by George Beahm
With the passage of thirty-seven years, The Shining has lost none of its considerable power as a narrative. Considered by college professors as King’s best and most teachable novel because of its psychological complexity, Michael Collings explains,
The Shining also represents one of King’s few narrative excursions beyond New England. To this extent, his story of greed, moral corruption, and haunting fear represents a transfer of the darker elements of King’s New England—and Hawthorne’s, and Poe’s, and Lovecraft’s—to the newly opened West. King amplifies this sense of transplanted literary heritage with multiple allusions to mainstream writers (Frank Norris, Shirley Jackson, and others), horror writers (it is almost impossible to read the novel without recalling again and again Poe’s “The Mask of the Red Death,” or missing offhand allusions to Ray Bradbury), modern dramatists (the novel is structured like a five-act play, with its own prologue in the separately published original introduction, “Before the Play”), and others. In fact, The Shining is one of King’s most teachable novels simply because in it he consciously incorporates so much of his own reading background, while at the same time using those references to create unique sequences of symbolic images. The Shining functions throughout on several levels—literal, symbolic, metaphorical—often with characters themselves pointing out the connections the readers should be making, as in Jack Torrance’s elaborate meditations on the meaning of wasps. The novel provides a casebook example of literary nurturing, owing much of its power to King’s articulate manipulation of others’ words and images in the process of creating his own. This is not to suggest that The Shining is limited by its literary connections; on the contrary, here King demonstrates an unusual skill in controlling outside references, in matching his style to meet the needs both of his story and of his literary texture.
The Shining is the second of King’s “Big Three”—three novels completed during his first decade as a published novelist that to this day still largely define his role in American letters and that provide an internal standard against which almost all of his subsequent books have been judged: ’Salem’s Lot, The Shining, and The Stand.
In other words, The Shining is an enduring classic. King friend and literary collaborator Peter Straub, in Horror: 100 Best Books, wrote, “I can’t think of another book in the field of horror that affected me as strongly, and of only very few outside it. In its uniting of an almost bruising literary power, a deep sensitivity to individual experience, and its operatic convictions, it is a very significant work of art.”
In the hands of a hack novelist, The Shining would have been an eminently forgettable book, but King realized that in order to terrify—to fulfill the highest level of art in a horror novel—he would have to create fully rounded characters that aroused the reader’s empathy.
Jack Torrance, the protagonist of the novel, rings true because he’s a down-on-his-luck guy at the end of his fraying rope, which is already unraveling. In an essay, “On The Shining,” King wrote, “I saw a face that hypnotized me because it was, to a large extent, my own.… The book became a ritual burning of hate and pain, and in the actual writing, done in a quiet, rented room overlooking the Flatiron Mountains, I found myself mesmerized by the story.”
Recalling the days not too long before that when King also found himself at the end of his fraying rope, he was able to transmute those experiences and channel them into the character Jack Torrance, a novelist who was clearly out of control and nearly driven mad by frustration in the process. King only had to look within himself to tap into Torrance’s well of despair:
During those years before Carrie allowed me to write full-time, I felt like a man caught in a malign funhouse, blundering his way around with increasing desperation, looking for the way out. I had my dark nights when I saw myself at fifty, my hair a salt-and-pepper color that was more salt than pepper, my nose full of those burst veins that are known in the services as “drinkers’ tattoos,” my trunk full of unpublished stories and novels.
The Shining remains (to date) the only novel to which King’s written a sequel (Doctor Sleep, 2013), and it spawned a movie adaptation so divergent from the book that King himself stepped in to write a screenplay for a made-for-TV movie (ABC-TV, 1997).
Stanley Kubrick’s reimagined version of the book is best termed “Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining,” to differentiate it from King’s made-for-TV movie.
STANLEY KUBRICK’S THE SHINING
In numerous interviews over the years, King has stated that he considers a book as a separate entity from the movie adapted from it. Nonetheless, he still harbors strong feelings when a director forcibly imposes his or her vision onto one of his own books, especially if the adaptation omits key points. King’s book The Shining was “kubricked”—that is to say, bent, folded, spindled, and mutilated to accommodate Kubrick’s vision, instead of giving us King’s.
The Shining is in many ways a brilliant, disturbing, and admittedly unnerving film, despite its tonal divergence from the novel. Moreover, as King has pointed out on numerous occasions, the casting of Jack Nicholson was the triumph of box office bankability over proper casting. Coming off the success of his role as R. P. McMurphy in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Nicholson, said King, comes off as a loony from the beginning of the movie, which significantly undermines our sympathy for him.
What’s lost in translation, King says, is the heart of the film: the love Jack Torrance has for his family, which becomes imperiled when the insidious effects of the Overlook Hotel’s haunted history take a cumulative, psychic toll on Jack: He finally snaps and loses his tenuous grasp on reality.
A ROPE WITH WHICH TO HANG ONESELF
After King vocally criticized the movie at length in multiple venues, Stanley Kubrick had had enough, and one of the conditions of allowing King to remake the movie was that he stop the endless kvetching to the media. King dutifully complied.
