The Shining And Misery : What Makes A Film Adaptation Great?

The movie industry has been developing fast recent years. Due to the improvement of technology, movies are becoming much more widespread nowadays, and especially for the horror movies. Movie directors are able to pursue as many special effects as they can to create a horror atmosphere, which makes those movie plots more eye-catching for the audiences. Honestly, I am not a fan of horror movies. I am not scared of it, I just feel a little bored about it, and I am also confused why people still want to see those movies if they feel paranoid after watching it. However, after reading two articles in Monsters, I come to realize the meaning of creation of horror movies, which is not only for fun, but also a review of our real life. Those ideas indicated by Chuck Klosterman and Stephen King are kind of similar, yet differently inherent.

What is common between most horror films and texts? They all use similar types of codes and conventions. These codes and conventions differ between genre and can be easily identified. These also reflect the values of the audience they are intended for. The 1993 stop-motion animated film, ‘The Nightmare Before Christmas’, directed by Henry Selick, and the 1845 poem, ‘The Raven’, written by Edgar Allan Poe, are both a part of the horror genre, as they follow the codes and conventions of that genre. They use similar visuals, sounds, characterisation, and themes. Using these and other conventions, audiences can identify a genre, which influences their opinions and feelings about the genre.

When novels are adapted for the cinema, directors and writers frequently make changes in the plot, setting, characterization and themes of the novel. Sometimes the changes are made in adaptations due to the distinctive interpretations of the novel, which involve personal views of the book and choices of elements to retain, reproduce, change or leave out. On the contrary, a film is not just an illustrated version of the novel; it is a totally different medium. When adapting the novel, the director has to leave out a number of things for the simple reason of time difference. Furthermore, other structures and techniques must be added to the film to enhance the beauty and impressions of it. Like a

This open letter is directed at the directors of Horror films. This letter will discus the over used gimmicks and the lack of creativity on their part. It will be written in a conversational way with the use of pathos of how these movies are faulty with a touch of humor, and rhetorical questions to emphasize certain points of my discussion of this topic. I will also use ethos through my time as a film fanatic who is passionate on all that is film especially horror film which is my favorite film genre, and is the largest genre with so many subgenres within it that have the ability to use so much imagination. I have crafted this conversation to be directed towards the directors of horror films with the use of film lingo that is used for this genre, movie examples they should look at, and a deep analysis of what and how this problem cause movie of today to lack in appeal.

King, Stephen. "Stephen King -- Why We Crave Horror Movies." Scribd. N.p., n.d. Web. 17 Nov.

First and foremost, The Shining uses setting as a main factor to help portray America and its instability. The film starts out with a deep winding road along with the Rocky Mountains that can be taken to pursue the idea of the struggle that lay ahead for the characters in the film or for the Natives that this film tries to implicitly show. The scenery can represent America and as it is shown in a continuous shot, it also displays the endless opportunities America is known for, however as the camera continuously pans for a few more seconds, a sense of despair comes across you and the long twisty road suggests the impossibility of escape. The manager of the Overlook, Ullman suggests that the Hotel is haunted which ties in with the fact that the Hotel and America has had a very aggressive history that may still haunt us today. Reporter Bill Blakemore pointed out in Room 237 that Kubrick’s team had to research the town and hotel’s history, which showed Navajo tribe tensions with the the white men in the early 1900s. Blackmore also writes about how the name of the hotel connects with the fact that this film addresses the fact that America overlooks the Native American genocide or even the racism in the country.

Wes Craven’s horror movie “Scream”, inspired the gruesome murder of Gina Castillo. Castillo’s sixteen year old son and his fifteen year old cousin killed Gina Castillo. Why would anyone wish to watch the petrifying film, “Scream”? What would trigger a person to take inspiration from the horror movie, “Scream”. Stephen King describes horror as a piece of the human condition. Author of several horror novels, Stephen King wrote an essay titled “Why We Crave Horror.” In this paper he thoroughly explains why the human species craves horror and how it makes humans feel. In this essay, Stephen King precisely claims that humans desire, horror because horror pushes them to face their fears, renew their feelings of normality, and to expose

Whenever books are adapted for film, changes inevitably have to be made. The medium of film offers several advantages and disadvantages over the book: it is not as adept at exploring the inner workings of people - it cannot explore their minds so easily; however, the added visual and audio capabilities of film open whole new areas of the imagination which, in the hands of a competent writer-director, can more than compensate.

