BAD DAD

Rachel Kincaid on how one version of The Shining differs from the other when it comes to paternal evil

This essay is the final installment of the Bookworm series, which focuses on horror films adapted from books. Bookworm is made possible by the Rocky Wood Memorial Scholarship Fund from the Horror Writers’ Association. Read the first essay here; the second here; and the fourth here.

BY: RACHEL KINCAID

“Thought I saw an eagle / but it might have been a vulture / I never could decide
Then my father built an altar / He looked once behind his shoulder / He knew I would not hide”

- “Story of Isaac,” Leonard Cohen

The oldest horror story in the world: there's a man who wants to hurt you. The second-oldest: there’s something wrong with the house and now it’s your problem. 

Both plotlines are at work in The Shining — both of The Shinings, the original 1977 book from Stephen King and Stanley Kubrick's 1980 film adaptation (or all three, if you include the 1997 TV miniseries). In fact, watching The Shining feels like watching two movies nested inside each other: one plot features a rapidly decompensating abusive alcoholic, Jack, who is about to turn on his family; the other is about a haunted hotel. 

The haunted hotel film is a fascinating and deeply imagined entry into the canon of buildings with ill intent — a kind of spiritual descendent of Hill House. At its best, the Overlook is Lynchian, with its surreal Room 237; the ghosts that stalk its surroundings range from gruesome haunted house fare to genuinely unsettling.

The rapidly decompensating abusive alcoholic plotline, though, is where the terror of The Shining really takes root. This narrative — about being trapped in a house with a man who wants to hurt you — operates almost completely separately from the ghosts orbiting it, who come to seem more like a Greek chorus urging Jack on, invisible to all but Jack and the audience. 

The real story takes place at the intersection between these two archetypes — what is a father but a man multiplied by the factor of home? 

The book and the film versions of The Shining are meaningfully divergent on this question of men and houses and the dynamic they share. King famously took issue with the film adaptation of his work, both in the characterization of the Torrances — who he considered hamfisted compared to the characters he wrote — and in its relationship to the supernatural.  

King saw Jack Torrance's decompensation as a true possession; an imperfect man who walked into the wrong hotel at the wrong time. The Overlook, in King's imagination, is the real villain, while Jack is a kind of pitiable hand puppet — a hotel walks into a man and puts a mallet in his hand. (I'm reminded of Twin Peaks; some kind of Jungian impulse at work here with our desire to separate violent fathers from their own violence).

And while the original text of “The Shining” does circle around the genesis of Jack's violence, giving him brief moments of clarity about his own impulses, the book’s final denouement reflects the idea of possession pretty unambiguously:

Standing on top of [the kitchen chopping block] was a martini glass, a fifth of gin, and a plastic dish filled with olives. Leaning against it was one of the roque mallets from the equipment shed.

He looked at it for a long time. Then a voice, much deeper and much more powerful than Grady’s, spoke from somewhere, everywhere ... from inside him.

(Keep your promise, Mr. Torrance.)

“I will,” he said. He heard the fawning servility in his own voice but was unable to control it. “I will.”

By the time he and his mallet find Danny, Jack is no longer in the picture at all — Danny describes the evil taking over his father as something "hiding behind Daddy’s face… imitating Daddy’s voice."

Kubrick's work, by contrast, is less clear about who the real evil-doer is, house or man. This is in part a product of the medium — films let us see what people do, but don’t always show us why they do it — and in part because of something else.

The hotel functions as a haunted house, a container for both the violence of the land it was built on and the horrors that have come to pass in it. But it also has other valances: The Overlook — isolated and nested with impossible layers of hallways and chambers representing decades of calcified history — is the ideal laboratory for an experiment about intrafamiliar violence. 

Some men are violent indiscriminately. But some men are violent when the circumstances are right: when they are shielded from public view, without consequences. Sharp, kind doctors like the one who clocks Danny's vulnerability to abuse in the first act don't visit the Overlook; no one does, after the end of the season. 

If you only hurt someone when you know you'll face no consequences for it, does that make you more or less violent? What circumstances would it take for you to hurt someone? What would you need whispered in your ear — would you need the power of suggestion at all, or just a winter disconnected from reality? Can you be sure? 

