Today's the day. The sun is shining! It's my first post! Such a fun new chapter: an opportunity to develop myself, my mediocre writing capabilities, and my tastes in media! To give my opinion, and receive feedback!
I figured I would begin by pissing off horror movie fans.
As someone who considers myself a lover of horror, both in books and in film, it's well-known that Stanley Kubrick's The Shining (1980) is considered one of the greatest horror movies of all time. It was the first horror movie that I ever consciously watched, and it introduced me to Stephen King, who would go on to become the first novelist I ever loved. It's iconic! The twins in the hallway? The elevator full of blood? All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy? REDRUM? Mention any of these, and you're bound to find someone who loves the film. It's a staple of the horror genre.
It's also over-hyped garbage.
To say nothing of what an inaccurate adaptation it is, the characters have no substance, the story has no value, and the ending is fucking LAME. To say one thing of what an inaccurate adaptation it is, I'm pretty sure Stanley Kubrick read the back of a paperback copy of the book and said, "I can do that."
I mean, it's pretty? I'm a slut for atmospheric winter lighting. The cinematography is artful; like, the drawn-out shots following our characters is a good attempt to fluff the intensity that should have been provided by plot and characters. The score absolutely fucking slaps. The fact that Jack Nicholson plays a character named "Jack" and Danny Lloyd plays a character named "Danny" pleases me immensely. The high pitched ringing that plays when there's an occurrence of "shining" is super cool.
I'm a huge Stephen King fan, and I've read this book several times. The first time I saw the movie, I was eleven, and I thought it was phenomenal. I thought Jack Nicholson was amazing! What a villain! I read the book afterward, but I never really absorbed any of it. When I reread the book when I was nineteen, I figured I'd watch the movie, to see if I still loved it. Just how much the movie upset me was genuinely shocking, starting even with the first scene: Jack getting his interview to work at the Overlook. I love this scene in the book, because we immediately get to see Jack's personality. The damned opening line of the book is "Jack Torrance thought: officious little prick." Jack is immediately portrayed as snarky and self-important, although intelligent. It's later revealed that he has anger issues, and is recovering from alcoholism, but that he loves his family. Jack in the movie, though? From scene one, he just looks mean and crazy. There's no human side to him; he has this villainous stare and this monotonous way of talking. He is introduced as someone who would try to kill his family with an ax.
What is interesting about that? Nothing. The tragedy and tension from the book is completely lost; the horror of a man who loves his family losing his grasp on reality and growing to see the people he loves the most as villains doesn't exist. Movie Jack doesn't give a shit about his family; the hotel is just an excuse to do what he already wanted to do.
Oh my god, and Wendy. This poor woman may as well have gotten murdered with an ax: Stanley Kubrick sure did it to the character. Book Wendy was brave, and had complex human emotion, which is way too much work to write into a script (not surprising, considering writing Jack to even like his wife and child was clearly a herculean effort). Much easier to write "WENDY screams for thirty minutes."
Book Wendy is a woman who has her own personal struggles, like her fear of turning into her hateful mother, and her feelings of inadequacy when she sees how much Danny unconditionally loves his flawed father. Regardless of that, she stays optimistic that their luck as a family can change when they begin their stay in the overlook, hesitant though she is to pity her husband for putting them in such a position. The woman nearly gets beaten to death and manages to keep her wits enough to escape with her life, her son's life, and Dick Hallorann's life. Movie Wendy bounces off the walls, screaming, sometimes carrying food, sometimes a knife.
As far as Movie Danny versus Book Danny goes, there isn't much to screw up: the kid's, like, six. He does seem as morose and "mature" as Book Danny does, and the only main difference that upsets me is how terrified he seems of his father. In the book, he worships the ground his father walks on, to the point where Wendy harbors mild hostility towards her husband because of how second-fiddle she feels in the eyes of their son. In the movie, Danny seems like he wants to start crying through most of their interactions. But, like, can you blame him? Acting with Jack Nicholson probably gave Danny Lloyd real-life dad issues.
The lack of any of the book's narrative is harmful to the movie in other ways, like, why does Jack even "go" insane in the movie (as if he weren't already)? Is it just the isolation of being on top of a mountain with no one but the family he clearly loathes? If so, what does the hotel being haunted have to do with anything? All in all, the haunting of the Movie Overlook has no real effect on the plot. Movie Danny's visions could just be forewarning his father's breakdown, and Movie Jack is just a murderer who hasn't murdered yet. He monologues about his "responsibilities" to the hotel, when he's literally never seen doing any form of upkeep. Book Jack's negligence of his responsibility to the boiler causes the hotel to fucking explode in the end, while Movie Jack has no repercussions from his lack of effort. Basically the only justification for ghosts in the movie is so there's someone let Jack out of the freezer.
Book Overlook seduces Jack in an effort to keep Danny around, so it can keep feeding on his "shine." The hotel sees this struggling man as a means to its own end. It lures him in with its questionable history that he thinks he could write into a bestselling book, and manipulates him into stopping any attempt by his family to leave the hotel. The influence from the hotel substitutes Jack's alcoholism, and he even regresses into old habits from his drinking days, like wiping his mouth compulsively and crunching aspirin. Danny's psychic ability is strong enough that Book Overlook is positively vibrating with the energy it gets from him, enough so that the whole family notices the spooky goings-on. Jack's insistence upon staying even while the elevator runs by itself and they hear people partying like it's nineteen-forty-nine only compounds Wendy's contempt toward her husband.
In the book, Jack fights until the very end to keep his control. Even when he chucks the battery of the snowmobile into the distance, he loves his family, and thinks he can control his spiral. Slipping under the control of the hotel is as easy for him as slipping into the hands of his past alcohol dependency, but he still tries to resist it. The only reason Danny survives in the book is because Jack's love for him breaks the hold of the hotel for long enough that he tells Danny to run away. Movie Jack anticlimactically dies, frozen and hateful, trying to kill the boy that was Book Jack's moral compass.
Stephen King is someone who has struggled with addiction in his life. Jack was supposed to portray that side of him, and what horrors could come from the aggravation of someone struggling with staying sober, trying to make his place in the world, providing for his family, and dealing with the guilt of making them suffer and the frustration of his own inadequacy. Ruining Jack Torrance like Stanley Kubrick did is just a big “fuck you” to Stephen King, and I loathe him for it.
Aside from the big stuff, it’s the little things that really get me. Like, minuscule shit that makes no notable difference. Why is Tony a finger-wiggle? Why an ax instead of a roque mallet? Why room 237 instead of room 217? Why leave out everything about the elevator? Why kill Dick Hallorann? I can understand why some things were just more convenient: a living topiary garden was probably kinda hard to make in 1980, and there was a maze right there. It's just mildly infuriating that the most well-known aspects of The Shining -- the twins, the maze, all eyebrows and no personality makes Jack a dull character -- are things that don't even exist in the god-forsaken book.
To be fair, I'm unnecessarily harsh on inaccurate book-to-film adaptations. It's a hazard of being a pretentious tool. Also, I might have a bias against Jack Nicholson because he ruined this as well as One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, another book that I love with him miscast as the lead in a sub-par film adaptation.
Is this movie just supposed to prove that you don't need characters, plot, or substance to be considered a "masterpiece?" The score for this movie, as I mentioned, is the shit, but it shouldn’t be up to the soundtrack and the cinematography to carry a two-and-a-half hour movie. If being pretty was all that was required to make a movie great, we would treat Lars Von Trier's Melancholia like it was Citizen Kane.
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