Please read the book

Rating: 5/10 (28 April 2010)

The movie has it's good points, but it is highly overrated. Not one of the best horror movies of all time. Not even close.
Normally, those people telling you to read the book are either completely right, or just happy that they finally got around to reading a book that they had laying next to their bed for months at a time. This is definitely not one of those books that lays around waiting to be read. It read's itself.
I'm not trying to advertize the book, just explain my reasoning for giving such a celebrated horror film just five stars.
In the case of The Shining the book leaves you with a completely different feeling. And the emotional depth of Jack Torrence is actually explored... King's introduction at the beginning of the book is very informative. He explains how he and Kubrick had a disagreement over the presence of ghosts in the overlook. (Which I really don't know how the story works without the supernatural presence) But Kubrick heavily altered his screenplay and made an extremely successful horror movie out of it.
I don't like it. - It does the same thing to the story that Kubrick did to A Clockwork Orange - He could have kept more of the characters development and internal conflicts if he cut out his famous scenes of atmospheric nothing... - I don't know who did the casting for this movie but... the wife, I mean c'mon. She's submissive and fits some of the character rolls but the acting on her part isn't believable.