To ask it another way: if a man thinks dark thoughts, but never commits them because the circumstances don't arise, is he still violent? If he has the will to commit violence but wouldn't have thought to do so unless someone whispers the idea in his ear, how do we assign blame? If he only commits them because the particulars of a house afford him the opportunity, is he at fault — or the house?

These weren't abstract questions for King as he authored the original text. According to the biography, Haunted Heart, he wrote “The Shining” based on his own urges to lash out at his children. King admitted "feelings of anger about [his] kids [he] never expected," saying that he "wanted to grab them and hit them" at times. In creating Jack Torrance, he didn't intend to write about himself. Instead, biographer Lisa Rogak quotes King as writing “The Shining” as a kind of absolution; a way of "trying to keep the hex off… if I write this, it won't happen." (It won't happen; not, I won't do it — a careful invocation of the passive voice). King’s novels sketch out a complex picture of evil; people are driven by inner turmoil and human failings that escalate dangerously because of circumstances that alienate us from our better natures. 

This personal framing didn't translate to the film adaptation; King and Kubrick are working with different paradigms of violence. In the world of Kubrick's Shining, danger lurks around every corner because people are fundamentally violent and they live in an inherently dangerous world. Despite the Overlook’s isolation, we’re made aware of its context: "Wasn't it around here that the Donner party got snowbound?" Wendy asks in the first 15 minutes of the film. Later, Wendy hears a TV news segment about another young wife suddenly disappeared under mysterious circumstances related to her husband. The implication is clear: even if she were able to leave the hotel and the increasingly menacing Jack, who's to say she would be safer out there? 

King is correct in his critiques. Jack and Wendy are hamfisted; Jack is cartoonishly evil, and while Wendy performs admirably, her character has clearly been designed to react, not engage meaningfully — a surface on which Kubrick projects his shadows. 

It's inconvenient, then, that Kubrick's Shining manages to be one of the more resonant and authentic depictions of a spiral into violent abuse on screen. The film is far from a nuanced feminist work, but Nicholson's cocktail of patriarchal tyranny and childishness rings somatically true. Even Jack's most exaggerated delivery, where he rounds on Wendy to deliver a monologue about how she cruelly refuses to support him or consider his needs, does not feel far off from reality. This is one of the shameful secrets familiar to those who have navigated their own personal Jack Torrance: abuse really can be this embarrassingly on the nose.

Most of all, what The Shining (1980) gets right is the waiting: the 146-minute runtime lets Kubrick spool out hours, days, and weeks of almost unbearable dread. This excruciating hang time is a remarkable exercise in verisimilitude; installation art about what it feels like to spend your life in this kind of house with this kind of father, waiting endlessly for the bad thing to finally happen, for the tinder to catch. Gradually, then suddenly.

Wendy comes across Jack in his capacious writing lounge and he's distraught, indisposed. She cradles him like a child on the floor as he tells her with deep distress that he had a terrible dream, one where he murders her and Danny gruesomely. The sneering, fast-talking man we know is gone; the one in his place is feeling real terror. 

There's no supernatural element visible in this scene. We don't see Jack's dream, with ghosts leering from the wings; we have no indication that this is anything but a genuine nightmare, rooted as the worst nightmares always are, in our own most urgent fears. There's just an ordinary man, shaking in his wife's arms, thinking about how it would feel to hurt her.

As Wendy is comforting her husband, Danny appears silently on the edge of the tableau. Only the viewer knows that Danny has just had an encounter with the lascivious ghost of Room 237. His parents only see that he’s disheveled, with visible bruising around his throat like he's been choked. 

While Wendy grows increasingly upset, Jack remains frozen in the background and doesn't even rise from his chair to check on his son for himself, too paralyzed by his own guilt about the imagined harm he caused Danny in his dream to engage in any way with the real harm the child has suffered in the present.

Eventually, Wendy gathers Danny up in her arms and tearfully accuses Jack of assaulting him, finally taking a stand relative to her husband's mounting malevolence and also cementing herself as a target. But the moment just before that happens is the core of the film for me —  the moment where Jack could do something — anything — but chooses not to.

This is where Kubrick and King's visions overlap in a man who has always known he is abstractly capable of causing harm, but is beginning to fear he is capable of doing so purposely — one who is, we imagine, all but begging to be convinced otherwise. We see this man with a chance to fix something, to right the scales even a little; we see him decide not to. 

