The Shining: How Stanley Kubrick Referenced His Stephen King Book Changes

The fraught creative conflict between Stanley Kubrick and Stephen King over the film adaptation of The Shining is one of cinema’s most infamous, but there is a detail that the auteurist director made sure to put in the final cut that is hilariously snarky even after all these years. It’s subtle, but keen-eyed audiences of both the movie and the novel can see that Kubrick changed the color of Jack Torrance’s car — then shows the destroyed wreckage of a car that is the same color as the one in the source material.

The change between King’s novel and Kubrick’s cinematic classic, The Shining, serves as one of the starkest in the history of adaptations and retellings. Whereas King’s work is definitively moralistic and parabolic in its messages, Kubrick’s vision is much more surreal and ambiguous. King explicitly explains in the novel that Jack Torrance succumbs to the ghosts of the hotel when he becomes a murderous alcoholic, despite his struggles to overcome his destructive habits. In contrast, the Jack Torrance in Kubrick’s film is implied to have already been harboring violent tendencies, and the Overlook Hotel merely accompanies his mental breakdown into psychopathy.

King’s negative response to the changes has sparked a wave of debate over the meaning behind the changes Kubrick made to the film. The author, along with others, has examined the director’s detachment from other people and inner intensity, while also acknowledging his incredible intelligence. Despite his mastery of the horror story, Stephen King is notable for his pathos and even, in some cases, heartfelt character moments. Perhaps Kubrick’s cold and cerebral style is what led King to grumble that he is a man who “thinks too much and feels too little.”

Stanley Kubrick Referenced the Changes to The Shining

For all of the numerous differences that fans of both the film and the novel have analyzed, one of the most telling of Kubrick’s own artistic views is also one of the subtlest. Twitter user Movie Details has pointed out that Kubrick changed the color of Jack Torrance’s beetle car from red to yellow. To top it off, the filmmaker includes a red beetle in the background later in the film, but it’s crushed under a truck, implying that The Shining is the director’s own unique vision rather than a retread of the novel of the same name.

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