12 Perfect Horror Movies With One Glaring Flaw
6. The Shining - It's A Terrible Adaptation In Many Ways
Is there any other horror film that gets under your skin like this one? Quite possibly not.
Like one of Khan Singh's mind worms, this visually perfect, beautifully acted and nightmarishly terrifying psychological horror burrows its way into your mind and is perfectly likely to leave you practically sucking your thumb in terror.
Stanley Kubrick's The Shining is a stunning piece of cinema, and many will wonder why the hell the author of the original novel, the great Stephen King, hated it so much. Well, here's the thing: those who have read the book will completely get it.
While the book presents a more complex, likeable version of Jack Torrance whose downfall into madness is a real tragedy, the film's Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) seems to be just a bit bonkers from the very beginning, and he's never the most likeable of characters. Kubrick's picture basically presents a more straightforward descent-into-madness story that largely misses the point of the source material, and even if you take the book out of the equation, the film's Jack definitely could've used more backstory.
Let's be honest, Nicholson's Jack is not actually a terribly interesting character prior to his mental breakdown, so Stanley Kubrick would've benefitted from borrowing from the book a little more than he ultimately did.
It's a testament to how great the film mostly is, that it succeeds so well despite the mistakes it made with writing Jack's character and even though it largely fails as an adaptation of the source material.