Stephen King famously hated how much Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 adaptation The Shining diverged from his novel, but the movie’s original treatment featured an even more drastically altered ending. Released in 1980, The Shining saw mercurial A Clockwork Orange helmer Stanley Kubrick put a cast that included Jack Nicholson and Shelley Duvall through hell to create an unforgettable piece of cinematic psychological horror. The movie received mixed reviews during release but is now considered a true classic.
Less emotionally resonant and more blackly comic than Carrie creator Stephen King’s source novel, the movie adaptation of The Shining diverged from the original book in major ways, both in terms of plot and characters. Jack Torrance was less of a tragic figure and more of an indefensible madman in the movie, while the moving topiaries that signaled the novel’s supernatural elements were very much real were excised by Kubrick for a more ambiguous feeling. Where King’s novel was a brutally sad story of a man trying and failing to fight his demons and succumbing to insanity, in contrast, Kubrick’s movie was an inscrutable, often oddly comic mystery about a man who is most definitely mad and a hotel that may not even be haunted
Stephen King was - and remains - vocally unhappy with how the movie adapted his work, though he was much happier with Mike Flanagan's Doctor Sleep, which managed to merge his Shining sequel novel of the same name with the 1980 movie. But Kubrick's early treatment for The Shining contained even more notable differences that would have diverged further from King’s vision. This included a finale where Wendy kills Jack - only for the newly arrived Dick Halloran to become possessed by the evil of the Overlook Hotel and take over villainous stalking duties.
In the finished film, Dick Halloran is killed by Jack and provides The Shining's lone (non-Jack) casualty near the closing moments in a scene so anticlimactic it borders on morbid comedy. However, the original ending would have seen Kubrick skew closer to the horror tradition of revealing the paranormal threat is not quite vanquished as it became clear the hotel now had Halloran in its sway, and Scatman Crothers’ character replaced Jack as the one terrorizing Wendy and Danny. The idea the hotel could simply possess anyone who entered its hallowed halls does take the sting out of The Shining’s implication Jack was always fated to end up there, and this ending makes the character’s madness easier to excuse as it clarifies he was under the sway of supernatural forces beyond his control.
Ultimately, it is probably for the best Kubrick went for the more ambiguous ending, wherein it is heavily implied that something in Jack’s spirit has always been tied to the Overlook without actually clarifying that any of the ghosts or hauntings were real. Not that this more faithful decision would stop King from creating a television miniseries adaptation of The Shining in the mid-90s which, despite some effective makeup work, fell far short of matching Kubrick’s take. King’s decision to excuse Jack’s breakdown by making the paranormal elements explicitly real was what many critics saw as the miniseries’ biggest failing, proving that Kubrick made the right call in changing the ending of The Shining from his first treatment.
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February 22, 2021 at 05:50AM
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Kubrick's Original Shining Script Broke From Stephen King Even More - Screen Rant
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