Reply #56: Have you read "The Haunting of Hill House"

[cemaphonic]

by Shirley Jackson? It also has an already-troubled character that is further isolated and alienated from people through contact with a haunted house. I'm pretty sure I've seen King cite this as a huge influence on "The Shining." I always liked how in the novel, Jack starts re-exhibiting symptoms of his alcoholism long before he actually falls of the wagon. The movie isn't as detailed, but basically presents the same situation where his sobered-up but untreated alcoholism is the wedge that the hotel uses to break him.

All in all, I guess what I am saying is that the book character is way more fleshed-out (a strength of the novel form in general and King in particular), but that Nicholson's portrayal seems to me to be a reasonable distillation of how the novel character would appear to a neutral, exterior pov like a film camera.

I've wondered about the axe myself. The mallet has a grotesque perverseness to it that would have well-suited the film, while the axe just seems prosaic. The topiary was something that his film crew looked into and decided that there was no way to do it that wasn't going to look silly.