The first “grown-up” books I really ever read were Stephen King novels. All through middle and high school, Stephen King was there. I wrote this essay examining where the book and movie versions of The Shining differed for my favorite college class ever, a high-level theory course called “The Horror Film” that examined horror through theoretical and cultural insights. It was really fun, and I haven’t had a chance to work on the new essays I’ve been working on, so…
The Shining is doggedly pulled in two directions, made famous both by the iconic original Stephen King novel (1977) and Stanley Kubrick’s equally classic film adaptation (1980). Though the core plot remains the same in both mediums — the nuclear Torrance family, The Overlook Hotel, the supernatural “shine,” the inevitable mad-dash attempted familicide — the underlying themes and characterizations linger on opposing thematic endpoints. Within both versions, themes of supernatural interference, madness and the psyche, and personal destiny are considered to different degrees. When asked what drew him to King’s novel, Kubrick said, “[The story] seemed to strike an extraordinary balance between the psychological and the supernatural.” However, despite Kubrick’s assertion, a major difference between the two versions lies in that very relationship between the psychological and the supernatural. In the novel, the insanity of the central figure of Jack is brought on by the supernatural figures of the hotel’s past and by the shine of the hotel itself. He is haunted to insanity. In the film, though, the madness and the supernatural are seen as all the more separate. The film shows an already unstable character become slowly and very surely more unhinged. The Kubrick version shows the insanity and the supernatural as two ingredients in the story’s recipe; the King version sees them not as separate entities but as an intertwined core. While both versions serve as important and effective masterpieces of horror, it is interesting to examine how they differ, and what effect each divergence creates. These greatest changes can be seen in the different characterizations of the Torrance family and their relationships with each other, through themes of alcoholism and obsession, and through specific stylistic idiosyncrasies.
The Shining is, at its core, a story about family. The evils revealed at the Overlook Hotel are revealed, re-lived, and amplified through the viewpoint of the Torrances. Each character is infinitely important to how the story plays out, so it is interesting and boundlessly meaningful to see how the characters change between the film and the novel. Furthermore, how each character differs affects the themes of horror that the story ultimately projects. Most important — and most divergent between film and novel — is Jack Torrance, the patriarch of the little Torrance family and the one who accepts the job that brings the trio to the Overlook Hotel. His characters in the book and in the movie are fundamentally different, and, though they follow similar storylines, end up defining the story along particular fashions.
One such difference is the more surface-level problem of casting. Stephen King has maintained that he hates the casting of Jack Nicholson in the film. In his eyes, Nicholson has no space for character development (or, in this case, character devolvement). “The guy is crazy. So where is the tragedy if the guy shows up for his job interview and he’s already bonkers?” Jack Nicholson is in no way subtle; his eyebrows curve in menacing arcs, his smile is lazy and dishonest and impossibly wide, and his actions, even before he begins to turn to the dark side, are over-extended and hyper and jerky. Next to the everyman that Jack Torrance is said to be in the book, Nicholson’s more eccentric acting is definitely a departure.
Next, and maybe most important, is Jack’s struggle with alcoholism. In the novel, this struggle is center stage and ongoing; right in the first chapter, Jack mentions that he is sober in a way that suggests he is proud of his progress. When talking to Ullman about a past caretaker (Delbert Grady) who, exacerbated by cabin fever and alcohol, killed his family and himself, it is said that “Jack felt a slow, hot grin — the total antithesis of the toothy PR grin — stretch across his mouth,” as he tells Ullman of his sobriety. He is visibly affected by the mention of alcohol, and his struggles are immediately brought to light, continuing to stay central to the story. Later in the book, we as an audience are told of how Jack was fired from his teaching job for assaulting a kid he found vandalizing his car. How he broke Danny’s arm one night in the midst of a drunken rage. How he ran over an abandoned bike in the middle of the road while driving drunk, and realized he could have hit a kid. His struggle-filled past is dark and deep, and it stays present in his everyday life. This is a talked-about struggle, not just a mentioned one.
