Stanley Kubrick's Vision For The Shining Was Inspired By A Different Hotel Horror Story
Stanley Kubrick's 1980 horror film "The Shining" was recently selected as one of the 100 best movies of all time by the venerable once-a-decade Sight and Sound poll, coming in at #88. It was one of three films by Kubrick to have made the list, the others being "Barry Lyndon" (at #45) and "2001: A Space Odyssey" (at #6). Many hold "The Shining" to be one of the scariest films of all time, and its iconography is referenced and recognizable across the pop culture landscape; Steven Spielberg's "Ready Player One," for instance, recreated whole scenes from Kubrick's film.
Perhaps infamously, Stephen King, the author of the 1977 novel on which the film is based, openly dislikes Kubrick's film. In King's original version of the story, the main character, Jack Torrance, was a recovering alcoholic attempting to stay sober ... just like King. "The Shining" book is about a normal man who succumbs to the evil influence of dark forces around him. The story's main character is Danny, Jack's young child who possesses a type of ESP.
In the film, Jack (played by Jack Nicholson), is clearly the main character, already full of wrath at the start of the story. The supernatural forces he encounters are not outside antagonists, but a massive and timeless disembodied consciousness that draws kindred spirits into its fold. The Overlook Hotel, where the story is set, is like a gigantic ghostly brain. Jack merely wanders around between its neurons, finding a match for his already inborn compulsions toward wickedness.
King clearly didn't jive with Kubrick's statement that Jack was perhaps inherently murderous from the jump.
The inspiration
It's a pretty well-known piece of trivia that the Overlook Hotel in "The Shining" was, in fact, the Timberline Lodge in Mt. Hood, OR. The film's interiors were sets, built in England. What might be less well-known is that King drew his inspiration for the Overlook from the Stanley Hotel, located in Estes Park, CO. The 1997 TV miniseries, "The Shining" was filmed at the Stanley, a hotel that first opened in 1909 and is said to be haunted. According to George Beahm's 2015 book "The Stephen King Companion: Four Decades of Fear from the Master of Horror," the author looked into the Stanley bathtub, envisioned that someone had died in it, and instantly had a story.
Stanley Kubrick had made no reference to the Stanley Hotel when he began working on "The Shining." Allegedly, King had contributed a draft of the script, but Kubrick immediately dismissed it. According to John Baxter's 1997 book "Stanley Kubrick: A Biography" the filmmaker was far more interested in recreating the psychological impact of a preexisting horror story called "The Blue Hotel," written by Stephen Crane in 1898.
"The Blue Hotel" is set in 1800s Nebraska, and tells the story of a quintet of men who are idly playing cards in the lobby of their titular place of lodging. For no discernible reason, one of the men, a Swede, begins to grow suspicious of the other men in the room and is convinced that one of them has arrived to murder him. The accusations lead to a fatal fight out in the snow. The paranoia increases, more discomfort is displayed, and at least one more death occurs. A big crux of the story's tension is that no one seems capable of dampening the violence and suspicion.
The Blue Hotel
In "Stanley Kubrick: A Biography," Kubrick is said to have interpreted "The Blue Hotel" as a study of self-punishment. He was familiar with the story thanks to an episode of the 1956 anthology TV series "Omnibus," which featured an adaptation written by James Agee. The story was also adapted into a feature film in 1977 by director Ján Kadár, wherein David Warner played the Swede. That version is currently available on Hoopla and Kanopy.
As Kubrick saw it, the dark fates suffered by Stephen Crane's characters are largely self-inflicted, with people pushing and prodding others when such behavior is not at all warranted. The Swede, in making such an issue of being cheated at cards, invites all the abuse he receives. Jack Torrance, Kubrick seems to have felt, was the type of person to prod irresistibly at the darkness, eager to welcome the murderous impulses that he begins expressing late in the film. Jack actively sought his own annihilation, channeling evil into his own body, and using it to try to kill off the wife and child he clearly resented. They weren't welcome in his world of hate. It's almost like they didn't exist in any real sense for Jack.
If we're to read "The Shining" as a semi-autobiographical account of Stephen King's own struggle with addiction, one can see why the author would resent an interpretation of his work that declared the King stand-in to be homicidal, cold, unloving, and seeking his own destruction. Kubrick's misinterpretation moved King to write the 1997 "corrective" miniseries, and led to the addiction-forward narrative of the 2019 "Shining" sequel "Doctor Sleep."
Which version is preferred remains a matter of debate.