“Few adaptations have been as deliberately unfaithful to its source material as Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 masterwork of Stephen King’s 1977 novel, ‘The Shining.’” So begins CineFix’s new “What’s the Difference” video, which breaks down the deviations of the film version of “The Shining” from King’s original novel. Yet, as the video’s narrators Michael Truly and Casey Redmon claim, “Most [people] consider the 1980 Kubrick film quintessential, not in spite of its differences, but because of them.” So what are the differences?
READ MORE: 23.7 Facts About Stanley Kubrick's 'The Shining'
The duo highlights how, right off the bat, the film detours from the book in something as rudimentary as the protagonist’s name. King’s hotel warden is named John Daniel Torrance, yet Jack Nicholson famously portrayed Jack Torrance in the horror classic. Furthermore — and though it might seem a small change — in the book, the Overlook Hotel’s season runs May 15 through September 30, whereas in the movie,...