In the movie, however, Jack doesn’t really acknowledge his alcohol-fueled misdeeds; instead, we are told of them through Wendy. He doesn’t own up to his past or acknowledge his growth. In fact, when he is talking to Lloyd at the bar he says, “I haven't laid a hand on him. G-ddam it, I didn't. I wouldn't touch one hair of his g-ddam little head. I love the little son-of-a-bitch.” This is said about the mysterious bruises Wendy accuses Jack of giving Danny in Act 2, but the indignant tone and the crazed smile reveal a broader shirking of responsibility. It is a blanket statement made defensively and recklessly, and it is obvious Jack does not in that moment care about his son but himself. It can therefore also be said that alcoholism is more pronounced and profound in the novel, and that the presence of the theme of alcoholism represents a more grounded and psychologically healthy character to start with.
Movie-Jack doesn’t offer up information about himself freely; he instead only mentions that he is sober when, on the tour of the hotel, he is told that the bar is not stocked with alcohol over the winter break. Addiction and the demons that the disease causes is a fundamental theme within the novel; the demons that haunt the Overlook Hotel are mirrors of the inner demons that haunt its undertaker. In the film, the alcohol simply acts as a signal of Jack’s descent, a sign that he has passed over from his own reality to the hotel’s. But, that’s all it is; a symbol for the passage over. There is no sense that he is fighting against this madness, only that he wants it desperately. As he says in the film, “G-d, I'd give anything for a drink. I'd give my g-d-damned soul for just a glass of beer.” He longs for the drink, and in his longing there isn’t any presence of a conscience or reason. The struggle for redemption isn’t very present throughout the film. Jack goes in one man, and quickly changes not to a different man but to a heightened, more erratic version of himself. His need for a drink isn’t marred by the defeat or the guilt of ending his sobriety, but by the imminent relief he knows he’ll feel and by the simple longing to feel better than he does.
This is very different from the novel. There is a similar quote of longing for a drink: “Dear G-d, he could use a drink. Or a thousand of them.” However this quote comes in a very different context; rather than coming from a place of anger, it comes from boredom and annoyance. It is more mundane, and, since it comes relatively early in the story in chapter 3, shows the journey Jack undergoes and the actual later effects of the hotel on Jack. This can also be seen in how Jack refers to alcoholism in later chapters, where he reflects on his evolution as an alcoholic. His musings on the passivity of an alcoholic, the circumstances and surroundings that lead to someone becoming one, are paired also with the shame he feels about his actions. He says that his alcoholism was probably genetic, that it probably started with his very first drink as a teenager, and that it was probably made worse by the trauma and abuse his father inflicted upon him. He blames his stress on his school, his failures in life, as a parent, a husband. He also acknowledges the addiction itself, though, and realizes not only that he has a problem and is sick, but that he is making a negative impact on his family. He is self-aware even in his excuses.
While thinking back to the incident that got him fired from Stovington Prep, he summarizes to himself: “It had nothing to do with willpower, or the morality of drinking, or the weakness or strength of his own character. There was a broken switch somewhere inside, or a circuit breaker that didn’t work, and he had been propelled down the shoot willy-nilly, slowly at first, then accelerating as Stovington applied its pressure on him.” He is cognizant of the fact that he has a problem and that it is solely his problem, even as he mitigates the blame and acknowledges the stressors of his past and his everyday life. While in the film alcohol signifies a Jack transformed into his unhinged, destructive self, in the novel it shows Jack’s potential for destruction, and his ongoing struggle to rise above it and to be better.
Not only do the outlooks on alcoholism differ between the film and the novel, but the connections between Jack and the Overlook are markedly different. This has largely to do with Jack himself. In the novel, Jack legitimately is a caretaker; he attends to the upkeep and maintenance of the hotel, he stays in contact with the nearby police station over the radio, and, most importantly, he tends to the huge furnace that stands beneath the floors of the hotel. He also spends time investigating the disturbing history of the hotel itself, planning to write a screenplay based on the Overlook. In the movie, though, Jack spends his time throwing a tennis ball around. He is lethargic and unmotivated. His un-specified “writing project” is never shown and no details are mentioned. Based on these differences, it seems as if Jack is more in tune with the version of the Overlook that lives within King’s pages.
