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A closer look at Stephen King’s famous critique of “The Shining” movie (2023)

Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining” has become nothing short of a cult classic, with the iconic, tilde-shaped eyebrows of Jack Nicholson wormed into the psyches of multiple generations. The movie has become one of the most renowned and culturally significant adaptations of one of Stephen King’s horror novels, an author with over 40 of his books

Instead of King, Kubrick collaborated with writer Diane Johnson due to her expertise as a professor of Gothic novels at the University of California, Berkeley, and her contributions to The New York Times Book Review. King wrote the book as a kind of cathartic release, describing it as “ a ritual burning of hate and pain ” that offered him a sense of closure, putting his troubled past to rest. However, Kubrick and Johnson’s script depicts Jack less as a protagonist battling and eventually overcoming the darkness within his own mind and evil influences of the Overlook Hotel, and more as an outright psychopath from the very first scene.

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