Stephen King has made no secret of the fact that he’s not a fan of Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of The Shining, mostly because it deviated a bit too much from his novel; the 1997 miniseries is more faithful, and was essentially made in direct response to King’s disapproval of the Kubrick film. Regardless, most agree that The Shining 1980 is one of the best horror films of all time.
One of the big changes Kubrick made was in regards to the ending. In King’s novel, the Overlook Hotel burns to the ground with Jack Torrance inside of it; Wendy, Danny, and Dick Hallorann manage to escape with their lives. In the 1980 film, Jack of course kills Dick Hallorann and eventually freezes to death outside. As for the Overlook Hotel, it never burns to the ground.
But that wasn’t always the ending that Kubrick had in mind.
In a new chat with Entertainment Weekly, co-writer Diane Johnson and producer Jan Harlan provided some insights into alternate endings that were conceived as part of the writing process. One idea was to have Wendy kill Jack, while another draft had Jack killing young Danny.
Johnson explained why Kubrick changed King’s ending:
The ending was changed almost entirely because Kubrick found it a cliche to just blow everything up. He thought there might be something else that would be metaphorically and visually more interesting. In the book, nobody gets killed except Jack. And Kubrick really thought somebody should get killed — because it was a horror movie. So we weighed the dramatic possibilities of killing off various characters and did different treatments. We actually talked it over in detail the possibility of having different people getting killed.
Danny’s relationship with his father was the thing that most interested Kubrick. He was emotionally involved with the point of view of a little boy who is afraid of his father. I remember Kubrick saying that visually he could imagine a small yellow chalk outline on the floor like that they put around the bodies of victims. And Kubrick liked that image. But he was too tender-hearted for that ending and thought it would be too terrible to do.
She also noted that the idea was tossed around at one point to have Hallorann live but become possessed by the evil powers of the Overlook Hotel, turning him into a “surrogate for Jack.”
Johnson and Harlan also dug into the infamous hospital scene that Kubrick had destroyed, as well as the many (wacky) fan theories that have sprung up over the years. So be sure to read the full interview over on EW if you can’t get enough of The Shining. You’re not alone.
