Stanley Kubrick’s wonderful Shining was released in 1980, the film adaptation of the same name Stephen King novel, although in truth one should speak much more correctly of inspiration than of direct transposition, since the differences between book and feature film are many and evident.
But what is broadly speaking THE most important difference, the substantial one, between the work of the Master of Horror and that of one of the greatest authors of the Seventh Art?
Many of you will surely know this already, but for the uninformed or newbies to the novel-film controversy, the most evident content divergence is above all important is relative to the ending of the two works, completely different in the passage from paper to the big screen at the direct will of Kubrick.
In the book, in fact, Jack Torrence must periodically and promptly regulate the boiler in the basement of the ghostly Overlook Hotel so that it does not explode, which is precisely what happens in the last chapters of the novel, when Jack loses control and is no longer interested in the manual work of the building. These were then revisited in the cinema by Mike Flanagan’s Doctor Sleep, which attempted a formal and ideal crasis between the events of King’s two novels and Kubrick’s masterpiece.
As we know, however, the film ends with the famous maze scene, the one where a Jack now totally out of control chases little Danny in the open, being then cheated by the child and freezing to death without being able to find the way out of the maze.
