Quote:
Originally Posted by KMR
Film and literature are two very different art forms. In adapting a novel to film, the prime consideration should be to make it work as a film. Stephen King's works are notoriously difficult to transform into films. King's greatest strength is his talent for getting deep inside his characters, making the reader identify with them, getting across their internal states and their emotional journeys. That is something that is very, very hard to do in film, which is primarily a visual medium. So the films of King's stories tend to focus on the outward "horror" aspects and miss what makes the stories work. My guess is that with the Kubrick film, the goal was to take the essence of a story told in 165,000 words and use it to fashion something that would work as a story told as a two-hour picture.
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Totally agree. Film is very good at showing the plot, but it's not so good at conveying a character's interior state or the overall writing style of a novel. For me, the best part of the novel of The Shining is how King allows the reader into Jack's mind, lets us see his flawed love for his wife and son, lets us see memories of his sad, abusive childhood, lets us hear the tone of his thoughts, which are often sad, self-pitying, desperate, surprisingly literary, full of fragile hope for the future, etc. All that stuff can't really be conveyed in a movie.