This is Going to Hurt_ (2005), but they also contain passages that read like a parody of _The Shining_ : a young woman who is forced to stay in her room throughout the film by her tyrannical father; a series of men who keep her locked up and sedate her with drugs; the final reveal that the girl was not all that crazy after all.
A short story called 'The Seducer' features a woman who is imprisoned in her own house by the very same monster who later torments King's characters. A _Lovecraftian_ influence is also at work. 'The Seducer' was published in 'The Thing in the Pit' (1948). That tale is also dedicated to Dora Miller, 'who asked me to dedicate this to her'.
In 'The Long Road Home' from _Skeleton Crew_ (1985), the hero is returning from war and goes to his old house to see if anyone had survived; it is empty except for the dog, who keeps vigil for a year and then is eaten by the monstrous Thing in the Pit. The ending of 'Wampyr' (1953) evokes the final scene of 'The Mist', with the hero who is about to be devoured finding out that his fiancée is about to deliver a baby, thus putting the monster in an even more monstrous position: 'It was then that the man began to grow uneasy. It would be too horrible for him to feel the life within her burst forth and to see it eaten up by the beast.' The _Skeleton Crew_ story is dedicated to Dora Miller and her brother-in-law's dog which died 'one horrible evening'. In _Hearts in Atlantis_ (1999), Dean R Koontz writes of an old house 'so decrepit with decay' that it was like a 'living skeleton'. It was from that house that its 'ghost', Cuthbert, was last seen walking up to a 'silent lake, black and chill'.
**The Horror of Realism**
When the first _Dark Tower_ film was released in 1982, Stephen King was unhappy with it:
One of the problems with [the film] is that it's not _my_ house. To see my fictional, romanticized version of a house, is interesting. It belongs to a child's idea of the great American horror. To see this dark, Gothic fortress in a real world, in its gritty, real world way, where it's falling down and it's crumbling and rotting... that's another thing. The house in my novel never changes. So to have a movie, not based on the novel, be the house. This is the big difference. You don't have the kind of 'It was a dark and stormy night' kind of thing. The audience will come out of that saying, 'I've been there. That's real.'
Similarly, King's characters in the first film are not nearly as frightening as they are in the novels: 'The best part about it, especially to my surprise, was that the character of Jake. He was still in the book. The script [for the film] was so badly written, he wasn't in it at all. So suddenly the screenwriters just wrote him out of the picture'. That is not entirely true: Jake did appear in 'Little Sisters', the short story that was published alongside the script.
The opening scene in the film is very different from that of the book; indeed, it is rather more realistic. Of course, any film adaptation of _The Shining_ must be different from the novel in one important way: as Kubrick himself said, 'That story must be told – the story about how Danny got killed'. After all, there can be only one version of _The Shining_ , not three. The film differs from the book in one other very significant way: it ends abruptly. The film has to end after Danny dies, but there is no room to show us how he died. Kubrick realized that, and so the film ends with a shot of a woman (Teddy) waking up on a plane.
It is possible that Stephen King learned his lesson from this, as he later gave his readers an in-depth ending to the novel, one that had never been seen before in any book or film: one that is far more horrific than anything contained in the opening sequence of the film. For example, the novel starts with a scene in which Jack Nicholson does battle with his fearsome hallucinations:
Nine shots of Seconal and I'm ready to join the Marines or maybe even take a shot at the great beyond. Or maybe I'll head on out west where I was before I came to Maine. Colorado would be nice. The mountains there are rugged enough for my taste. Yeah, rugged enough.
Yet as the book progresses, the terror intensifies. Indeed, by the end of the book, Jack Nicholson is confronted by a hellish scene in which he is attacked by a giant snake in his hotel room. Jack survives and finds himself at the bottom of a massive crevasse, still clutching the knife with which he fended off the snake. All alone, this is perhaps the most terrifying of all of the many scenes where Jack is confronting his fear and defeating it. The book continues on for several more pages, including one passage describing Jack taking a bath and thinking about how nice it would be to die (and wondering if 'some people might even claim' that it was suicide); it finishes with him taking the 'shame' of his suicide into the 'final dark realm'.
There are some obvious parallels between _The Shining_ and Kubrick's _2001_. King writes about 'the idea of going to a place in deep space that is a parallel of the human soul', and he also talks about 'the problem of how to deal with the dark side of human nature' ( _The Shining_ , p. 21). There is, too, a strong sense of the _fated_ hero in Kubrick's _2001_. An interesting example of this comes from a brief exchange between the scientists:
The Doctor: You think they got to me? Kaufman: Could be. The Doctor: They're smarter than we thought. They're all over the base.
Indeed, in 'The Shining', Jack's own journey towards the Overlook Hotel is very similar to the hero's journey in Kubrick's film. In a recent interview, King noted:
One thing about Kubrick, you see, is that he's a very intelligent man. He's got a sense of humor, and he's got this sense of doom, and I don't mean in a gothic sort of way. When he said to me, 'Well, what do you think of my plans?' And I said, 'Well, I'm not sure. The film's about haunted houses, and I'm trying to tell a really scary story, and I don't think yours is really that scary,' and so he said, 'I think you're wrong.' And he had me there. I didn't have to tell him why the story wasn't that scary. He was smarter than me.
The point is that _The Shining_ is about the dangers of the Overlook Hotel as a metaphor for the dangers of technology, the danger of technology 'going on the blink' and causing a meltdown like that that occurred at Chernobyl in Ukraine in 1986. In a speech that Kubrick gave before King first saw the completed film, he talked about the need to 'create an absolutely frightening experience for the viewer' that 'would create the feeling of being inside a totally evil, totally mad world' ( _For Kubrick_ , p. 61).
Jack, his son, and all the others are trying to escape the effects of technology that have led to the break-up of a family, the death of a father, the break-up of a marriage, and the murder of a little boy. If Kubrick was attempting to describe how America came to be a technologically advanced, global superpower, then he achieved his goal. However, when we look closely at the history of American technology and America itself, it is clear that the two themes of technophobia and genocide could not be more connected. Perhaps that is one of the reasons why the book is so famous. In a 2005 interview, one of the special effects technicians on the film referred to Kubrick as 'a political genius'. He noted:
I would say that it's really an interesting lesson that we learned, that these projects are really too complicated to really give someone an honest opinion when they ask for your honest opinion. But to his credit, I must say that he was very good about making up his own mind. I mean, he hired the right people to work with him, and he gave them a bit of freedom. But for the most part he was good, because if he didn't like something, he would let you know and say, 'This is what I want you to do,' or, 'You could do that if you really wanted.'
Like most writers who have written successful novels, King has come to a realization that there is not a great deal of difference between the author and the reader. King's books are intended to be enjoyed by the reader (although not necessarily by the reader alone). But his readers are still fictional characters in much the same way that they are characters in his novels. We are all Jack Torrances.
**Jack Nicholson and the _Shining_