And so it seems that the supernatural is more present and more necessary in the novel. The Overlook’s shine is seen as malevolent and monstrous. It has a mind of its own, and in seeking to consume Danny’s shine the hotel uses its powers and its spirits to infect Jack. In the movie, though, the Overlook is less intimidating and more seductive. Jack is at his lowest; he’s lost his job, he is at odds with Wendy and Danny, he has writer’s block. The hotel is not the rabbit hole through which he falls into an othered existence but an answer to his atrophied and agonizing life. Here he is needed, celebrated, special. When Jack first enters a ballroom filled with ghostly guests, Lloyd greets him first, saying “It’s good to see you.” The guests he sees at the hotel are deferring to him, and they all are happy upon his return. Furthermore, he is given a title that is all his; when talking to the haunted figure of Grady, Grady says he has no recollection of ever being a caretaker at the Overlook, telling Jack “You’re the important one… You have always been the caretaker.” This exists in both mediums, and in both it is true; Grady (and the Overlook) is feeding into Jack’s ego, his most inner need to feel wanted and important. In the novel, though, while Jack starts out also happily soaking in the attention and adoration of the ghosts of traumas past, he is quickly chastised and put into a position where he is no longer in power. When, later in the novel, he gets uncomfortable at the involvement of Danny in the Overlook’s guest’s talks, Lloyd scolds him, saying “Drink your drink, Mr. Torrance. It isn’t a matter that concerns you.” Whereas one Jack forever holds his place of power and adornment, the other quickly becomes imprisoned and stuck in the Overlook’s quicksand.
The movie version of The Shining seems more like a psychological delusion than pure supernatural horror and, though it maintains an ambiguous outlook on which of these is the root cause of Jack’s madness, sees a markedly shallower and seemingly inevitable fall from grace. This psychological highlight seems to point to a very uncanny horror. As Cynthia Freeland says, “What is threatening… is something from ordinary life that has a mysterious and familiar feel yet becomes alien and frightening.” The uncanniness of a father’s hatred and violence towards his family is truly sinister. This holds true in the novel, except that there is a larger influence observed from the hotel on Jack. He is not himself, whereas movie Jack is his very worst self. Towards the end of the novel, Danny breaks through the misty barrier of the Overlook’s haunting in order to talk to Jack. Jack is able to regain sanity in order to help Danny escape. This moment of clarity never comes in the movie, hinting that there was no clarity for him to regain, and the violence was all Jack. Freud says that the concept of the uncanny “signals a disclosure, revelation or exposure of what is ordinarily… repressed… by our ordinary ways of seeing.” A repressed feeling of hatred towards responsibility, towards family, is very uncanny and morbid, and links this uncanny feeling of being lost in the familiar to the psyche of Jack. The Freudian concept of the uncanny is unsettling because it reveals to us our most secret wants, the ones that go against morality and society. Jack’s total release into his primitive need to enact violence on his own family shows that the inner demons of his psyche are terrible beings all on their own. Because he is never redeemed, it seems that the violence and destruction is a form of horrible redemption in and of itself, and releases Jack from holding back. Jack’s tortured psyche is horrible on its own.
The repeated All Work and No Play’s are a good example of this idea, and introduces an eeriness that is very much tied to Jack’s interiority. As Jack Kroll says, “The sight of Torrance’s endlessly repeated sentence chills you with the revelation of a man so clogged and aching… that his desire to kill doesn’t need to be explained by his seizure by sinister and suppurating creatures from a time warp of pure evil.” Jack begins to appear fragmented and tortured in a horribly internalized way; it is eerie and close-hitting. His hard work at the typewriter is chilling when revealed to be one ever-repeating sentence. The repetition of this nothing sentence, and the work that Jack had put into this frenzied meaningless project, is terrifyingly insane — and terrifyingly human in its insanity.
Freeland speaks to how powerful this scene is from a visual standpoint as well, pointing out how the camera “shifts and glides in from the side along a dark hallway. What first seems to be an objective long shot showing Wendy’s distress is slightly repositioned to reveal the back of Jack’s head as he watches her.” The shift in the source of the horror, the re-focusing onto a figure (Jack) who should represent safety or comfort but instead instills fear, underscores the uncanny nature of this scene and this horror. Such innocent things as a typewriter and one’s husband, in a normal context, would not betray any sense of danger. Here, in this scene, they epitomize the danger within the film.