At a press conference to promote the remake, King said, “In order to get this project off the ground, a deal was made between me, Warner Brothers, and Stanley Kubrick. One of his stipulations was that I would not talk about his version of the film, so I don’t … because I can’t. If you ask me about it, I’ll say ‘No comment.’”
Directed by King’s friend Mick Garris, based on King’s own screenplay, with Steven Weber in the title role of Jack Torrance, and Rebecca De Mornay as his wife, Wendy, we finally see The Shining through a new and sympathetic lens: It’s all about family; it’s specifically about how the Torrances are afflicted with major fissures in the family structure that threaten to break it asunder.
At a press conference held in Pasadena on January 9, 1997, Stephen King, who also doubled as an executive producer for the $23 million, six-hour movie, shed light on why he felt impelled to go back to the drawing board and remake the film, even though Kubrick’s was well-regarded by the general public, critics, and Kubrick fans. As King told the media, “Doing The Shining was like a dream to me, to be able to do it, to have it put together, to have ABC be as welcoming and supportive of the project as they were, and to get a chance to work with Mick Garris again, after working with him on The Stand, and having that turn out the way that it did, to get a chance to work with the cast that I did.”
Filming at the Stanley proved to be a challenge. Shooting on location always presents its own host of problems, but who would have thought the cast and crew would have to endure ghostly sightings? From TV Guide (April 26, 1997):
Tonight, even as crew members sweep away the confetti from the dance floor, the Stanley looks like a train wreck. The hotel, built in 1909 as a getaway for the rich, has been transformed into a studio set, with all 92 rooms occupied by cast and crew. Everything that’s tough about making a movie has been crammed into the first three weeks of shooting: makeup effects, snow, no snow, cold, night shooting, a child actor who can only work half days, explosions—everything. And then there are the real ghosts. Doorknobs turn. Mysterious thumping disrupts shooting. “One of our cost
ume people went to bed one night,” says director Garris (The Stand). “Five minutes after he hit the sack something sat down on the bed next to him.” Weber has heard the stories, too. “When you have big, beefy grips come down to breakfast and say, ‘Man, something walked through me last night!’, you know they are not kidding.”
The Stanley Hotel Shines On
As I write this, it’s Halloween and, appropriately, IKEA released a horror-themed commercial showing a young boy named Danny pedaling around in an IKEA retail store, replete with cobwebbed skeletons and other macabre touches, that culminates on a happy note: the frightening-looking pair who urge him to “come play with us” are in fact his parents.
It’s an imaginative, timely ad, and if nothing else, it shows the enduring power of Stanley Kubrick’s vision of The Shining. No one needed to be told about the ad’s inspiration because it’s long since become a part of our popular culture, just like Carrie has become a symbol of a put-upon girl who is perceived as an ugly duckling.
In a disclaimer to The Shining, King writes: “Some of the most beautiful resort hotels in the world are located in Colorado, but the hotel in these pages is based on none of them. The Overlook and the people associated with it exist wholly within the author’s imagination.” But in the real world, the Stanley Hotel does have its own ghost stories, as Lindsey Galloway of BBC Travel pointed out in a story online in March 2014:
Though King called the hotel in his book The Overlook, the fictional Overlook and the real-life Stanley not only look alike, with sprawling front porches and crisp Georgian architecture, but both were completed in 1909.… The Stanley’s original MacGregor Ballroom, with its raised stage and large windows showcasing expansive mountain views, was reincarnated in the pages of The Shining.…
Long before King’s stay, room [217] had a history. In 1917, the chief housekeeper Elizabeth Wilson was lighting the hotel’s acetylene lanterns during a storm in case the electricity went out. When she went to light the one in what is now room 217, the lantern exploded, blasting out the floor beneath her feet and sending her falling down to the story below.
She survived (albeit with two broken ankles). Even so, guests of 217 report her spirit stops by on occasion—usually to tidy things up, sometimes putting stray items away or unpacking a suitcase. The hauntings, both the fictional and the ostensibly real, hardly deter guests. In fact, room 217 is usually booked months in advance.
Not surprisingly, the hotel capitalizes on the Stephen King tie-in: In its gift store, you can buy a coffee mug or T-shirt labeled REDRUM year-round, but when it’s Halloween, the Stanley celebrates in style with The Shining–themed events.
There’s a masquerade party, and The Shining ball, a danse macabre, but for those who aren’t in the spirits to dress up, drink and dance, there’s spirits of a different kind available on the hotel’s ghost tour, which runs year-round to satisfy demand: the tour will teach you everything you want to learn about the paranormal activity of the Stanley Hotel. The tour “begins with an introduction into what paranormal activity is and an explanation of the different types of paranormal phenomenon and experiences that we have at The Stanley Hotel. From there we will venture to some of the most paranormal areas of the Stanley Hotel property,” says its Web site.
Two bottles of beer with art inspired by The Shining, bottled for the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, Colorado.
21
NIGHT SHIFT
1978; ORIGINAL TITLE: NIGHT MOVES
A press conference for Graveyard Shift at a Bangor theater; screenwriter, John Esposito; director, Ralph S. Singleton, and Stephen King.
