Originally, Stephen King's novels were used by me as hypnotic reading materials~ There are a lot of delicate and easy life descriptions of characters in his books, which have no sense of plot.
At least that's what I thought at first.
Because I have the habit of reading my favorite novels over and over again, for example, I have read "The Silence of the Lambs" no less than twenty times, and I am basically familiar enough to memorize it, so I can't accept the film adaptation.
"The Shining" is similar, but every time I watch it again, I feel more terrified. It is obviously a familiar plot, but because I am more and more familiar with every detail of the novel, so every time I read it again, I feel more vivid and clear about the novel. It's hard to describe in words.
Compared to Joey hiding "The Shining" in the refrigerator, I understand very well, because now I wrap this novel in a cover, and then press it under a thick pile of military novels and comedy novels, and then lock it in the cabinet, I feel less scared, hehe~
I have read too many horror novels and horror movies, except for the kind of works that challenge my stomach with blood, if there is any story that can scare me from scratch The one with cold feet and too scared to sleep is "The Shining". And only this work has terrified me so persistently.
I'm sure any reader who doesn't think The Shining is scary hasn't read it carefully enough to experience the feeling of immersion.
Book: The Shining by Stephen King
The Shining is a 1977 horror novel by American author Stephen King. It is King's third published novel and first hardback bestseller; its success firmly established King as a preeminent author in the horror genre. Wikipedia
- Originally published: January 28, 1977
- Author: Stephen King
- Followed by: Doctor Sleep
- Adaptations: The Shining (1980), The Shining (1997), The Shining
- Genres: Novel, Horror fiction, Psychological horror, Gothic fiction, Supernatural fiction
- Cover artist: Dave Christensen
About this Book: The Shining
Jack Torrance, an amateur writer, is unemployed and embarrassed in his middle age. In order to support his family, he did not hesitate to choose to be a temporary manager of an old hotel in the mountains that was closed by heavy snow in winter and isolated from the world.
So when the hotel was about to close in winter, Jack took his wife Wendy and son Danny to the Yuanwang Hotel in Colorado. The five-year-old boy Danny was born with a kind of super sensory predictive ability - "The Shining".
Before the family set off, he had nightmares of ominous dreams. Since Jack's family moved in, weird and strange events happened one after another: Hornets killed by pesticides came back to life in groups, green hedges cut into animal shapes were ready to move, and footsteps sounded in empty rooms...Jack, I accidentally found a newspaper clipping book about the history of the hotel among the old paper piles in the basement.
I was addicted to it and my spirit became increasingly tired. The young Danny had a premonition of various dangers and was at a loss; while Jack's temperament changed drastically, he was moody, and he was violent to his wife and children from time to time... The family gradually went crazy and was destroyed in the isolated environment.
About the Author: Stephen King
The author, Stephen King, is one of the most influential popular novelists in the United States.
Since the publication of his first novel "Carrie" in 1974, he has written more than 40 novels and more than 200 short stories, and more than 50 film and television works are based on his novels. The most famous one is "The Shawshank Redemption".
In 2003, he won the National Book Award of the United States, and later won the "Lifetime Achievement Award" of the World Fantasy Literature Award and the "Master Award" of the "Ellen Poe Award" of the American Mystery Writers Association.
Core Content: The Shining book by Stephen King
"The Shining" is one of the most famous masterpieces of the American story by King Stephen King. It's a haunted house-type horror story set in the isolated Overlook Inn during winter in Colorado.
The first half of the novel provides readers with a standardized scare package, but the second half shifts the focus of horror from ghosts to people, giving the story a more general and realistic meaning.
The Yuanwang Hotel is the epitome of the United States, and Jack is a "struggle" in quotation marks who goes astray in pursuit of the illusory "American Dream". Jack did not hesitate to destroy his family to achieve his career, but in the end, he could only go to self-destruction.
Although the movie version of "The Shining" downplays the existence of ghosts, it strengthens the theme that people are destroyed by their inner desires.
This issue of audio is divided into three parts. The first part talks about ghosts and the "working principle" of ghosts.
The second part talks about people and analyzes why people can be more terrifying than ghosts. In the third part, I will compare the difference between the original book and the movie for you.
This difference is in the final analysis of the different choices in the "ghost content" of the story, and the different interpretations of who should be more responsible for crimes, ghosts or humans.
