10 Stephen King Adaptations The Author HATES

Widely seen today as the finest Stephen King adaptation of them all, if not perhaps the greatest of all horror films, The Shining is also notorious for quite how much the author loathes the movie. So much so, in fact, that he endorsed the drab 1990s miniseries version instead.

King, who once had a character in The Outsider remark that they wanted to watch Stanley Kubrick's Paths Of Glory because "it's better than The Shining", admires Kubrick's work and craft, just not what he did with this particular film.

He once told The Paris Review that the Kubrick film was "a Cadillac with no engine in it", beautiful to look at but lacking in substance.

King has complained that, rather than his story of a man struggling to keep a grip on his sanity, Jack Nicholson's take on Jack Torrance "has no arc at all ... all he does is get crazier". Meanwhile, he called Shelly Duvall's version of Wendy "one of the most misogynistic characters ever put on film. She's basically just there to scream and be stupid".

At least there's a sort of happy ending to this one, though. After trying to bridge the gap between King and Kubrick's vision for The Shining with his sequel Doctor Sleep, director Mike Flanagan told Entertainment Weekly that Doctor Sleep had managed to "warm" King's feelings toward the Kubrick film. It's just a shame that the new film didn't really connect with wider audiences in the same way.