Stephen King has never shied away from talking about how much he dislikes Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of The Shining, King’s novel about a writer possessed by malevolent forces at an isolated hotel in the Colorado mountains. Kubrick’s 1980 adaptation, King has argued, is “totally empty” and a “great big beautiful Cadillac with no motor inside,” a film much more interested in the conventional awfulness of a man terrorizing his wife and child than in the uncanny suspense of the book. “Kubrick just couldn’t grasp the sheer inhuman evil of the Overlook Hotel,” King explained to Playboy in 1983. “So he looked, instead, for evil in the characters and made the film into a domestic tragedy with only vaguely supernatural overtones.” The movie, he insisted, “never gets you by the throat and hangs o

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