Book Summary: The Shining book by Stephen King
Stephen King won the Lifetime Achievement Award of the National Book Award in 2003 for "inheriting the great tradition of American literature's attention to plot and atmosphere, and embodying all kinds of beautiful and tragic moral truths deep in the human soul". This book is one of his masterpieces.
Another story about the hotel. The environment of the hotel itself can produce all kinds of weird plots.
As the book says, "Every big hotel has a scandal," "just like every big hotel is haunted. Why? Hell, people come and go. Sometimes someone dies suddenly in the room, heart Sickness, stroke, or something else.
Hotels are superstitious places. There is no 13th floor, no 13th room, no mirror behind the door to the guest room, all these things." I have seen an adaptation of
Stephen Jin's "1408 Phantom of the Dead", plot is full of twists and turns, and the story is set within the story. In a suite, various horrible events are derived. And "The Shining", which also happened in the hotel, has very different techniques and angles to create horror.
The protagonist of the story, Jack, is an unemployed college teacher who finds a job at the Yuanwang Hotel in the mountains. In the long and harsh winter, Jack, his wife, and his son will stay in the hotel for several months. He was going to make a big splash and make a difference in writing.
In this book, the narration of the story is also progressing step by step, and the first part slowly lays the groundwork and lays the groundwork. The strange failure of the hotel boiler happened one after another, the baked honeycomb gave birth to bees and the diary of the former guardian.
Suffering from writer's block and his family's suspicions, Jack turns to alcohol again, shattering an already fragile trust between him and his wife.
Part of Jack's transformation is due to the depravity of human nature, and part is also due to the terrible power of the hotel itself. His transformation is the climax of the entire book. The author's handling is also the most ingenious. In the bar, the conversation between Jack and the former Guardian is chilling:
"—kill him. You must kill him, Jack, and her. Because the true artist must suffer. Because every man destroys what he loves; for they are always plotting against you, trying to hinder you from your success."
For a writer, "a real artist must endure pain" is the truth, but when the truth comes here, it is distorted and used for murder, which is so plausible. It seems that in every really good horror story, the villain or hindering force is not a simple killer.
They all contain various weaknesses of deep human nature, so they can always find good excuses for their actions. These excuses are often difficult to refute.
In the drama "Fargo", isn't what if they are wrong while you are right the key to the hero's transformation from a wimp to a murderer with ease? In the "Silence of the Lambs" series, Dr. Hannibal's knowledge of God often makes us feel empty and lost.
I think the reason for the success of these works is that their villains really stand up and have their own souls. When they use words to ridicule positive characters, they are independent individuals, and what they say will move readers and even the author himself.
Only in this way can the conflict of a story play its most important role and bring you an exciting reading experience.
Book Review: The Shining book by Stephen King
The book I will interpret for you today is The Shining, the masterpiece of the American story King Stephen King.
There are many writers in the United States who can be called literary masters, but perhaps only Stephen King can be called the king of storytelling. The surname King (King) originally means "big king", and King's name is worthy of the name, which can be proved by data.
According to statistics, Stephen King has published more than 60 novels, more than 10 short story collections, and 5 non-fiction works in his writing career of more than half a century.
The most amazing thing is that his works have been adapted It has become more than 50 movies, and many of them are classics, such as: "The Shawshank Redemption", "The Green Mile", "Carrie", "The Clown", and today's "The Shining".
You must know that many excellent novelists may not necessarily have their works adapted into movies throughout their lives. Although the film adaptation itself cannot measure the artistic achievement of the writer, it can explain the public influence of the work.
It is generally believed that catering to the interests of the public requires giving up part of artistic pursuits, but when it comes to Stephen King's level, commercial success, and artistic achievement will lead to the same goal by different routes.
If an excellent novel must reflect reality, then King's works constitute the reality of America itself. He provides readers with "a way to imagine America". Generations of Americans have observed and understood contemporary society through King's filter.
The Fears and Desires of American Society. In this sense, it is also reasonable that Stephen King won the National Book Award’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 2003 as a popular novelist, the highest award in the serious literary circles of the United States.
"The Shining" I'm going to talk about today is one of Stephen King's most famous and influential works. The film of the same name, adapted by the talented director Stanley Kubrick, has been the number-one horror film in film history year after year.
