The Overlook Hotel - The Shining prequel

[olliebean]

Anyone seen Room 237 yet? Is it any good?

[castro diaz]

Back in those crazy, hazy days when I was 17 and I thought austerity was a posh girl's name, I asked my then girlfriend to go the videoshop (like netflix, but with bricks and Rambo II posters and a pale guy behind a desk) to rent out The Shining as she said she'd never seen it.  So I come back from work, go over her house all excited to rewatch a masterpiece and hoping she would jump directly on my lap during the scary parts.

It turns out she had got confused and rented The Shining: Part 2.  An odd beast; it was part remake, part 'alternate world' but billed as a sequel.  It was shit, whatever it was, and even the words 'TV Movie' won't prepare you for its blunt awfulness.  I seem to have blocked most of its atrocities out, although I remember the black guy not dying, a lot of saccharine bullshit between this ersatz Nicholson dad and the kid that would be followed with him trying to strangle him a few scenes later.  Then the Overlook gets blown up using special effects from Doom II.

All very odd.  My absolute favourite part was when it skipped forward 15 years to the kid's graduation, watched proudly by his mum and that mad old caretaker bloke (the horrific attempted infanticide obviously bonded the 3 of them together for years to come), and as he collects his diploma a ghost of his dad pops up on the stage, tells him how proud he is of his 2:2 in Media Studies and blows him a kiss, which is RECIPROCATED by the son.  The fuck!

One genuinely scary part was these topiary lions that guarded the snowy maze outside.  They'd encroach on you every time you turned your back, but stood stock still when you looked at them.  There was something about having to have constant vigil on something trying to kill you that still gets to me.  I weep every time I go to Kew Gardens.

[Cerys]

There was a pretty good thread about The Shining some time ago, here.

[Famous Mortimer]

Anyone seen Room 237 yet? Is it any good?

Armond White hates it, so it's probably decent.

[Mini]

Anyone seen Room 237 yet? Is it any good?

Not really, the theories are mostly stupid and the documentary isn't particularly well made.

[clingfilm portent]

Yes, Room 237 is terrible and at times fully embarrassing. That anyone would call it worth-watching, let alone any good boggles the mind.

[Johnny Townmouse]

Yeah, I get a bit sick of the wild theories, especially when they are presented as being equivalent to the Native American subtext of the film. The Shining mentions killing Native Americans and uses audio consistently to evoke that back-story/origin.

[Cerys]

The Shining reference in Tracey Beaker Returns today.  Small child riding tricycle in hall encounters two girls with ominous expressions.  Brilliant!

[El Unicornio, mang]

It turns out she had got confused and rented The Shining: Part 2. 

That was actually Stephen King's The Shining (presumably tape 2, as it was a two-parter). Stephen King hated Stanley Kubrick's version so had a new one made. It's apparently a lot closer to the novel, but ss you've mentioned, it's daft and not very good.

[Johnny Townmouse]

It's also shot in the same hotel that the novel was written - an issue that King somehow thought was important. It's a fucking shocking piece of work, and a wonderful example of how authors should butt out of adaptations and let screenwriters and directors do their work unhindered by 'fidelity'.

[Thomas]

Thingy Thingy's film adaptation of his book 'The Perks of Being a Wallflower' was pretty neatly done. Wrote and directed it, if I'm not mistaken. Not hugely taken by it but it was neatly done.

I also would really like to see Stephen King's 'daft' and 'shocking' adaptation now.

[El Unicornio, mang]

Go on, treat yourself:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QswE8ew91jA

[Johnny Townmouse]

The first appearance of 'Tony' is just laughably brilliant.

[Pube]

So, this thing doesn't appear to have King's full blessing.

Stephen King says he'd be "happy" if a planned film prequel to his 1977 horror novel The Shining "didn't happen."

It was announced last week that former Walking Dead showrunner Glen Mazzara had been hired to write a screenplay for The Overlook Hotel, a film which will be set before the events of The Shining.

But King, who famously hated Stanley Kubrick's 1980 movie adaptation of The Shining, said that he isn't especially keen on the project – and questioned whether The Overlook Hotel's makers even have the rights to exploit material from his book.

"There's a real question about whether or not they have the rights to 'Before the Play,' which was the prologue cut from the book — because the epilogue to the book was called 'After the Play,'" said the author.

"So they were bookends, and there was really scary stuff in that prologue that wouldn't make a bad movie. Am I eager to see that happen? No I am not.

"And there's some real question about what rights Warner Bros. does still have. The Shining is such an old book now that the copyright comes back to me. Arguably, the film rights lapse — so we'll see. We're looking into that."

Nevertheless, King said that, despite his reservations, he wouldn't necessarily try to stop the prequel being made.

"I'm not saying I would put a stop to the project, because I'm sort of a nice guy," he told Entertainment Weekly. "When I was a kid, my mother said, 'Stephen if you were a girl, you'd always be pregnant.' I have a tendency to let people develop things. I'm always curious to see what will happen. But you know what? I would be just as happy if it didn't happen."

Sounds to me like he doesn't want to stop it, because it might be good, but he doesn't want to give it the Official Stephen King seal of approval, because it might be shit.

