A comparison of Stanley Kubrick and Mike Flanagan’s interpretations of Stephen King’s works, and an examination of why Flanagan is one of the best horror directors of our time.
**CONTENT WARNING: Mentions of violence, child harm/death**
Here there be spoilers
As a huge horror and Stephen King fan, I recently embarked on a journey into the life of Danny Torrence. I saw The Shining a long time ago, prior to reading the book a few years later. I watched the director’s cut of Doctor Sleep a few months ago and was blown away. But I wanted the whole story. Over the past few weeks, I re-read The Shining, gave that movie a second watch, read Doctor Sleep for the first time, watched the theatrical cut for the first time, and then finished it off with a re-watch of the director’s cut for fresh comparison. I have to say, it’s been quite a ride and one that I can’t refrain from discussing.
Adapting Books to the Big Screen
It’s an age-old agreement that a movie is never an accurate depiction of the book it is based on. The way I have always seen it, the real criteria for a worthy adaptation isn’t how verbatim it is. After all, there are certain things that have to change when translating things to a movie format. For one thing, if every single detail in a book was put into a movie, most of the time it would be far too long for standard film length (although some recent adaptations have worked around this by adapting books into television shows instead of movies in order to give them extra time to explore the story). Additionally, books are often more mentally internal compared to movies, which must rely on visually showing what’s happening, short of narrating every single thought of the characters. As such, the expectation should not be whether or not the movie is exactly like the book, but rather if the director understood the source material well enough to translate it into a worthy version for the big screen, making changes as necessary to stick to the tone and message of the book. With that criteria in mind, let’s take a look at how Stanley Kubrick and Mike Flanagan each approached their film adaptations.
The Shining
We’ll start at the beginning. Stephen King published The Shining in 1977, and it was followed by Kubrick’s film adaptation in 1980. I think it’s fair to say that this is among King’s most popular works and the film has long been praised within the horror community. As a fan of horror, I was a bit thrown off when I originally saw it and did not find it to be particularly disturbing. Now that I’ve watched it again right after finishing the book, I am all the more puzzled at its fame. While Kubrick certainly has an eye for visually stimulating cinematography, he left out much of what made the story so tense and terrifying.
The Characters
As mentioned, it can be difficult to properly translate a book to a movie when there is a lot of internal characterization, and the book The Shining had an abundance of this. I can see where it might have been difficult for Kubrick to portray Jack (Jack Nicholson), Wendy (Shelley Duvall), and Danny’s (Danny Lloyd) internal struggles. The problem is, he didn’t really seem to try. Jack is just crazy, and Wendy and Danny are basically scared ragdolls who have a bunch of things happen at them. It’s Writing 101 to avoid having characters who merely react to things as they happen, rather than proactive characters who make things happen.
In the book, Danny steals the keys and goes into room 217—the room number is changed to 237 in the movie—knowing it is a scary room, because he can’t stand not knowing what it contains and whether it can actually carry the power to hurt him. In the movie, Danny sees that the door is open and wanders inside. In the book, Danny even stands up to Jack at the end, despite knowing Jack is literally trying to kill him, and is able to bring Jack’s true nature forward momentarily in resistance to the hotel’s influence. It’s this act that ultimately saves Danny and Wendy. In the movie, Danny doesn’t do much besides backtrack on his footprints in the snow to trick Jack. Most of the movie, he just sort of wanders around and looks scared.
As for Wendy and Jack, in the book they have this tense history to their relationship where they both have contemplated divorce, but they both love each other enough to keep trying. Jack was much more violent prior to coming to the hotel—having beaten-up a student of his and broken Danny’s arm instead of only dislocating it—but he’s sober now and really trying to be a good father and husband. Wendy never fully trusts that he’s sober, constantly wary of his temper and smelling his breath for a sign of alcohol. I just didn’t feel any of this depth of their relationship in the movie.