In 2018, the film version of "The Shining" was selected as a "National Treasure" in the United States due to its "cultural, historical and aesthetic importance", and was permanently collected by the Library of Congress-specifically, the film copy of the film was sent to the mountains The underground warehouse, even if one day the outside world is turned upside down due to reasons such as war or natural disasters, these movies must be passed on.
Interestingly, though, King himself hated the film version of The Shining, arguing that it grossly misrepresented his original work.
Hearing this, you may have a series of questions in your mind: Is "The Shining" really that scary? Do horror stories really have such high cultural and artistic value? What are the differences between the novel version and the film version, and why do the original authors hate these changes so much?
My reading will attempt to answer these questions. Combined with the plot of the novel, my interpretation will be divided into three parts. The first part talks about "ghosts" and the "working principle" of ghosts.
The second part talks about people and analyzes why people can be more terrifying than ghosts. And in the third part, I will compare the difference between the original book and the movie for you.
This difference is in the final analysis of the different choices in the "ghost content" of the story, and the different interpretations of who should be more responsible for the crime, ghosts or humans. Which is better, I will give my conclusion, I believe you will have your own ideas after listening.
First part: The Shining
OK, let's start with the story. "The Shining" is the third novel published by Stephen King. The first two novels were set in his hometown of Maine. By the third book, he wanted to change the environment and spread out a map of the United States in the kitchen. , casually pointed to Boulder, Colorado, which is a tourist destination with the magnificent scenery of the Rocky Mountains.
King and his wife rushed there and checked into a hotel called The Stanley. The hotel was big and old, and the walls were covered with portraits in elaborate frames. When Kim and his wife arrived, the tourist season was drawing to a close and there were no other guests.
Monotonous record music echoed in the empty hall and winding corridors. This strange and chilling atmosphere stimulated Jin's imagination, and he had a nightmare that night. After waking up from the dream, the story of "The Shining" has taken shape.
The stage where the story of "The Shining" takes place is actually the Stanley Hotel, but it has been renamed "Yuanwang Hotel".
Note: The word "overlook" can also mean "overlook" in English. The object of looking from a distance is naturally the scenery outside the hotel, so it is not difficult to imagine what is being overlooked, and what is being overlooked must be the secrets inside the hotel.
The Yuanwang Hotel opened its doors to welcome guests in 1910. By the end of the 1970s when the novel took place, it had a history of 60 to 70 years. After welcoming so many people, it naturally left countless stories and secrets, some of which were terrible. chapters.
For example, the story of Grady, the previous winter janitor. In winter, the mountain is closed by heavy snow, and the hotel is closed, but a caretaker has to be arranged.
Who knew that this Grady went crazy in the isolated environment, hacked his daughters to death with an ax, and then committed suicide. This incident alone is enough to characterize Yuanwang Hotel as an ominous haunted house.
The protagonist of the story of "The Shining" is the new winter gatekeeper, his name is Jack Torrance, and he is a writer. Jack did not write well, but he contracted a writer's common problem-drinking.
Once he was drunk and broke the arm of his three-year-old son Danny because Danny messed up his manuscript paper. Jack was so remorseful that he gave up drinking, for nineteen months now.
But after quitting drinking, he still lost control of his emotions and lost his teaching job for beating students. He came to work as a hotel janitor, firstly for money, and secondly for creating a quiet environment.
In order to avoid being too lonely, Jack also brought his wife Wendy, and his five-year-old son Danny with him.
Hearing this, you might think, this hotel manager is really big-hearted, isn't he afraid that the guard will repeat the same mistakes? The reason for the hotel manager is that Jack is a cultural person, unlike his predecessor who was a big bastard, so he should not be so bored as to go crazy.
The biggest suspense of the story has been buried from the very beginning: Will Jack let the tragedy happen again?
Let's look at it step by step.
At the end of September, Jack, Wendy, and Danny, a family of three, came to the Yuanwang Hotel on a closed day. The hotel chef, an old Negro named Dick Hallorann, took them on a tour of the hotel before leaving.
Dick discovered that Danny could communicate with him directly in his heart without using his mouth. Dick himself also has this kind of telepathic superpower, so he secretly told Danny in his heart that this kind of power is "The Shining".
The original meaning of the word Shining in English is "shining", and the translation is "shining", which perfectly takes into account the sound and meaning, and the translation are very spiritual.
However, the function of Shining is not just like a wireless walkie-talkie in the brain, allowing two people to communicate through the air. It can also perceive the past and the future, but it is not necessarily accurate. Dick bet on the horse with the Shining, and he couldn't keep winning.
