The pair produced a work which is astonishingly faithful to the text one scene and then entirely unmoored from it the next, often in ways King found to be illogical. With The Shining, however, he’d written a script, which Kubrick rejected without even reading it, preferring instead to co-write his own with Diane Johnson. For that film, he was paid the lump sum $2,500 for the rights and had no further involvement. It was his third novel and the second to be adapted to the screen, following 1976’s Carrie. The book, after all, was inspired by the author’s own bottoming out period when he was battling alcoholism and struggling to maintain control of his family. The exact reasons for King’s antipathy toward his cinematic adaptor go beyond film criticism. But for those who always wanted a faithful adaptation, the mini-series serves as a universe-balancing alternative to Kubrick’s far more cerebral masterwork. While undeniably more faithful to the novel, King’s The Shining, which substitutes Stephen Weber and Rebecca De Mornay for Jack Nicholson and Shelley Duvall, isn’t quite a classic. He held such a grudge that in 1997 he leveraged the success of It and The Stand on ABC to finally get a three-part miniseries of The Shining. He has been neither tactful nor restrained in his consistent criticisms of Kubrick’s work. Such opinions never much mattered to King, though. Paste Magazine has it at #2, behind The Exorcist. Case in point, Film School Rejects recently put it at #6. All these years later, it regularly ranks near the top of any “best horror movies of all-time” list. By that point, The Shining was nearly a decade old and already considered a classic. So argued Stephen King in 1989’s Feast or Fear: Conversations with Stephen King. Here, it seems there’s no tragedy because there’s nothing to be lost.” I wrote the book as a tragedy, and if it was a tragedy, it was because all the people loved each other. “That’s what’s wrong with The Shining, basically…the movie has no heart there’s no center to the picture.

But, how did Kubrick feel about King’s original novel? Stephen King famously hates Stanley Kubrick’s film version of The Shining.

Stephen king movies the shining