[Noodle Lizard]

Does he not own the rights to his books?  Is it an Alan Moore type deal[nb]the difference being that Alan Moore is (more often than not) completely right about the adaptations of his books[/nb]?

[Tiny Poster]

I imagine that back in the 70s, when he was a hot young author and Carrie turned out to be a success, there was a rush to get the rights/option to film as many of his novels as possible. He's probably a lot more media savvy about the rights to later efforts.

Ignatius S will soon explain all of this in detail I expect, what with his surprisingly encyclopaedic knowledge of such all things.

[Noodle Lizard]

He's probably a lot more media savvy about the rights to later efforts.

Just as well.  Nobody wants to see film versions of those.

[checkoutgirl]

Just as well.  Nobody wants to see film versions of those.

I do.

[Pube]

He comes across as a right bitter bastard in this video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x98qcNZ8Fz0

My mum does that same thing, where she has to give the supposed fool of the anecdote a weird or retarded voice. It's a good way to convince people that you're telling the objective truth.

[Tiny Poster]

His one son has just put out a novel, and I read a middling review of it. His other son, Joe Hill, is supposed to be great though. I've only read his (almost completed) Locke & Key series and think it's possibly the best non-superhero, non-REALLIFE ongoing comic series I've read this decade.

[MojoJojo]

That's what I was thinking about. To have Jack looking in the mirror in all those scenes is to imply that it's all in his head. But Danny can see the two little girls and Wendy can see that river of blood. You could debate whether they literally see these things or they're just visual metaphors for their fears. But then Wendy sees the blowjob bear, which is oddly specific, and Danny is able to send a psychic distress call to Scatman Cruthers, and there's nothing ambiguous about that.

In the book it's quite clear that there are two supernatural things going on - Danny having the Shining and the haunted hotel (although the hotel is interested in Danny because of his shining, so they are linked a bit).
But in the film - yeah, I don't think there is anything that couldn't be dismissed as hallucination/cabin fever if you wanted to. Although is there a non-supernatural explanation for how Jack gets out of the fridge? I can't remember.

Then there's the fact that there's a dead ringer for Jack in the old photo, which I've never fully understood. It either means that he's the reincarnation of the old caretaker, or that he appeared in the photo after he'd died and joined the ghosts.

Well, my interpretation is that the hotel has power/personality because of it's terrible history and all the violent deaths and things that have happened in the past. And Jack's now become part of that terrible history and so part of the hotel.

[Pube]

Isn't there something faintly racist about Scatman Cruthers being a "shiner"? As in a shoe-shiner, or a man with shining black skin?

Seems a bit dodgy.

[Tiny Poster]

Nope.

[Pube]

Yup.

I mean, this is Stephen King, who had a literal magic negro in The Green Mile. No coincidence that he has a black man "shining".

[Jemble Fred]

Who talks about non-caucasians' skin 'shining'? Surely you'd have to be pretty racist in the first place to dream up any such connection. Apologies if I'm missing some kind of resplendent sardonic humour.

[olliebean]

Does he not own the rights to his books?  Is it an Alan Moore type deal[nb]the difference being that Alan Moore is (more often than not) completely right about the adaptations of his books[/nb]?

Wikipedia implies that he needed Kubrick's approval when he made his own version of The Shining:

The creation of this miniseries is attributed to Stephen King's dissatisfaction with director Stanley Kubrick's 1980 film of the same name. In order to receive Kubrick's approval to re-adapt The Shining into a program closer to the original story, King had to agree in writing to eschew his frequent public criticism of Kubrick's film, save for the sole commentary that he was disappointed with Jack Nicholson's portrayal of Jack Torrance as though he had been insane before his arrival at the Overlook Hotel.

Presumably Kubrick had bought and still owned the film rights to the story.

[Noodle Lizard]

Isn't there something faintly racist about Scatman Cruthers being a "shiner"? As in a shoe-shiner, or a man with shining black skin?

Seems a bit dodgy.

He certainly got stuck with the "magic negro" typecast after 'The Shining' - ever seen the Spielberg segment of 'The Twilight Zone Movie' where he wanders from nursing home to nursing home with a magical tin can, turning old people back into kids again?  He even does a bit of singing and whistling, too.

It's been a while since I read the book, but what exactly is the point of Halloran in 'The Shining'?  A bit of exposition about what "shining" is aside, he pretty much just has a lot of screen time devoted to him trying to get up to the hotel only to get swiftly snuffed off.  Don't get me wrong, I liked that that subplot gave you some hope that they would be saved and then have that hope destroyed quicksmart, but it still felt a bit odd.

[Noodle Lizard]

Who talks about non-caucasians' skin 'shining'?

Nobody here.

Surely you'd have to be pretty racist in the first place to dream up any such connection.

Your words.

[Jemble Fred]

Read the thread, you scaly tit. 7 posts up.

[Noodle Lizard]

Read the thread, you scaly tit. 7 posts up.

My bad.  I remembered the bit about "shoe-shiner", not the last bit.

I've had a fair bit of orange juice.