Danny's Shining is much more powerful and will transform into a boy named Tony. In the eyes of his parents, Tony is his son's "invisible little friend". The Tony in Danny's eyes looks very similar to himself, only a few years older, as if from the future, and often uses a dream-like way to give Danny a preview.
For example, this time, Danny knew that his father would get the job of janitor, and had a premonition that something terrible would happen to the Yuanwang Hotel, but he didn't say it because he knew that this job was very important to his father.
In the first few weeks in the hotel, the Jack family was quite happy, after all, the entire luxury hotel now belongs to them only. Jack didn't really have much work to do, except to depressurize the basement heating boiler every day.
But as time passed, loneliness set in, and with it a series of strange events. For example, in the hornet's nest where the insects had been killed, many hornets suddenly flew out, stinging Danny's body with cuts and bruises.
For another example, the shrubs built in the shape of various animals outside the window seem to be changing postures all the time.
In addition, the elevator seems to always go up and down automatically, and it seems that noises can be heard in the corridor, but only the voices of people can be heard, and no one is seen...
These strange things basically belong to the standard configuration of haunted house stories. Giving life to inanimate things and imagining people where there are no people is actually a psychological mechanism for people to resist loneliness.
To some extent, it can even be said that loneliness is worse than ghosts, and people prefer to believe in ghosts' half-truths, so as to avoid facing the endless emptiness.
But the Yuanwang Hotel is really haunted. The first person who really appeared was the female ghost in room 217. Before she was alive, she was a very old rich woman who lived with a young lover who "could be her grandson" and attracted attention.
But then the guy ran away in the rich woman's Porsche. The rich woman then took a large number of sleeping pills with alcohol and committed suicide while lying in the bathtub. Her body was secretly transported out of the hotel, but her ghost lingered in the bathtub, often scaring people to death.
Danny knew something was wrong with room 217 by virtue of his flashing spirit, and the black chef warned him not to go there, but a five-year-old child was curious after all, not to mention extremely boring in a closed environment.
Danny secretly took the key, finally entered room 217, and was almost strangled to death by the female ghost.
Although Danny was able to escape, shocking fingerprints were left on his neck. Mother Wendy once thought it was Jack's domestic violence child again, so she had a big fight with Jack. Danny had to tell the truth.
Of course, the adults didn't believe it, but Jack still went to Room 217. He saw the silhouette of the female ghost through the shower curtain, and quickly backed out, but told his wife Wendy that everything was normal.
Let's pause here for a moment and briefly talk about the "working principle" of ghosts in works of art. Ghosts are different from man-eating beasts because ghosts are social.
The essence of ghosts is that they are incompatible with secular ethics. It can be said that before the rich woman in room 217 committed suicide, she had largely become a female ghost who was ostracized by society.
The reason why ghosts are scary is that the physical discomfort caused by their appearance is only a superficial factor, and the deep factor is the desire represented by ghosts and the transgression of social ethics.
Here I want to introduce a concept to you: Gothic novels. "Gothic" literally means "Germanic", and the Germanic people destroyed the Western Roman Empire, so they were regarded as barbaric and heretical.
However, whether it is Gothic architecture or Gothic novels, it is not limited to the Germans. The elements of Gothic novels are usually gloomy castles and reclusive monsters, and the reason why monsters live in reclusion often involves some kind of unethical love.
From this point of view, the female ghost in room 217 is a typical Gothic female ghost. And the reason why King arranged it as the first ghost to appear in "The Shining" is not so much to inherit and pay tribute to Gothic novels, but to say that Gothic novels have already unconsciously delineated the framework for Westerners to imagine ghosts.
Gothic novels were produced during the period when the European feudal system disintegrated and the bourgeoisie rose. It always looks backward: it has a strong and even morbid nostalgia for the nobility that passed away.
The boundary between life and death cannot be easily crossed in Gothic novels. The result of force is often stuck in an embarrassing state of neither life nor death, such as in the famous vampire.
The female ghost in room 217 can actually be regarded as a vampire in disguise because she has a morbid obsession with her lost youth. Today's readers probably don't think she is scary. After all, she can't even strangle a 5-year-old child to death.
