Fans have known for years that Stephen King isn’t a fan of Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 adaptation of his novel The Shining. Telling The Paris Review, that the film was “too cold” with “no sense of emotional investment in the family whatsoever on his part.”
Going further King says “I was really disappointed. It’s certainly beautiful to look at: gorgeous sets, all those Steadicam shots. I used to call it a Cadillac with no engine in it. You can’t do anything with it except admire it as sculpture. You’ve taken away its primary purpose, which is to tell a story. The basic difference that tells you all you need to know is the ending. Near the end of the novel, Jack Torrance tells his son that he loves him, and then he blows up with the hotel. It’s a very passionate climax. In Kubrick’s movie, he freezes to death.”
[Related] Director Mike Flanagan Says Season Two of ‘The Haunting’ is “Unbelievably Scary”
Bringing the story and film together
King’s 1977 novel centers around a young family who has relocated to the remote Overlook Hotel as caretakers. While there, they are threatened by supernatural elements, coupled with the father’s alcoholism. So when Stephen King began working on the sequel to The Shining, Doctor Sleep, he followed his original source work. Which was a universe where the Overlook was destroyed. However, writer-director Mike Flanagan knew that the two creations could, and should collide for audiences.
“I said, ‘Look, I’m a King fanatic, I have been since I’m a kid, you are my hero, but when I read Doctor Sleep, all the images in my head were Kubrick’s images. The Shining is so ubiquitous and has burned itself into the collective imagination of people who love cinema in a way that so few movies have. There’s no other language to tell that story in. If you say ‘Overlook Hotel,’ I see something. It lives right up in my brain because of Stanley Kubrick. You can’t pretend that isn’t the case.”
Flanagan knew he would have to convince King that the differences could be rectified in a Doctor Sleep film. But Flanagan knew it would be an uphill battle to get the author on board.
“He was reluctant. And then I said, ‘Well, let me tell you how I would approach it.’ I pitched him one scene inside the Overlook. I said, ‘The rest of the story, I’m going to try and stay as faithful as I possibly can, but the final fight will take place — instead of on the grounds that used to be the Overlook — it’s actually inside the space. I pitched him one scene, and then he thought about it, and he came back, and said, ‘Okay, then go ahead.’”
“I read the script to this one very, very carefully,” author Stephen King told EW. “Because obviously I wanted to do a good job with the sequel, because people knew the book The Shining, and I thought, I don’t want to screw this up. Mike Flanagan, I’ve enjoyed all his movies, and I’ve worked with him before on Gerald’s Game. So, I read the script very, very carefully and I said to myself, ‘Everything that I ever disliked about the Kubrick version of The Shining is redeemed for me here.”
Flanagan says he felt the pressure, not from King but as a fan. “But you know that, as soon as it’s done, he’s going to see it, and you know, because of what happened with The Shining, if he doesn’t like what you do, he’s not going to be shy. So, there’s this huge fear. Even though he’s not over your shoulder, there’s this sense every day that, yeah, he’s going to see the movie. Just as a fan, I didn’t know if I was going to recover if he watched the film and felt the way he felt about The Shining.”
But luckily Flanagan was able to live up to the author’s expectations.
“I spent the whole movie trying not to throw up”
The director says that after he finished the film, he took it to Maine and gave King a private viewing. “I sat with him in an empty theater and watched the movie with him. I spent the whole movie trying not to throw up, and staring at my own foot, and kind of overanalyzing every single noise he made next to me. The film ended, and the credits came up, and he leaned over and he put his hand on my shoulder, and he said, ‘You did a beautiful job.’
And then I just died… He was like, ‘Having watched this film it actually warms my feelings up towards the Kubrick film.’ That’s when I really kind of freaked out. The whole goal from the beginning was to inch those two back together in any way, to reconcile that gulf of distance between the Kubrick Shining and the King Shining. If there was ever a way to do that, even a little, that was what I wanted as a fan.”
According to Stephen King, Flanagan’s adaptation does work for fans of both.
“I don’t want to get into a big argument about how great the Shining film is that Kubrick did or my feelings about it,” says King. “All I can say is, Mike took my material, he created a terrific story, people who have seen this movie flip for it, and I flipped for it, too. Because he managed to take my novel of Doctor Sleep, the sequel, and somehow weld it seamlessly to the Kubrick version of The Shining, the movie. So, yeah, I liked it a lot.”
Mike Flanagan’s Doctor Sleep stars Ewan McGregor, RebeccaFerguson, Kyliegh Curran, and Jacob Tremblay. The film is currently in theaters everywhere.
