If you're not too careful, you might end up agreeing with everything Jack says, as he charges through the hotel corridors, swinging a splintered Roque mallet decorated with brain and gunk. Jack Torrance did bad things, but he isn't the bad guy in this story. The hotel is, and the book never forgets that.

The film disagrees.

For the movie adaptation, Kubrick and fellow screenwrtier Diane Johnson removed almost all of the supernatural elements found in the book. Really, the only ghosts you see at all in the film is in a bizarre montage near the climax, accompanied by Shelley Duvall looking like a fish that's been swatted out of the tank by the cat. In its place, much of the true evil in the story comes from Jack himself, which is where the criticism from Mr. King and his trusted followers is usually held up. Unlike in the novel, Jack always feels like an axe-wielding maniac, who just needs to be given an axe. Where in the book you might be screaming "COME ON JACK FIGHT IT HELP YOUR FAMILY ESCAPE" in the film, you're screaming "KILL HIM OLIVE OYL, STAB THAT CRAZY BASTARD RIGHT IN HIS BIG WEIRD FACE". It seems fair to say that at least some of this can be blamed on the performance of the great Jack Nicholson, who couldn't play a gazelle in a Dreamworks film about the animals of Africa entering a break dancing competition, perhaps called 'DJ, Rwanda Track' without making it seem sinister. Seriously, look at this face.

There isn't a single moment in this film where Jack Torrance feels like a good father. He starts off a borderline maniac, pushed over the edge by the isolation of the hotel. The hotel does sod all to him, really. It probably had a bunch of ways to convert Jack to evil planned, but nope, Nicholson just handles that shiz on his own.

And you know what? Despite it all, I actually prefer the film. Why? The story is stripped down to the bar minimum while still being scary. Kubrick wants a sense of isolation and tension, and the general lack of ghosts and outsiders helps maintain that. The film has much of what makes The Shining so famous. The twins in the hallway, the typewriter, the proclamation that Johnny is here, etc. As much as it detracts from Stephen King's envisioning of Jack Torrance, Nicholson still puts on an incredible performance, and while he can't do family lovin', there's no one better for pure crazy. The novel version of The Shining tells a great, creepy story with a lot to work with. The film version of The Shining tells a great, creepy story with barely anything to work with. For that, it gets the win.

BOOK OR FILM: FILM