Her appearance on the stage mainly depends on the status bestowed by literary history. If you ask me, what is really scary is not her ghost, but Jack, who saw a ghost, but lied that everything was normal. In the next part, I will talk about why people are more terrifying than ghosts.
The second part: The Shining
Back to the story, now we focus on the father Jack. It is said that one day, Jack found stacks of old files in the basement, which were the hotel's past registers and ledgers.
Jack looked through the list of guests over the years, which is really a gathering of celebrities, including Henry Ford, the founder of Ford Motor, Hollywood superstar Clark Gable, and even Warren Harding, the 29th President of the United States...
Jack also found A newspaper clipping book with a white leather cover, which records various past events of the hotel with pictures and texts: After the war, a mysterious rich man named Horace Deventer, who is said to have made his fortune from smuggling and gambling, bought the hotel and invested in it.
A huge sum of money has been refurbished to turn it into a must-visit resort for celebrities. Later, the hotel changed hands several times and fell into the hands of a gangster who was involved with Devonte.
In 1966, the gangster and his bodyguards were brutally massacred in the presidential suite of the hotel... Jack was reading greedily, forgetting the time.
Who made the clipping? It may be considered that the ghost in the hotel did it, deliberately letting Jack find out, and the purpose was to win him over.
Jack is a writer, and the allure of this material is self-evident, and he soon decides to write a book based on it, and spends long hours in the basement every day from then on.
But the real desire planted in Jack's heart by this clipping is actually not to write a book, but to join the American upper class in the photo.
It can be said that the newspaper clippings endow both the Overlook Hotel and Jack with a more general meaning: the Overlook Hotel has become the epitome of the entire United States, and Jack has become the tragic character that most often appears in serious American literature: The "strugglers" whose "American Dream" leads to destruction—these strugglers are in quotation marks because their struggle methods are always "by whatever means".
After Jack went to Room 217 and saw the female ghost, he lied that everything was normal, not because he was timid, but because he didn't want to leave Yuanwang Hotel. He even broke the sled and the radio, cutting off the hotel from the outside world.
In other words, not only did he not leave by himself, but he also trapped his wife and children here as a kind of sacrifice to this hotel. This is the horror story version of "sacrificing family for a career".
Sensitive Danny knew his father was lying. Danny began to have frequent nightmares. In the dream, Tony said a word to him repeatedly: "red rum" (redrum), and Danny never knew what it meant. Until one time, Danny dreamed of a mirror.
In the mirror, there was a clock covered in a glass case. There were no hands and numbers on the clock face, only a date "December 2", and the glass surface faintly reflected "redrum". The word "wine", after a double reflection, turns out to be "murder" written backward.
The meaning of this dream couldn't be clearer. Danny woke up and quickly used the flash to ask for help from the black chef Dick thousands of miles away.
So what is Jack doing now? He walked into the ballroom of the hotel, where there should be no one there, but at the moment it was very lively, men and women of high society danced to old tunes from the past, as if they had traveled to the past.
There wasn't any alcohol in the hotel, but everyone was drinking now. Jack, who had been abstinent for a long time, couldn't hold it anymore and asked the bartender to pour himself a martini.
With the strength of alcohol, Jack danced lewdly with a beautiful woman, only to find out after the dance that the beautiful woman was the wife of the innkeeper Deventer. The woman even invited Jack to play in her room.
At this time, a person with a British accent offered Jack a glass of wine. Jack looked back and saw that the person who offered the drink was none other than his ex-Grady—yes, it was the Grady who went crazy and hacked his two daughters to death!
Jack greeted him: You, aren't you the janitor? Grady replied politely: You're the janitor, sir. You have always been the gatekeeper. ——This is a very strange remark, but Jack did not refute it.
Grady then tells Jack that his son is being naughty and that he is bringing an "outsider"—a "nigger"—to destroy the hotel. You have the responsibility to "correct" your son, just as I "corrected" my two daughters back then.
It was this dialogue that detonated the thunder that was planted at the beginning of the novel: Jack is finally going to make the same mistakes as Grady. Before telling the story of Jack chasing and killing Danny, I want to disassemble this dialogue again, because it is the weirdest and most intriguing part of the book. As mentioned earlier, the Yuanwang Hotel symbolizes the United States itself, so Grady's words have obvious xenophobia and racial discrimination.
However, please note that Grady not only asked Jack to kill the old black man who came to the rescue but also asked Jack to "correct", that is, kill his own son Danny. In fact, racial discrimination is just a superficial excuse to encourage Jack.