The PBS article on film adaption discusses the challenges of adapting a novel into film and the changes film makers may need to make. There are many differences between the two due to their prepositional setups. This can cause key factors of a novel to be lost once transferred into a film. This includes a narrator, personal attachments with the characters, engaging your imagination and possibly even scenes due to the time limitation a film has(PBS). However, when a director takes on this challenge they’re able to alter the novel and fix any faults they see. They also must make many attempts to successfully convey the protagonist’s emotions through other tools with actions or visual aids. This results in the director's

In Stephen King’s somewhat subjective essay in the 1984 Playboy magazine, Why We Crave Horror Movies, King describes his reasoning behind why so many people are fond of watching movies residing in the horror genre. The content of his essay, though inserted in an unconventional area for

Stephen King’s The Shining has maintained its cult status since its release in 1977. The Shining begins with Jack Torrance receiving a position as the winter caretaker for The Overlook Hotel, an isolated hotel in the Colorado Rockies. Jack hopes the stay will be therapeutic and allow him to focus on writing, family, and less on alcohol. As time progresses, unsettling events begin to transpire for Jack, his son Danny, and his wife Wendy. The intensity of the gothic novel came to life by the legendary Stanley Kubrick in 1980. The book was admired by fans, but Kubrick’s reimagining made it the iconic classic that it is today. Stephen King was not as fond of the movie. Although some of Kubrick’s take on The Shining complements the book, King

These days scary movies have many things in common, including events, settings, and characters. Of course, there are just as many differences used to keep the audience interested. Two horror movies “Let the right one in” and “twilight” are taken for comparison and tried to prove that “Let the right one in” has more depth and meaning of human spirit, invokes feelings and thoughts that stay with you, long after the movie is over. These two movies have many similarities, but they also have characteristics to make them unique. Both movies are based on superficial acts, but “Let the right one in” has much better effects as compared to Twilight. “Let the right one in” is life changing in composition to “Twilight” because it shows remarkable acting

Television today serves as a method to confront our societal fears in a comfortable setting, like books and oral tales did hundreds of years ago. The film The Shining directed by Stanley Kubrick, although a modern medium, still draws from the original gothic novel. Compared to The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole, The Shining plays on the same classic and applicable anxiety of finding terror within the nuclear family. Kubrick uses the gothic theme to address horror originating from family relationships, additionally taking the idea of “the gothic novel” to a heightened level through invoking despair in his audience rather than hope as Walpole did in his novel. Despair in The Shining is conveyed by

The book, "Being There," is about a man named Chance, who is forced to move out of the house he lived in his whole life and his experience in the outside world. Based on the success of the book, the movie, "Being There," was made. The author of the book, Jerzy Kosinski, also wrote the screenplay for the movie. I think the major difference between the book and the movie is that in the book, we get to read what Chance is feeling and thinking, but in the movie, we only get to see his actions.

Based on Stephen King’s horror novel of the same name, Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining features hallways filled with butchered daughters, and their guts and blood splashed down the hall. Horror and realism fuel Kubrick’s notoriously disturbing films and The Shining stands clear-cut amongst them. Although in the case of this movie, Kubrick shifts emphasis from visual horror to psychological fear and instills mounting dread from the sequence of disturbing events. Kubrick states, “one of the things that horror stories can do is show us the archetypes of the unconscious; we can see the dark side without having to confront it directly.” Never falling flat, The Shining provides a psychological horror masterpiece complete with brilliant acting, tight camera angles, haunting score, and unanswered questions.