This is not to say that the film is devoid of a supernatural presence; indeed, the supernatural adds to the uncanny. The presence and existence of things that simply should not be mirrors the feelings Jack has that he simply should not be feeling. The ending of the film, for example, shows the great and uncanny image of Jack smiling along with the ghosts he had seen. He should not be in that picture, and the seemingly mundane party relic is infused with all of the awfulness that has happened. While the supernatural is present and ghastly, it has more of a general effect and less directly contributes to Jack’s mental decline.
This psychological horror in the film is effective; the supernatural route of the novel, though, is instead very far-reaching and fantastic. The idea of the shine is more important in the book, especially in terms of how the hotel shines. The shine is the supernatural aura that hangs around both people and places within the story. Danny Torrance is perhaps the figurehead for the shine. Though his powers and visions vary between text and film, the very existence of his shine is integral to the story, to characters like Danny, Jack, and Dick Halloran, and to the backdrop of the Overlook Hotel.
In the movie, the Overlook is simply haunted, and its ghosts are seen because its inhabitants can shine. In The Shining novel, though, the Overlook itself can shine. Jack doesn’t want to kill his family to simply kill them, and isn’t influenced only by ghosts, but is told to do so because the hotel wants to inherit Danny’s power. This dynamic places Jack not as the evil but as the vehicle for evil.
Furthermore, the transformation of the shine itself changes how Danny exists as a character within the story. This is most visible in the imaginary, mystical figure of Tony. In the novel, Tony is Danny from the future (Tony is Danny’s middle name). Tony is not an evil character but a relic from the future coming back to talk to and advise Danny. Additionally, Tony is fully, 100% invisible to others. He speaks in Danny’s mind and has no corporal existence. In the film, Tony is a less mysterious, but more ambiguous character. He is seen as Danny’s imaginary friend, and yet he grows to be more separate as the movie unfolds. Danny expresses Tony’s thoughts by scrunching his index finger and speaking in a spooky growl of a voice. In this way, he is more familiar and less fantastical. He has a recognizable form through Danny. Not only that, but Tony seems less ambiguous and more resolutely evil in the film. Wendy sees him (Tony) as evil because she visually sees him and associates him with the episodes Danny suffers in expressing his psychic visions. Wendy is immediately shown to be weary of and worried about Tony, as Danny is examined by a psychiatrist in the beginning of the film in order to investigate what she sees as a very big problem. Danny isn’t shown to really like Tony in the film either, as he is constantly terrified. This changes the idea of the shine, too, because the idea of the “shine” itself is seen as all bad instead of a metaphysical and multi-layered power that has a spectrum of both good and evil. Danny’s shine is meant to oppose the hateful shine of the Overlook Hotel, yet in the movie, the shine becomes a flat, one-note negative power. It simply reveals the negative past of the hotel, and is therefore tied to such negativity. This detraction from the shine’s importance leads to less of a reliance on the battle of supernatural forces, and instead creates a more vague unreality.
In talking of the “shine,” it is fascinating to look at the stylistic idiosyncrasies through which it is expressed in each medium. Both the movie and the book reference the shine through stylistic details that juxtapose the seen and the unseen. Including these glimpses into other contexts introduces the idea of intrusion and loss of agency within one’s own narrative.
In the novel The Shining, one stylistic recurrence is the use of parentheses in order to reference various tangents that aren’t a part of the narrative but do have deep and significant meaning. The parentheses interrupt the narrative and soak the entire story in references to itself, to the family’s mentioned past and inevitable future, and to random allusions that express each character’s pop culture knowledge and their way of thinking. The first instance of this comes on page 14, where Wendy’s point of view is interrupted with the sentence “(Danny with his arm in a cast).” The image is one that is unfamiliar to the audience at that early point in the novel. Its inclusion, while slightly confusing at first, reflects the invasive nature of thought that is present throughout the novel, and mirrors the invasion of visions and hauntings that emerge at the sight of the Overlook Hotel. This reference to the time that Jack injured Danny is important and present in Wendy’s consciousness. Though it might not yet impact the story, it inherently influences her character and immediately shows us that this is an important thought.
