Stephen King’s the shining – review

Director: Mick Garris

Release date: 1997

Contains spoilers

Stephen King’s sequel to the Shining, Doctor Sleep, was a novel based around a group of energy vampires but, whilst Danny Torrence returned as an adult, the Overlook hotel was missing from the novel as it was destroyed in the climax of the original novel. Rather, the climax took place on the site that the hotel had stood upon. When the film Doctor Sleep was created this was changed as it followed the aesthetic and content of Stanley Kubrick’s film version of the Shining. Within Dr Sleep, as in the novel it is based on, the ghosts from the Overlook were shown as vampiric – trying to consume Danny’s Shining - but the hotel itself was also vampiric, the building was identified as consuming the shining also.

the Torrence family

Stephen King was famous for not liking Kubrick’s interpretation of the Shining, however. When a mini-series of the novel was proposed King, himself, wrote the teleplay. That makes the teleplay true to King’s concept, indeed the series was shot in the actual hotel that served as inspiration for the novel, but it still had to compete with the Kubrick film, which is (despite King’s feelings on the subject) a masterpiece.

the Overlook

I’m not going to blow by blow through the scenes. Suffice it to say that Jack Torrence (Steven Weber, Dracula: Dead and Loving It) is a recovering alcoholic who has lost his teaching job after beating a student and has previously injured his son, Danny (Courtland Mead), breaking his arm in a drunken rage. He gets the post of winter caretaker of the Overlook Hotel, which is snowed off over winter, and moves himself, wife Wendy (Rebecca De Mornay) and Danny to the hotel. He intends to write a play whilst there.

the hose

Danny is psychic, often seeing an (otherwise) invisible friend called Tony (Wil Horneff), a manifestation of his abilities. One difference between this and Kubrick’s is that Tony “appears” in Kubrick’s film as a voice spoken by Danny and represented by a crooked finger – in this Tony appears as a person. Danny is warned about the Overlook by Tony but, being seven, there isn’t much he can do about it. What we do get is an interesting view, in his visions, of something stalking the corridors but only the shadow is seen. This will turn out to be his father but the use of a shadow is, of course, a vampire genre trope. He also sees an animated fire hose with teeth, an unfortunate effect that we’ll get back to.

Melvin Van Peebles as Dick

Once at the hotel Danny meets chef Dick Hallorann (Melvin Van Peebles), a fellow psychic – though nowhere near as powerful – who recognises Danny for what he is. He calls the ability the shining and suggests that Danny shines brighter than anyone he has ever met. He warns Danny from the rooms, one in particular, and tells him that he has seen things occasionally in the hotel but they can’t hurt Danny. They are only pictures and if he looks away and counts to ten, they will go away. The hotel itself seems to have a shine of its own – hence it being a vampiric entity as we’ll explore.

reflected ghosts

Danny is seeing things from the beginning, and phenomena also occurs - poltergeist like falling of chairs, for instance. It is most certainly Danny that the hotel wants but, when it can’t get to him, it turns its attention to Jack. There is an implication that Jack shines also (in a minor way, and hence his susceptibility) but it is Danny’s ability that is fuelling the hotel and ghosts. This sees them ramping up their assaults and soon even Wendy can see/hear them. At one-point Danny realises that pretty soon they won’t be ghosts at all, meaning they are gaining a corporeal presence through their vampirism of Danny’s psychic gift.

the topiary

I mentioned effects and probably the worst is tied into an aspect missed in the Kubrick film altogether. In the movie Kubrick adds a hedge maze (rather effectively and it is reproduced within psychic sequences, at least, in the film Doctor Sleep) and uses it to replace topiary animals. They are here and, as in the book, there are moments when they come to life (an aspect of the vampiric hotel, rather than its associated ghosts). However, they look rubbish, bad cgi blobs with no weight to them as we see them move across the snows.

the ghost of 217

That’s not to say all the effects were bad. The drowned ghost of 217 (237 in Kubrick) looks fantastic in the bath, rotten and lying in a chemical soup. But the hose pipe, the topiaries and floating Tony all looked rubbish – and, given the key role of Tony plus the fact that the topiaries are essentially a set piece, that isn’t good. The dialogue can be a tad hokey also at times (have I committed a faux pas given King wrote it? Perhaps). The direction was, in fact, not as bad as it perhaps appeared as one cannot do anything but compare it to Kubrick’s auteur opus. That said, it didn’t capture the doom-laden atmosphere of the film. The mini-series format probably didn’t help with this dragging in its middle section.

Steven Weber as Jack

As for the key performances. Well, Courtland Mead works well as Danny – a tough role for any child actor, he manages to vacillate between childish reaction to knowing psychic. Rebecca De Mornay gives a strong performance as Wendy and a very different one to that offered by Shelley Duvall. Of course, Steven Weber was always going to be compared to Nicholson and his iconic performance – something that is probably really unfair. His Jack is more sympathetic, certainly, and he offers a strong performance but next to Nicholson it will always come out at second place. The adult actors were also hampered in places by that hokey dialogue I mentioned.

floating Tony

Retrospectively vampiric, like the Kubrick film, the consumption of the psychic energy isn’t mentioned (just that Danny enables it), and whilst it was always going to struggle next to the film, this wasn’t as good as it might have been anyway (in a universe where the Kubrick film didn’t exist). The film is dragged down by some of the effects, lack of atmosphere and some hokey Hallmark channel dialogue that surfaces through the film. Its TV mini-series origin means that some of the things we should have seen we didn’t. 6 feels a tad strong but 5.5 feels churlish and so 6 out of 10 it is.

The imdb page is here.

On DVD @ Amazon US

On DVD @ Amazon UK