The Boiler Room
In the book, we have the ticking time bomb of the boiler room. If Jack forgets to check on it regularly, the pressure will build up and explode, taking the hotel and the family with it. In fact, that’s what ultimately does the hotel and Jack in at the end. In the movie, Wendy checks the boiler one time and it doesn’t particularly focus on what she’s doing. The hotel doesn’t explode, and Jack freezes to death outside while hunting down his son. The reason why the pressure gauge is so important in the book, though, isn’t just because it could cause the hotel to explode, but because it represents Jack’s internal pressure gauge. Throughout the book, he keeps having intrusive, violent thoughts caused by the influence of the hotel’s dark nature, but doesn’t follow through with them at first. As the boiler room’s pressure gauge continues to build, the hotel’s influence on Jack builds the pressure inside of him until he “explodes” with violent behavior. Taking out the visual analog to Jack’s internal struggle for the movie shows a fundamental lack of understanding of the book.
The Horror
One of the biggest issues I have with the movie is that Kubrick adapted a horror book, but took out 90% of the scary scenes and replaced them with his own vaguely spooky content. I guess other people find the movie to be scary, but in light of the most terrifying scenes in the book that were completely absent, the movie pales in comparison. I would have loved to see the hedge animals stalking Danny through the snow or the wasps attacking them in the night, to name a few (fun fact, right after I read the wasp swarm scene, I was chased by a hornet, so that really amped up the terror). Even the room 217/237 scene, which actually made it into the movie, was completely altered to be less scary. He skipped over Danny’s horrifying experience altogether, and then when Jack went to check the room himself, he . . . starts making out with a random stranger? Really? First of all, his wife was downstairs. Secondly, he’s stranded in the middle of nowhere, and his first reaction to seeing a stranger in the house is to kiss her, not wonder why she’s there? I know she was hot and naked and all, but come on, dude. It cheapened the underlying sense of tension that came with them believing they had an intruder in the house, when there was no one who could reach them and no one they could turn to for help.
In return for omitting pretty much all of the frightening scenes from the book, Kubrick added in some eerie twins and a geyser of blood coming from the elevator, which sounds scarier than I actually found it to be. I did like the visual of the maze that he added, I just wish it didn’t completely replace the hedge animals. I’ll give him two things, though: the axe was a more terrifying weapon choice than the roque mallet, and the movie actually shows how Redrum came to be written on the wall.
Overall Adaptation
It may seem like I’m just being nitpicky about various changes, but my point in all of this is that the changes Kubrick made simply did not feel justified to me. He took out the majority of the tone, character development, horror, and throughlines. All in all, it felt like he didn’t really comprehend the core of what makes the book what it is, and instead went about making a movie showcasing whatever he wanted. As far as adapting a book into a movie goes, I would give it a 3 out of 10.
Doctor Sleep
While I technically originally watched The Shining before reading its original book, they were far enough apart for me the first time around that I wasn’t thinking much about the movie while reading it. On the other hand, the movie for Doctor Sleep was still fairly fresh in my mind when I read the book. It’s possible this biased some of my opinions, since I didn’t get to experience the book on its own merit. In any case, my view of the Doctor Sleep adaptation is the complete opposite of my view of The Shining’s. I fell in love with the movie while I was watching it, but I’m not totally sure I would have cared much for the book if I’d read it first.
A Sequel, But Also Its Own Thing
Doctor Sleep may be a sequel to The Shining, but tonally it is a drastically different story. The Shining is a claustrophobic tale of an unstable family locked in isolation while haunted by ghosts and alcoholism. Doctor Sleep spans several locations and is more about being hunted than haunted, though the struggle with alcoholism remains. In Doctor Sleep, it’s Danny’s—now going by Dan (Ewan McGregor)—turn to become a mentor to a child with the shining, a tween girl named Abra (Kyliegh Curran) who has caught the attention of a group of child-murdering immortals, the True Knot, who steal people’s shining—which they call steam. There aren’t as many horror scenes in this book as there are in The Shining, though it’s not without its moments.