A collection of short stories titled after the Bob Seger song, the book’s title was subsequently changed to Night Shift, commonly known in the workaday world as the “graveyard shift.”
Actually, it’s a little-known fact that early promo material went out with the book titled Night Moves, but Rick Hautala, in a conversation with King, kept hammering away at him, saying Night Shift was a better title. King agreed, and the title was changed in midstream.
These short stories, culled from their original appearances in Cavalier, Maine, Penthouse, Cosmopolitan, and Gallery, make for a remarkable collection. All but one, an epistolary story titled “Jerusalem’s Lot,” were optioned for the movies, and the collection as a whole shows King’s skill at writing science fiction, horror, suspense, and mainstream fiction. As novelist John D. MacDonald wrote in his introduction,
Now at the risk of being an iconoclast I will say that I do not give a diddly-whoop what Stephen King chooses as an area in which to write. The fact that he presently enjoys writing in the field of spooks and spells and slitherings in the cellar is to me the least important and useful fact about the man anyone can relate.… One of the most resonant and affecting stories in this book is “The Last Rung on the Ladder.” A gem. Nary a rustle nor breath of other worlds in it.
Here are some facts about these stories:
“Jerusalem’s Lot,” an epistolary story, foreshadows ’Salem’s Lot.
“Graveyard Shift” recalls King’s days as a dyer at the Worumbo Mill, where he worked during high school and in the summers during college.
“Night Surf” foreshadows The Stand, with its A6 virus.
“I Am the Doorway” is the kind of horror story masquerading as science fiction that he submitted to science fiction magazines.
“The Mangler” draws on his experiences working at the New Franklin Laundry in Bangor.
“Trucks” is the basis for the movie Maximum Overdrive, directed by King.
“The Lawnmower Man” was made into a movie and also a comic book.
“Children of the Corn” was made into a movie and spawned several forgettable sequels that made me want to tear my eyeballs out of their sockets. (Counting the original adaptation, there are nine in total.)
“One for the Road” ties into “Jerusalem’s Lot” and ’Salem’s Lot.
“The Woman in the Room” is a poignant story that draws on King’s personal experience of his mother dying of cancer. (It was adapted by Frank Darabont as a “dollar baby” movie, the rights for which were sold for one buck, with the proviso that it wouldn’t be shown for profit, and not released without permission as a commercial product.)
“I Know What You Need” is King’s first appearance in a mainstream magazine (Cosmopolitan, September 1976). The story was sold by his agent at the time, Kirby McCauley, who placed several stories with well-paying magazines to show King he could produce the goods as a literary agent. (McCauley, who edited the groundbreaking horror anthology Dark Forces, which included King’s “The Mist,” subsequently engineered King’s move from Doubleday to New American Library, in a multiple-book deal that earned King his first big advance.)
In a lengthy, informal foreword to Night Shift, King writes:
I didn’t write them for money; I wrote them because it occurred to me to write them. I have a marketable obsession. There are madmen and madwomen in padded cells the world over who are not so lucky.
I am not a great artist, but I have always felt impelled to write.
There are critics, including John D. MacDonald, who would dispute that King is not a great artist. “The Woman in the Room” and “The Last Rung on the Ladder” are not simplistic fictions. Even at this early stage in his career, King separated himself from his contemporaries by hitting high notes beyond their range. Later, in Different Seasons (1982), we see him flex his authorial muscles with longer stories that buttress their arguments: King is no hack writing horror but, instead, a writer who challenges himself and stretches to create complex fiction that resonates.
Keep on Trucking: Maximum Overdrive
As anyone who lives in North Carolina will tell you, July and August can be unbearably muggy. Now imagine having to spend a summer filming a movie there and being a first-time director. It doesn’t get much more challenging than that.
Far from his stomping grounds in Bangor, Maine, Stephen King set up shop at a du
mmy truck stop ten minutes out of Wilmington, North Carolina. It was such a convincing set that truckers pulled in for chow and gas.
Unfortunately, the movie itself drove viewers away. Based on “Trucks,” a short story published in Cavalier magazine, Maximum Overdrive is a good example of how a story capable of suspending the reader’s disbelief is nonetheless difficult to translate for the big screen, even when the screenplay is written by the author.
It also speaks to how difficult it is to make a convincing movie by bringing to life inanimate objects like trucks. Even with the best of intentions, “Trucks” would be a challenge for any director, but it was on-the-job training for King.
Grossing only $7.4 million at the box office domestically, Maximum Overdrive is King’s first, and last, self-directed movie based on his work. One time, King said, was enough; in the end, he had to chalk it up to a learning experience.
For Maximum Overdrive, King took on a production fraught with weather delays, language difficulties (the crew was Italian, and they didn’t speak English), and other problems, including an on-site accident during the filming that resulted in a lawsuit settled out of court.
Because of the time, money, and effort required to film a major motion picture, no one deliberately sets out to make a bad movie; the hope is that the movie will be profitable and earn money for everyone. But, as it turned out, Maximum Overdrive was a minimal film. Citing a lack of support from the producer Dino De Laurentiis’s organization, King told interviewer Gary Wood, for Cinefantastique, “I didn’t do a very good job of directing it.”