Regardless of whether Grady is a real ghost or a fantasy after Jack went crazy, Jack obviously has murderous intentions for his own son in his heart. What kind of hatred is this?
Jack's murderous intention actually stems from jealousy. Jealous that his son has the Shining, but he doesn't. Jack is a failed writer, he lacks aura and sharpness.
Earlier, when Jack walked into the dance hall where ghosts appeared, instead of being afraid, he was secretly happy: he could finally experience a supernatural feeling similar to his son.
And in the following episodes, Jack will yell at Danny himself: The hotel wants me, not you! ——It can be seen that the infinitely magnified jealousy has turned father and son into competitors.
And we can also understand this kind of father-son competition from the perspective of fables. As I said before, Gothic novels are always morbidly nostalgic.
Jack wants to kill his son, and he can also be regarded as a conservative father who kills a new generation of the creativity-the price of being obsessed with the past is often to kill the future.
Well, now let's see how Danny deals with Crazy Jack. Here, Wendy, the mother who does not have many roles in the book, stepped forward.
When Wendy found that Jack had lost his mind again and threatened the safety of her son, she did not hesitate to pick up a sharp knife and fight Jack. He stabbed Jack.
But Jack seemed to be blessed by the evil energy of the hotel, so he was not stabbed to death and continued to hunt down Danny.
At this time, the black chef Dick finally arrives after many twists and turns, but he is attacked by Jack and knocked unconscious on the ground as soon as he meets him.
So in the end, Danny had to face his crazy father alone. Tony warned Danny in a dream: You have to remember what Jack has forgotten. Now Danny finally understood the meaning of this sentence: it turned out that Jack was too busy hunting down his son to depressurize the boiler room every day.
Danny deliberately lured Jack upstairs, and when he retreated to a dead end, he reminded Jack that midnight was approaching and the boiler was about to explode. Jack hurried to the basement, and just entered the door, just in time for the boiler explosion.
It's ironic to think about it, no matter how much Jack tried, he failed to fulfill his duty as a gatekeeper, and the entire Yuanwang Hotel was destroyed by explosion and fire. And Danny, Wendy, and Dick narrowly escaped before the hotel was engulfed in flames.
That's pretty much the end of the story. Looking back, you may find that the haunted part of the novel is basically a standardized and routine operation, just like hamburgers and French fries.
Although it will never go out of fashion, there is nothing too special. You find that the ghost has never killed a person from the beginning to the end.
The person who kills is a person, the father who should have played the role of family protector, and this is where "The Shining" is truly original and terrifying.
What is the strongest horror? Let me quote a concept from psychoanalyst Freud: uncanny, which is sometimes directly translated into horror in Chinese, such as the famous Uncanny Valley theory: when a robot is most like a human It will suddenly cause strong resentment and horror.
The horror of this uncanny valley is actually "weird". Strangers and unfamiliar environments will make us instinctively feel vigilant and fearful, but what is even more frightening is that a very familiar person or scene suddenly becomes strange.
The degree of horror is the degree of impact on the sense of reality, and the contrast between the front and the back of the weirdness has a particularly severe impact on our sense of reality.
It is precise because of this psychological mechanism that Jack in "The Shining" is much more terrifying than evil ghosts such as the female ghost in room 217 in Yuanwang Hotel.
In fact, Jack's previous drunken domestic violence was more or less a foreshadowing of his murder of his wife and children later.
But Jack worked hard to quit drinking for 19 months, which shows that he still loves his children and family, but he didn't expect to encounter a ghost, who would conjure him alcohol out of thin air.
This involves a fundamental problem in "The Shining": How many of the ghosts in the hotel are external and "objective" existences, and how many are the illusion of Jack's dark desires in his heart? The different answers to this question caused the great difference between the movie version of "The Shining" and the original work.
The third part: The Shining
Stanley Kubrick, the director of "The Shining", is a rare genius in film history. It is said that in order to find a story suitable for adaptation, he would buy a lot of novels, read a few pages and feel bad, and throw the novels directly on the wall.
One day, the secretary realized that there had been no sound of books hitting the wall for a long time, so he opened the door and went in, and found that the novel Kubrick was reading was "The Shining".
A few years later, the movie version of "The Shining" came out, and it has almost firmly secured the throne of the first horror film in film history since then.
