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King vs. Kubrick: The Origins of Evil (2020)

Filippo Ulivieri July 2020 The Shining at 40 Issue 95 It is a common trope that authors rarely like films based on their novels. Stephen King, who at the time of this writing has seen 48 feature films and 26 television series adapted from his works,1 is no exception.

But the phone conversation was mostly about Kubrick asking King’s opinion on a different ending for the film, with Hallorann becoming possessed and finishing the job that Jack started, killing Wendy and Danny; the Torrances are then seen as ghosts in the Overlook Hotel the following spring. “ The Shining came from my own really aggressive impulses toward my kids,” King has revealed with surprising candour, going as far as mentioning a specific episode: “I came home one day [and] Joe, my oldest boy who was then three or four, had done all these cartoon and crayon drawings on this manuscript that I had been working on … and I was thinking of myself, ‘Little son of a bitch I could kill him. Before dismissing this as far-fetched psychoanalysis of Stephen King, let’s consider the fact that he wrote a sequel to The Shining in 2013, Doctor Sleep, which deliberately ignores Kubrick’s film and follows an adult Danny battling with alcoholism, like his father had.

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