This is what's hardest to get right in stories about abusive fathers: the violence of what he does to you, and more complicated, what he fails to do.

The novel “The Shining” (1977) is Jack’s story. It’s a horror story about the unspeakable dread of confronting that you are a person who would hurt their loved ones, that you have it in you to raise a hand to your own child. The engine that turns the machine of terror relies on the realization that abusers are not some distant, monstrous Other that you have nothing in common with; the you here is the father, the husband, the Bad Man, anyone who is afraid they could be a Bad Man, which is maybe all of us. 

The film The Shining (1980) is Wendy and Danny’s story. It’s a story about realizing that you are not safe with the man you love, about watching him turn a corner and head toward you. This plot unfolds differently for that reason; the internal clockwork of horror is designed from their perspective. 

This fear extends beyond individual characters and into the fabric of the film itself. When Danny covers his eyes in the hallway, it's the same gesture Jack makes at the bar to signify a kind of melodramatic surrender. The deepest, most potent fear of a kid with a bad dad: that we are just like him after all, that we were always going to be.

From the perspective of a Danny or a Wendy, the chicken-and-egg question of whether Jack or the Overlook are truly to blame is absurd. I wouldn't do this if it weren't for the house, the father says. Outside of here, things would be different, I would be different. What is this supposed to mean to those of us who are trapped inside the house — trapped with him? 

In King's book, there's a clear delineation between Jack-as-Jack and Jack-as-The-Overlook; when Danny sees his father round the corner with a mallet raised to beat him to death, King makes sure Danny tells us this isn't really Jack. "…it was not his daddy, this Saturday Night Shock Show horror with its rolling eyes and hunched and hulking shoulders and blood-drenched shirt." Jack is christened with a new set of pronouns to become an "it." 

The Shining (1980) forces us to confront the much more horrifying thing: this is his daddy. It’s yours, too, and it’s mine.

Where Kubrick has Danny flee from his homicidal father, King engineers a face-off between the two. In a hotel hallway, Danny confronts the monstrous figure of his father and tells him he knows the Overlook is in control. The child’s bravery is rewarded with a last visitation from his real, lucid father — who is already a ghost — and we get the last dialogue attributed to Jack-as-Jack: "Doc, run away. Quick. And remember how much I love you." 

This is what Kubrick is missing by refusing Jack any interiority. The idea that Jack really is as monstrous and culpable as all that — and also loves Danny, and feels, as King puts it, "mortal agony" at the harm he causes him.

It's a critical failure of imagination on Kubrick's part — unsurprising from the same man who couldn't trust that his actors could create anything on their own and needed to be tormented in real life to produce the desired effect on screen. He seems to understand violence, but not abuse, the connective tissue of love that makes it so devastating.

It's hard to imagine anyone loving Nicholson's Jack Torrance — a leering, facetious misogynist who seems mildly surprised whenever he runs across his own son in the hotel where they both live. And yet, his family must love him. Think of Wendy's comical, halfhearted stabs at Jack's arm as he chops through a door to reach her, which are usually read as a marker of her character's incompetence. But if you choose to believe that her character is a real person with an imperfect but coherent sense of the world, her behavior looks more to me like the anguished, impossible choice of a woman who still believes that she's going to lie down next to her husband again when she goes to sleep that night. Who still wants to, on some level. 

I think of King's refusal to believe that this man who loves his family can and will also raise up a hand, a mallet, an ax against them of his own free will. In “The Shining” he imagines a kind of deus ex machina, an outside evil that capitalizes on our potential to commit violence. A void opens up where these stories overlap: an inability to accept that we can do monstrous things of our own free will, and that we remain fully, terribly human while we do so.

This void of imagination is where the actual terror of The Shining originates, and where we sit as spectators, holding a truth too large for the story built around it: that none of us are forced to be monsters either by dint of supernatural forces or our own natures. That the family unit really can be a horror show, and is, but that it doesn't have to be. That we are granted the power of choice and are even now choosing: to harm, to save, to stay, to run. 🪱

---

Rachel Kincaid is a New England transplant to Minnesota, where she works in newsletters and occasionally teaches writing. Her favorite X-Files episode is "Beyond the Sea."