The movie takes the sequel a step further by incorporating some of Kubrick’s changes, while also sticking to the source material. Despite not being a fan of The Shining’s adaptation, I have to say I thought Mike Flanagan’s melding of all the sources to be a stroke of genius. Not only was he able to appeal to fans of both versions, but he was also able to leverage Kubrick’s changes into a more fitting climax for the story.
The Big Finale
In the book, the big finale takes place at the campground that has been set up on the same ground that once was the Overlook, but in the movie, since the Overlook Hotel didn’t explode in Kubrick’s version, Flanagan was able to have the ending set inside the hotel itself. This change allowed Dan to share a beautiful moment with his father at the same bar Jack sat at in The Shining, and it brought back several classic visuals of the hotel.
Another difference in the finale was actually bringing Abra along in person, instead of as an astral projection as in the book. While it’s understandable that King might not want Abra physically there, where she could be in grave danger, it’s also much more impactful to have the main character there for the big showdown.
One other thing Flanagan did with the finale that I really appreciate is that he found a way to bring in the scene that Kubrick took out of his finale with Danny standing up to Jack. In this context, Dan is the one who is possessed by the ghosts, and Abra stands up to him in a scene that almost exactly replicates the scene from The Shining. Dan is able to pull himself to the forefront of his consciousness and control his body enough to run to the boiler room and set it up to explode. I love that Flanagan was able to put back this missing piece that Kubrick removed.
The Horror
While Kubrick reduced the horror from the book (in my opinion), Flanagan actually amplified it in his movie. For example, the death of the Baseball Boy (Jacob Tremblay) was described briefly, almost clinically, in the book, but in the movie it was one of the most intense scenes I’ve seen, leaving me shocked at how disturbing they went with it.
The stakes never felt all that high in the book. The only person on the good side who dies is Abra’s great-grandma, Concetta “Momo”, who passes from cancer while in her nineties so it isn’t exactly a horrific death. In the movie, Abra and her mom are the only good guy who makes it out alive. Dan’s friend Billy (Cliff Curtis) dying was one of the moments that stuck with me the most upon reflection of the movie—though this wasn’t the first time Cliff Curtis has had a powerful death scene that lingered with me; he’s really good at those. Abra’s dad (Zackary Momoh) gets murdered by the True Knot, and Dan sacrifices himself to stop Rose (Rebecca Ferguson) and blow up the hotel. I much preferred this version where the good side doesn’t come out completely unscathed.
While both the book and the movie include Dan locking away ghosts in his mind, this was also amplified in the movie. In the book, Dan only locks away two ghosts as a child, Mrs. Massey and Horace Derwent, then throughout the book he also locks up Concetta’s steam when she dies so that he can weaponize it against the True Knot. He does release all three when the finale occurs, but Mrs. Massey has become a pile of ash by then, so it’s really just the two ghosts at that point. In the movie, by the time the main events take place, he has trapped ALL of the ghosts from the overlook in his head, and he releases them all to destroy Rose the Hat. While Concetta’s destruction of the majority of the True Knot is intense, the visual of a dozen ghosts swarming on Rose is wonderful, especially since it came with a bump in terror as Dan realizes that he now has to deal with them as well.
The book did have one big horror motif throughout that wasn’t incorporated into the book. Rose the Hat sometimes has just one tooth, or tusk. Um, okay. What does that even mean? I never could really picture that, so I’m completely fine with Flanagan’s decision to leave it out. Rose was terrifying enough without it.