The horror of "The Shining" is not the kind of horror that makes you cover your eyes and dare not look at it, or cruel and bloody, but it will make you feel more and more wrong after reading it, and the more you think about it, the more chilly you feel.
Kubrick's adaptation strengthened the visual presentation of the story. For example, the pair of little daughters who were killed by Grady, standing quietly at the end of the maze-like hotel corridor, has become a classic image.
Another example is that Kubrick let Wendy inadvertently discover that on Jack's thick typescript, there was a proverb repeated over and over again: "All work and no play makes Jack stupid" (All work and no play makes Jack stupid) a dull boy), it was immediately revealed that Jack was completely insane.
And this kind of madness is obviously caused by the huge pressure of work. Who is forcing Jack to work? In fact, it is Jack's own "American Dream".
For another example, the "Yuanwang Hotel" built by Kubrick deliberately made the layout of the rooms contradictory, which cannot exist in reality, so it is no wonder that the audience always feels something is wrong.
Kubrick also further elevated the pattern of "The Shining", setting the Yuanwang Hotel as being built on an Indian cemetery, thus strengthening the motif of "the hotel is the epitome of America" and "the bright surface of civilization There is always a terrible evil underneath" the central idea.
At the end of the movie version, the hotel was not burned down by a big fire, but Jack, who was frozen to death outside the hotel, strangely appeared in the old photo of all the hotel staff in 1921, dressed in the tuxedo of the waiter. smiling for the camera.
All of the above, it can be said that a lot of ingenious optimizations have been made to the story of "The Shining". But Kubrick's adaptation downplays the ghost element in the story as a whole.
According to him, this is a story of a family slowly going crazy together in a closed environment. The so-called ghosts are mostly inner demons, evil thoughts, and hallucinations of people themselves.
Why is King so dissatisfied with this? Because Jack in "The Shining" has elements of King's autobiography. Kim also had a bad habit of drinking, but he never beat a child, but he frankly admitted that when the child was disobedient, he also had thoughts of violence in his mind.
If the existence of ghosts is downplayed, the responsibility of ghosts is also downplayed, which means that Jack has to bear greater responsibility for evil deeds, and since Jack is regarded by Jin as his clone, after all, he doesn't want Jack to look too bad.
In fact, there is such a sentence in the original text of "The Shining": "Monsters are real, they live in our hearts, and sometimes, they win." It can be said that King and Kubrick's understanding is essentially the same.
Let's borrow the previous horror concept again: isn't a movie adaptation just a horror version of the original? Watching the movie version, Jin feels like looking at a person whose eyebrows and eyes are very similar to his own child but have a very different temperament, so he looks particularly annoying.
Interestingly, the prototype of the Yuanwang Hotel is called the Stanley Hotel, and Stanley happens to be the name of Kubrick, the director of "The Shining".
I don't know if this magical coincidence can calm down the protracted debate between fans of the original book and fans of the movie.
Conclusion: The Shining book by Stephen King
Well, the essence of this book will be interpreted here for you.
To sum up, "The Shining" is one of the most famous masterpieces of the American story by King Stephen King. It's a haunted house-type horror story set in the isolated Overlook Inn during winter in Colorado.
The first half of the novel provides readers with a standardized scare package, but the second half shifts the focus of horror from ghosts to people, giving the story a more general and realistic meaning.
The Yuanwang Hotel is the epitome of the United States, and Jack is a "struggle" in quotation marks who goes astray in pursuit of the illusory "American Dream".
Jack did not hesitate to destroy his family to achieve his career, but in the end, he could only go to self-destruction.
Although the movie version of "The Shining" downplays the existence of ghosts, it strengthens the theme that people are destroyed by their inner desires.
Finally, I want to talk about the superpower of "The Shining". The famous French philosopher Pascal in the 17th century once said: The biggest problem for people is that they cannot stay in the room by themselves. As I get older, I understand the sharpness of this sentence more and more.
The so-called loneliness is actually never being alone, because when you are alone, your inner memories, regrets, desires, and fears will only emerge more strongly. In the novel, Danny relies on Tony, transformed by the Shining, to fight against loneliness and danger.
In reality, we ordinary people can also have The Shining, the way is to read novels. Those characters in the novel, just like Tony, will use their wisdom, experience, and courage to accompany and guide us, help us fight against loneliness and madness, and stay away from indulgence and sin.
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