The Stephen King Companion

by George Beahm

  It proves that Kubrick set out to impose his vision over King’s to such an extent that the film is best described as “Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining,” to avoid confusion with King’s own remake that aired on ABC-TV in 1997. It’s also clear, in retrospect, that Kubrick fumed at King’s never-ending barrage of complaints. It seems that Kubrick had grown tired of reading King’s interviews about The Shining, in which he and his movie were treated as punching bags.

  Kubrick kept silent as King, over the years, repeatedly voiced his objections.

  All of that said, judging from its Rotten Tomatoes rating, critics and moviegoers liked Kubrick’s version, placing it among the highest-rated King films to date. Even among loyal King fans, there’s a begrudging admiration for Kubrick’s “haunted house” movie, as Spielberg termed it. It may not have been faithful to the book, but it sure as hell was scary—terrifying, even.

  The fact remains that, like The Exorcist, there’s a deeply unsettling—indeed, disquieting—quality to Kubrick’s film that invokes terror. From the appropriately eerie music that opens the movie to specific scenes that get under the skin the way a good horror movie does, The Shining is simply disturbing, serving Kubrick’s vision well: the two little girls inviting Danny to play, the discomfiting scene with the man dressed as a dog, the sense of increased dread as the walls close in on the Torrance family, the obvious mental disintegration of Jack Torrance as he slowly loses his grip on reality—all of these elements work in unison, and powerfully so. After viewing it at the theater, I left with a sense of dislocation. Immersed in the movie and its haunting elements, I appreciated what Kubrick set out to do, and what he accomplished, though I knew Stephen King would come away displeased.

  King, after all, is mostly interested in characters, in making an emotional connection with the reader/viewer, and he does so by carefully drawing portraits of sympathetic characters so that, when they are in danger, we feel their fear. But Kubrick’s vision for The Shining wasn’t about the family at all; it was about the Overlook itself. The people, to him, were of secondary concern.

  So, in the end, Spielberg is right: It’s the ultimate haunted house movie, though it should have been the ultimate haunted person/family movie, in the form of Jack Torrance.

  This explains why King wanted to redo the movie: He wanted to restore the family as its center. The Shining is, after all, a haunted movie about a dysfunctional family.

  When King decided to do a remake, he contractually needed Kubrick’s permission. Kubrick gave it, but with a nonnegotiable requirement: Stephen King had to stop complaining to the media about Kubrick’s film, and King agreed. He no longer speaks out against the film, preferring to talk about his own version.

  As for the remake, it was directed by Mick Garris, with a script by King, who also served as executive producer. Stephen King’s The Shining, a three-part miniseries for television, aired in 1997. This second time around, and based on King’s own screenplay, it was partially shot at the Stanley Hotel, and the casting reflected King’s choices: Steven Weber played Jack Torrance, Rebecca De Mornay played Wendy Torrance, and Courtland Mead played Danny Torrance; they all were relatable in a way that Jack Nicholson, Shelley Duvall, and Danny Lloyd were not. Moreover, the luxury of shooting for television gave King’s version more room to breathe: 273 minutes broken up in three 91-minute episodes.

  Speaking about his own movie at a press conference (the Ritz-Carlton Huntington Hotel in Pasadena, January 9, 1997), King was joined by director Mick Garris, Steven Weber, and Rebecca De Mornay. King explained:

  What I did was to try to write the truest, most wrenching story.… The Shining is a story about a haunted hotel, but it’s also a story about a haunted marriage. And the two should work together. The reality of that abusive relationship should enhance and make the ghost story even more frightening.

  But let’s face it: I tried to write a scary book. And I didn’t see any sense in taking it and prettying it up for TV, so I went to ABC and said, “Do you have a problem with this, if we do this, this and this?” And they said, “No, we can do that for TV.” … I think people who’ve read the book know what they’re in for. And I think people who tune in … well, hopefully I think that story succeeds on its own terms. That if a story is good and if the characters are believable, and if the acting is good, and if the direction works—if all those things work—people get into the story, and they want to live in that world for a while; they’re willing to go into that car of the roller-coaster and go up the slope.