Other Changes
Although Flanagan did shift, remove, or merge a number of things, many of the scenes in the movie are similar to the book. Considering that the theatrical release was two and a half hours, and the director’s cut a full three hours, it is completely understandable that some of the content was trimmed or merged. As I said earlier, the true mark of a good adaptation isn’t that there are no changes at all, but that the changes are justified and the core of the story shines through. In this case, the changes do truly feel justified, and in many situations felt like an improvement to me. In fact, Flanagan somehow managed to make the tone of the movie feel more magical than the book did. Since I watched the movie first, I typically pictured the scenes in my head when they were described in the book, but I often felt there was something lacking in the book’s descriptions. I kept having a “That’s it?” feeling while going through the scenes when I compared them to the beautiful portrayals in the movie. It was as if Flanagan took the core of the book and expounded on it to be more powerful than what the book offered.
Ironically, as with The Shining, this book also contained a ticking time bomb of sorts that was removed in the film adaptation, but in this case it was a more reasonable choice to make. When the True Knot kills the Baseball Boy, they don’t realize that he has the measles, and throughout the book more and more members become infected with it as their defenses are loosened due to their lack of new steam. This adds extra pressure for them to find a new source of steam. Although this factor was missing from the movie, I never once questioned their urgency at finding new steam regardless. They still were almost out of stock, so it made perfect sense that they would go to such great lengths to track down Abra.
The one other massive change was the removal of a huge twist in Abra and Dan’s connection. On Concetta’s deathbed, she and Dan piece together the truth: Lucy’s (Jocelin Donahue) unknown father was none other than the one, the only, Jack Torrence! So Dan and Abra are literally related, and this is used to explain some of Abra’s Jack-like tendencies and anger issues. Since the movie has zero reference to this whatsoever, I was aghast when I uncovered this truth in the book. But honestly, I’m not entirely sure that I like it. Yes, we all know Jack was a scamp and an alcoholic, and sure, maybe he would have cheated on Wendy if given the chance. But the fact that an affair never once crossed his mind during the course of The Shining makes this retconned factoid feel forced. If it hadn’t been King himself who inserted this piece of information into the story, I wouldn’t have accepted it as canon.
Overall Adaptation
These two adaptations couldn’t be more opposite. Kubrick took The Shining, threw out whatever he felt like, and produced whatever he wanted. Flanagan saw the potential in Doctor Sleep and cultivated it into a more beautiful, more horrifying, more tragic story. It’s hard to believe, but this is an instance where the movie actually improved the book, in my opinion. On a scale of adapting books to movies, I’d give it 10/10.
The Directors
One last aspect I wanted to delve into was the directors themselves, on a broader spectrum. I mentioned that Kubrick does have a good eye for visuals, but unfortunately that’s one of the only complements I can give him. I know this is probably controversial for me to say, because he was such a well-renowned director, but I never really understood his materials. The one movie of his that I love is Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. The difference between this movie and his others is that it is less visually stunning, but it is filled with amazing satire and humor, something his other films seem to lack. That movie aside, I generally get the impression from Kubrick that he was rather pretentious and tried too hard to make things artful without really trying to make a story worth telling.
Flanagan is staking his claim as a prolific horror director. Oculus is one of my favorite horror films, and he’s no stranger to book adaptations. He managed to take Gerald’s Game—a book that takes place mostly inside someone’s head—and turn it into a worthy screen adaption. He’s also the creator of the Haunting of . . . mini-series. I loved both Haunting of Hill House and Haunting of Bly Manor, but what really impressed me was when I read Haunting of Hill House following watching the show. I’m just going to say it: that book was not great. It was confusing and boring. Flanagan basically changed the entire thing so much that it’s hardly the same story, which could be considered a bad move for an adaptation, but in this instance he took a bizarre and hard to follow story and turned it into this beautiful and tragic horror character piece. Whereas Kubrick took an engaging book and ruined all the best parts, Flanagan seems to know how to pull out the best essence from written stories. I can’t wait to see more of what he can do.
Conclusion
Kubrick didn’t really understand what King’s intention was with The Shining, but Flanagan took Doctor Sleep and made it better, even while incorporating aspects of Kubrick’s adaptation. Doctor Sleep is the clear winner here.