King STILL hates Kubrick’s The Shining

It is no secret that best selling Horror author Stephen King has always loathed Stanley Kubrick’s film adaptation of his novel The Shining but it looks as though time has not softened the author’s opinion of the blockbusting movie.

A prolific tweeter King replied to a question posed on Twitter by the American film and television production company Blumhouse asking what were its followers’ top five Stephen King joints and pulled no punches in making it clear that his feelings clear on the subject- King still hates Kubrick’s The Shining.

Filmed in 1980 Kubrick’s adaptation of King’s 1977 novel about a family who face untold horrors after the father Jack takes the position of off-season caretaker of the historic Overlook Hotel in the Colorado Rockies has always been a thorn in the author’s side. An instant smash at the box office the film is regarded as one of the greatest horror films ever made but that has never been good enough for King and he has not been shy in expressing his opinion of the film in the intervening years.

From a 2014 interview with The Rolling Stone

Then there was this from an interview with Indywire in 2016

And of course this 2015 video interview.

The film is now nearly 40 years old, its director dead for almost two decades and yet King is still incensed by what he sees as a betrayal of his characters, especially Wendy who he wrote as being a strong woman, a woman who would stop at nothing to protect her child and who he believed Kubrick turned into a snivelling wimp; but should he just get over it?

I am with King, I hate the film and for exactly the same reasons as the author dislikes it, I truly loathe Kubrick’s version of Wendy and I spent almost the entirety of the film wishing that Jack would just hit her over the head and shut her up.

What about you?