  We’re promising them a scary ride, but one that they’ll come back from alive.

  Given that King’s 1997 remake succeeds in correcting what he perceives as egregious in Kubrick’s film, the TV miniseries is in essence a different take based on the same source: We see Kubrick’s version and also King’s, and as to what the viewer prefers, it’s a matter of taste that depends largely on where one’s sympathies lie.

  Note: King has steadfastly refused to write sequels, but he felt impelled to tell the story of what happened to Danny Torrance, who escaped with his mother from the Overlook Hotel. The sequel, Doctor Sleep, will surely see a major motion picture release. In the meantime, though, Hollywood is going back to The Shining, with a prequel: The Overlook Hotel, to be directed by Mark Romanek, with a script by Glen Mazzara. No date has been announced, and it’s worth noting that Stephen King is not involved, but this prequel should tap into “Before the Play,” a reworked version of the The Shining’s original prologue, told in five scenes, that his publisher unwisely jettisoned because of length issues: The prologue properly sets the stage for what is to follow and is required reading to fully enjoy the novel.

  But if “Before the Play” is not a starting point for the prequel, then I for one am not optimistic. I’d rather not see another King film that trades more on his name than on a faithful adaptation of his work, because it’s not about fidelity; it’s about infidelity, and screwing everybody over at their expense in pursuit of profits for the studio and its shareholders, and the writer be damned.

  Multiple Takes

  Stephen King: “I’m not a cold guy. I think one of the things people relate to in my books is this warmth; there’s a reaching out and saying to the reader, ‘I want you to be a part of this.’ With Kubrick’s The Shining I felt that it was very cold, very ‘We’re looking at these people, but they’re like ants in an anthill; aren’t they doing interesting things, these little insects’” (BBC, interview with Will Gompertz, September 19, 2013).

  Diane Johnson (screenwriter): “I’m not a big Stephen King fan. I’m not a big horror story fan. But I thought when I was reading it that it had a sort of surprising scariness, considering its flaws—how kind of pretentious and predictable it is. But at the same time it was scary. So I admired it in that sense.… I know that King didn’t really like [the film]. And I can sympathize with that because we did come out with a completely different thing. His book is very baroque and you can’t really do that in film. It had to be radically simplified” (Mark Steensland, terrortrap.com, May 2011).

  Shelley Duvall: “So here was my chance to work with Kubrick.… Going through day after day of excruciating work. Almost unbearable. Jack Nicholson’s character had to be crazy and angry all the time. And in my character I had to cry 12 hours a day, all day long, the last nine months straight, five or six days a week.… After I made The Shining, all that work, hardly anyone even criticized my performance in it, even to mention it, it seemed like. The reviews were all about Kubrick, like I wasn’t there.… Perhaps with a star director such as Kubrick, I said, critics get mesmerized by his name and forget the actors” (interviewed by Roger Ebert, December 14, 1980; rogerebert.com).

  The Critics’ Take

  Alexandre Aja (director of Horns): “I was fully mesmerized. I watched maybe a half an hour but it was enough time to present the twin sisters and a vision of the elevator with all the blood floating out. I talk a lot about the immersive experience as the ultimate quest in mak
ing all my movies, but I think my desire to be INTO a movie, living it and not just watching it, came from that first experience of being sucked into that flow of images that Stanley Kubrick put together, where each element, from the music to the sound design to the choice of focal length, everything created an experience from which there was no escape. It was way beyond my expectations” (“Hero Complex,” Los Angeles Times, October 29, 2014).

  Laura Miller (salon.com): “The Shining, in my opinion, is a terrific film. But I suspect that even if King accepted the brilliance and the talent (and for all I know he does) they would not make up for what he feels the movie lacks in humanity. Humanity is what matters most to him, and all the browbeating of all the fan boys in the world is not going to change his mind on that. Kubrick can be the bigger genius; King would rather be the bigger man.”