A later instance of this use of parentheses, and one that shows a more abstract thought and a more distinct interruption of the narrative flow, comes later in the novel. As Wendy and Danny stand in the elevator on their way to find Jack, Wendy’s thoughts are interrupted by: “(must have been quite a party) (???WHAT PARTY???)” This is odd, abnormal; it shows how the character is thinking along a structure that is unusual. This thought structure is organic and real, yet simultaneously jumps out as out of place and abnormal. It is a beautiful use of structure to mirror the themes of discomfort and uncanniness that live within each page. This is an example not of an intrusive memory but of a peripheral experience that Jack has had. This portrayal of the shine is messy and abrupt and almost violent in its entrance. This shows that even this already informal way of expressing the shine is fluid and allows for emotion and punctuation to seep into the inner thoughts. Additionally, it allows for the mixture of both inner thoughts and exterior feelings. Wendy is shown to react to her own non-memory, showing that the shine and the characters begin to become intertwined.
Another example, a long one at that, comes when Danny returns to Room 217. “(Curiosity killed the cat my dear redrum, redrum my dear, satisfaction brought him back safe and sound, from toes to crown; from head to ground he was safe and sound. He knew that those things) (are like scary pictures, they can’t hurt you, but oh my god) (what big teeth you have grandma and is that a wolf in a BLUEBEARD suit or a BLUEBEARD in a wolf suit…)” This fragment, this time from Danny’s perspective, is all over the place. They are run on, discombobulated sentence fragments that combine popular sayings (curiosity killed the cat), fairy tales (Little Red Riding Hood), and the introspections of a haunted little boy. The Bluebeard story is one Jack read to Danny, about a man whose secret forbidden door holds inside the desiccated corpses of past wives. Furthermore, the mantra that nothing can hurt him is referencing the comment made by Dick Halloran. This mashup of phrases very accurately describes the introspections of a young child, but they also show the ebbs and flows of how thoughts and shines can change in shape and intensity. This melodic way of expressing the shine is really interesting, as the barriers of the parentheses work to combine all the characters with each shine.
In the film, the shine is portrayed in quicker, subtler, more jarring ways; through quick cuts of cryptic, menacing images. These images are fearsome. They are also only related to the Overlook. There is no image of past events or of outside references and, because of the singular narrative structure within the film, no melding or intrusions of other people’s experiences. There is the blood pouring out of the elevator bank, the Grady twins flitting between their bodies and their corpses. The quick cuts show the menace of each image as well as the intrusion into Danny’s life.
There is also a lot of duality within the visions that are shown, though only when shown to Jack, not Danny. To Jack, empty ballrooms fill with parties and then empty out again. He sees (and interacts with) a beautiful woman in room 237, then sees her morph into an old festering woman. Because the ways in which the shines are shown are so well defined (as opposed to the flexible literary format), the shine-visions are less universal. No longer do they seem applicable to all the characters; instead, they are finely tuned and specified for different characters. Danny’s visions are less corporeal because he can see through their glamour, seeing the gore within. In contrast, Jack’s visions are more fleshed out, laying languid and passively in the background in order to goad Jack into betraying himself. The response to these visions — one with fear, one with pompous acceptance — shows how Jack and Danny differ. While the novel’s shine unites its characters through the horrific, the movie’s shine separates the characters.
The Shining is a universally recognized title, with an equally iconic story. What story that title evokes, though, differs depending on whether one think about the book and the movie. Stephen King’s original story is a fantastical story about an average family; a family haunted by supernatural ghosts caged within a supernatural hotel. The characters are flawed and complex, and the evil, though partly human, lies in the supernatural corrupting the natural. In contrast, the film adaptation helmed by Stanley Kubrick tells the story of a man driven by isolation to engage his darkest urges. It is a story not only of the supernatural but of the uncanny, and delves into the psyche of a madman.