How Stephen King Adapted Shirley Jackson’s Most Iconic Story

In 2002, Stephen King adapted Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting Of Hill House into a three-part miniseries titled Rose Red, but with some major changes to the original story — here’s how. Rose Red premiered exclusively on the American television station ABC and garnered an impeccable number of viewers over the course of its nightly release schedule, which started on January 27th and ended on the 30th. While its contents are loosely based on Jackson’s 1959 gothic horror novel, the haunting of Rose Red veers towards an even more famous story about a real-life haunted house.

Stephen King is known for being one of the most prolific horror authors of the 20th and 21st century. With sixty-one novels written and another set to release in March 2021, he continues to satisfy readers with terrifying tales of the supernatural, surreal, and fantastical. The author has expressed admiration for Shirley Jackson, who famously authored The Haunting Of Hill House and We Have Always Lived In The Castle. He has cited Jackson as one of his primary sources of inspiration in his own writing, which resulted in his own movie adaptation of her novel featuring the notorious Hill House. Initially, he pitched the idea in 1996, but The Haunting’s 1999 release forced him to return to his screenplay and revise it with new additions as well as alterations to the original story.

King also took notable influence from the famous Winchester Mystery House, which was owned by Sarah Winchester, the sole heir of the firearm fortune. She believed she was plagued by the spirits of those who died by the family’s guns. According to documentation, it is reported that Sarah built the house with their instruction. If the spirits requested thirteen staircases with thirteen steps, she immediately went to work on making it a reality. In many ways, Hill House and the Winchester Mystery House share a commonality, primarily in their size and attachment to families.

The Haunting Of Hill House has been directly adapted three times to date. It was first made into a feature-length movie in 1963 with the movie The Haunting, which was then remade in 1999’s The Haunting, which bombed among critics and fans. The most recent iteration of the story released in 2018 on Netflix with Mike Flanagan’s The Haunting Of Hill House. Flanagan is also known for adapting various Stephen King stories, including Gerald’s Game and Doctor Sleep. While these adaptations are closely tied to Jackson’s original work, King’s is often overlooked due to how many differences there are between the source material and the movie.

The biggest difference is the story of the actual house. King takes the premise of the Winchester Mystery House’s legends to create April Rimbauer, the daughter of Ellen and John Rimbauer who went missing at a very young age. April represents Annie Pardee Winchester, Sarah’s only daughter who died as an infant. Annie Wheaton (Kimberly J. Brown, Halloweentown) of Rose Red has the power to communicate with the dead, which allows for psychic researcher Dr. Joyce Reardon (Nancy Travis, So I Married An Axe Murderer) to explore Ellen’s true purpose in building the home. This is directly taken from The Haunting Of Hill House, as a psychic researcher gathers a team of like-minded individuals to investigate the estate. They even share similar ghosts that haunt the halls.

The basic elements of the original Jackson story are present, such as a family member’s return to the estate and a haunting relating to said family. The rest of Rose Red was entirely unique to King’s screenplay and his image of a haunting. If he chose to tackle the story in its entirety, it would be an incredible posthumous Jackson collaboration, but it could also falter by being King’s concept of a haunting over hers. There are very few similarities between Rose Red and The Haunting Of Hill House when all is said and done, but it’s still interesting to note that one of the greatest horror authors of the modern era wished to pay homage to one of the genre’s pioneers at one point in time.

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