  Josh Larsen (larsenonfilm.com): “The Shining is terrifying for what it doesn’t do.… We’re left to fill in the blanks with our own active imaginations. And of course we fill them with pure dread.… What I didn’t know how to handle were murdered twins fixing me with their blank stares; decomposing bodies rotting in tubs; whatever was going on in that room with the well-dressed man and the person dressed as a rabbit (bear?). For all the fast edits and ugly insert shots that have come to dominate contemporary horror, Kubrick is the only one who truly perfected what those poseurs are after: sheer, subliminal terror.”

  3.

  Cujo: He Was a Good Dog…

  Release date: August 12, 1983; Tomatometer: 59%; audience score: 45%. Screenplay by Don Carlos Dunaway and Lauren Currier; directed by Lewis Teague. Budget: $8 million; U.S. box office receipts: $21 million. Key Cast: Dee Wallace, as Donna Trenton; and Danny Pintauro, as Tad Trenton.

  This ranks high on King’s list of films, but not so much with critics or fans. Even still, it’s a compelling film because, unlike the horror films he’s known and celebrated for, the horror hits closer to home in this flick: a dog is bit by a rabid bat and changes into a crazed, relentless beast who, after killing his abusive owner and an innocent neighbor, attacks a woman and her son, who are trapped in a Ford Pinto.

  Stephen King’s recollection, in a 2006 Paris Review interview, was that “[i]t was the first new car we ever owned.… We had problems with it right away because there was something wrong with the needle valve in the carburetor. It would stick, the carburetor would flood, and the car wouldn’t start. I was worried about my wife getting stuck in that Pinto, and I thought, What if she took that car to get fixed like I did my motorcycle and the needle valve stuck and she couldn’t get it going—but instead of the dog just being a mean dog, what if the dog was really crazy?”

  It’s not a flashy movie, but it’s relentless, just like Cujo. The movie just keeps coming and coming, and never lets up.

  Multiple Takes

  Stephen King: “It’s one of the scariest things you’ll ever see. It’s terrifying!” (Stephen King from A to Z).

  Dee Wallace: “The minute I read Cujo, I knew that mother. I am the quintessential mother-caretaker. I so understood before I ever had a child that I would give myself up entirely for a child if I had to. Now that I have a child I understood that even more. For me it was ‘My God, I’m blessed with the opportunity to bring this alive!’

  “And I was very active in getting [the ending of Cujo] changed. Actually, Stephen King wrote us and said ‘Thank God you changed the end. I never got more hate mail than when I killed the boy at the end of Cujo.’ … You cannot ask a theatre audience to go through and invest all this love and then pulling for this little boy to be saved and then rip that away from them.… And obviously it doesn’t work in the book” (denofgeek.us).

  The Critics’ Take

  Rob Vaux (mania.com, August 2013): “King’s knack for characterization made the dog as sympathetic as the hapless humans it menaced … and proved more than a dedicated animal lover like me could bear.

  “The movie adaptation gets half of that equation right, thanks to an impressive performance from Dee Wallace as the mother. Fresh off of her standout performance in E.T., she embraced the grindhouse grit of the material here, and cemented her status as a grade-A scream queen in the process. Cujo works almost solely because of her, though King’s basic scenario doesn’t hurt the equation either.”

  Jason Thompson (bullz-eye.com): “Cujo is definitely a Stephen King adaptation that doesn’t suck. The pacing is well-balanced, the tension is palpable, and the fears are based on things all too frighteningly real.… Suffice it to say that Lewis Teague knew what the hell he was doing when directing this picture.”

  4.

  The Dead Zone: Life as a Wheel of Fortune

  Release date: October 21, 1983; Tomatometer: 90%; audience score: 76%. Screenplay by Jeffrey Boam; directed by David Cronenberg. Budget: $7 million; U.S. box office domestic total gross: $20.7 million. Key cast: Christopher Walken, as Johnny Smith; Brooke Adams, as Sarah Bracknell; and Martin Sheen, as Greg Stillson.

  The hardest King movies to adapt are the straight horror movies, because they either brilliantly succeed—or fail, relying heavily on special effects to induce the willing suspension of disbelief. The easiest King movies to adapt are those without any supernatural elements, like Stand by Me and The Shawshank Redemption. In between are the ones like Carrie and The Dead Zone, in which the supernatural plays an important element, but not overwhelmingly so. In other words, by focusing on characters, which is always King’s main interest, the movies hew closer to the heart of King’s fiction and are therefore easier to film.

