THE SHINING (1980) | Stanley Kubrick, Stephen King and the Perfect Adaptation (High)

We went High on The Shining, and this is not just a High because it is one of the most famous horror movies ever made. For us, Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980) is a masterpiece because it understands something essential about fear: the scariest place in the world is not always the haunted hotel. Sometimes it is the family you are trapped inside.

That is the central argument of this episode. Kubrick takes Stephen King’s novel, strips away explanation, changes the characters, changes the ending, and turns a supernatural story into something colder, stranger, and more psychologically suffocating. This is not adaptation as transcription. It is adaptation as transformation. Kubrick understands that sometimes respecting the source material means knowing exactly when to leave it behind.

In this episode, we finally check into the Overlook Hotel and talk about The Shining, directed by Stanley Kubrick, starring Jack Nicholson as Jack Torrance, Shelley Duvall as Wendy Torrance, Danny Lloyd as Danny, and Scatman Crothers as Dick Halloran. This is one of Dom’s favorite horror movies, favorite Kubrick movies, and maybe favorite movies, period. It is the kind of film that feels less like something you simply watch and more like something you enter.

We begin with the opening aerial shots, because the movie announces itself immediately. The music is dissonant and ominous, the landscape is massive, and the car looks tiny against the mountains. Before anyone says anything scary, the movie has already told us we are going somewhere wrong.

A major part of the episode is the difference between King’s novel and Kubrick’s film. King’s version is warmer, more emotional, and more explicit about Jack Torrance as a man being corrupted by the Overlook. Kubrick’s version is colder. His Jack feels dangerous before the hotel ever gets its hooks into him. That has always been one of the big criticisms of the movie, but we argue that it is exactly why this version works. Kubrick is not telling a story about a good man who becomes evil. He is telling a story about a resentful, volatile man who is already standing at the edge and only needs a little push.

We also dig into the idea that Jack may have the Shining too. Danny clearly shines. Halloran clearly shines. But Jack’s relationship with the hotel suggests that he may also be receptive to its energy, only he does not understand what he is receiving. Danny and Halloran know there is a signal. Jack mistakes the signal for himself. That may be why the Overlook gets to him so quickly. He is an open door that does not know something is passing through it.

One of the biggest Highs is Shelley Duvall as Wendy, a performance that deserves far more respect than it has historically received. It is easy to reduce Wendy to someone who spends the movie crying and terrified, but that misses what Duvall is actually doing. Her Wendy is fragile, yes, but she is also deeply human. She is a woman who has spent years managing Jack’s rage, trying to hold the family together, trying to stay cheerful, trying to keep Danny safe, and slowly realizing that the person she has been protecting the family from is inside the family.

We talk about how much information is buried in Wendy’s early conversation with the doctor. Jack injured Danny years earlier, but he has only been sober for five months. That detail tells us everything. This is not one isolated mistake. This is a pattern. Wendy is not naive because she does not know who Jack is. She is exhausted because she knows exactly who he is and has been trying to survive him.

Jack Nicholson is, of course, one of the movie’s defining forces. His performance is huge, funny, terrifying, theatrical, and completely iconic. From the first interview with Ullman, Jack Torrance feels wrong. The smile is too wide. The charm is too forced. The resentment is too close to the surface. By the time he reaches the Gold Room and talks to Lloyd, it feels less like a man suddenly going insane and more like a man finally giving himself permission to stop pretending.

Another major High is Dick Halloran, played by Scatman Crothers. He is the movie’s clearest force of warmth and goodness. His conversation with Danny about the Shining is one of the only scenes where an adult genuinely meets Danny on his level. He explains the gift, warns him about room 237, and takes him seriously. When Halloran senses Danny’s distress and fights his way back to the hotel, the movie trains us to believe he is the rescue. Then Kubrick brutally rips that hope away.

One of the episode’s biggest adaptation discussions is fire versus ice. King’s novel ends with the boiler exploding and the Overlook burning. Kubrick throws that away and gives us the hedge maze, the snow, and Jack freezing to death alone. For this version of Jack Torrance, it is the perfect ending. He does not get redeemed. He does not fight his way back. He gets lost inside the maze, literally and psychologically, while Danny survives because he understands the pattern well enough to escape it.

The maze is the movie. The Overlook is a maze. Jack’s mind is a maze. His resentment is a maze. His obsession is a maze. Danny does not overpower his father. He outthinks him.

We do find a couple of tiny Lows. Halloran’s psychic ability has one very convenient blind spot when he walks into the hotel and does not sense Jack standing nearby with an axe. We also talk about “Here’s Johnny,” which is iconic, funny, and terrifying, but also one of the only moments that dates the movie because the Johnny Carson reference will not land the same way forever.

But those are tiny objections in a movie we consider close to perfect. The Shining is a High because Kubrick creates something colder, stranger, and more enduring than a straightforward haunted hotel movie. He takes King’s material and turns it into a film about abuse, addiction, isolation, psychic sensitivity, inherited violence, and the way evil can become part of a place’s history. 

Topics Discussed

• The Shining 1980 review

• Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining

• Stephen King vs Stanley Kubrick

• Jack Nicholson as Jack Torrance

• Shelley Duvall as Wendy Torrance

• Danny Lloyd as Danny Torrance

• Scatman Crothers as Dick Halloran

• The Overlook Hotel

• Room 237

• Does Jack Torrance have the Shining?

• The Shining ending explained

• The hedge maze ending

• The Shining book vs movie

• Jack Torrance and alcoholism

• Wendy Torrance performance defense

• Dick Halloran’s death

• The Gold Room and Lloyd the bartender

• “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy”

• “Here’s Johnny”

• The Shining as psychological horror