9. The Shining (1980)
Stephen King famously disowned Stanley Kubrick's adaptation of his classic horror novel, which says a lot about how "bad" an adaptation it actually was. In actuality, Kubrick's movie is a great, dark and ambiguous film, and has rightly been branded as one of the greatest horror movies (if not
the greatest horror movie) ever made, though as an adaptation of King's book, it plainly sucks. The two share a few common plot elements, but the style is totally different: Kubrick plays it vague and clinical, whilst King writes with real emotion and detail. So whereas The
Shining is a wonderful movie (as is the book), Kubrick merely took the basic idea (man goes crazy and tries to murder his family in a secluded hotel in the mountains) and created a tapestry of horror in and around its plottings. One of the biggest issues that King had with the adaptation was in the casting of Jack Nicholson, who he felt seemed far too "crazy" to begin with as to successfully chart a normal man's descent into madness. The movie also comes across as cold, and whereas King is more willing to explain the supernatural elements of his story, Kubrick leaves them all up to the imagination. Both great, both entirely different.