  By 1983, with Carrie, ’Salem’s Lot, The Shining, and Creepshow establishing King as a horror writer, and with director Cronenberg identified with horror films (the Internet Movie Database says his nicknames are “the King of venereal horror” and “Baron of Blood”), the release of a nonhorror movie like The Dead Zone broke new ground for both of them.

  King’s departure from Doubleday to New American Library was marked with his first novel that didn’t rely on traditional elements of horror, The Dead Zone, and the movie version reflected it. As with Cujo, the evil was not external but internal. As Douglas E. Winter explained in The Art of Darkness, “The evil within is a traditional horror theme, often expressed in the form of a logical insistence that unpleasant consequences await those who meddle in matters best left undisturbed.”

  In Creepshows, Stephen Jones explains that The Dead Zone “was Cronenberg’s biggest hit—both critically and commercially—up to that date. ‘Cronenberg did one of the great jobs of his life,’ King later said. ‘He got tremendous performances out of people, but the movie was not able to break through.’”

  For Christopher Walken, who at that time was best known for his small but memorable role as Duane Hall in Woody Allen’s Annie Hall (1977) and as a tortured, imprisoned soldier named Nick in The Deer Hunter (1978), The Dead Zone put him on center stage with the role of Johnny Smith.

  Film magazine Cinefantastique (December 1983–January 1984) stated it was “not only the finest work to date by director David Cronenberg and the best adaptation of a Stephen King novel, but a splendid film by any standard.… In almost every way and on many levels, The Dead Zone is a glowing success.”

  Multiple Takes

  Stephen King: “It went through a number of hands and ended up with Dino De Laurentiis, and directed by David Cronenberg. I’m gonna see a rough cut on Monday when I’m back in New York. But I saw twenty minutes of it cut together and I thought it was gorgeous” (Martin Anderson, 1983, shadowlocked.com).

  Roger Ebert: “The Dead Zone does what only a good supernatural thriller can do: It makes us forget it is supernatural.… Walken does such a good job portraying Johnny Smith, the man with the strange gift, that we forget this is science fiction or fantasy or whatever and just accept it as this guy’s story” (October 26, 1983; posted on rogerebert.com).

  David Cronenberg: “I loved working with Christopher Walken, I thought I’d work with him again, but there was never quite the role
.… I had a pretty good time with all of my leading men and women really, so I could imagine a movie which they were all in. The way Fellini in 8½ had everybody in his life, all his actors in a dance with him” (Tim Lewis, September 13, 2014, theguardian.com).

  5.

  Stand by Me: Stephen King’s Childhood Journey

  For a long time I thought I would love to be able to find a string to put on the childhood experiences that I remember. A lot of them are funny, and some of them are kind of sad … the people that I’ve known and some of the guys I hung out with that really weren’t headed anywhere but down blind alleys.

  And nothing came, and what you do when nothing comes is, you don’t push, you just put it aside.

  And there came a day when I thought to myself, if these guys go somewhere, if there’s a reason for them to go somewhere and do something, what could it be?

  I came up with the idea of going down the train tracks to look for the body of a kid that I made up, a situation whereby they would know the body was there and they could go and find it. And everything else follows from that. Most stories, good stories about boys, are about journeys.

  — Stephen King, “The Tracks: The Summer of Stand by Me,” from the DVD edition of Stand By Me

  Release date: August 22, 1986; Tomatometer, 91%; audience score: 95%. Screenplay by Raynold Gideon and Bruce A. Evans; directed by Rob Reiner. Budget: $8 million; domestic total gross: $52.2 million.

  A railroad track in Durham, Maine.

  Stephen King cites this movie as his favorite among all the adaptations to date, and it’s easy to understand why. A classic film based on King’s most autobiographical story, “The Body” (Different Seasons, 1982), this elegiac film plumbs the depths of King’s childhood, a time he vividly recalled, and one that he brought to life with remarkable fidelity, as did Reiner for the film version.