Stephen King interview (1993)

we begin with Stephen King he is a national treasure of Terra since the publication of his first book Kerry in 1974 Stephen King has written 27 novels that have sold a hundred and fifty million copies worldwide and made him very rich his work including The Shining and misery has been adapted into 24 feature films and six television productions his latest book nightmares & dreamscapes is a retrospective of King phenomenal Korea including many hard-to-find stories and several that are being published for the first time we're very pleased to have him with us this time welcome Thank You charlie it's nice to be here it is really good to have you here we wanted to do this for a while tell me what what kind of books do you write well if you ask the ordinary run-of-the-mill reader if there is such a guy or such a gal I guess that I write horror novels I think that what I actually write are suspense novels what's the difference I think that the purpose of the horror novel is to sort of gross you out my idea of it is and I'm not averse to this I will do this as part of the fun of it is it's kind of at the it's a childish thing the way the humor is the two things are closely allied they both elicit when they work to their best of reaction from the audience laughter if it's comedy in a a scream or a yell if it's if it's horror but it's they're both childish and it's kind of like when you're a kid and you're sitting at the dining room table and you want to get to your to your sister your brother you kind of chew up your food and then ah you hang your mouth open like that that's horror suspense is a little more high-class than that so maybe that's why mothers are the way that was tasteless that's tasteless yeah that's right well my mother when I was a kid used to say Stephen your taste is all in your mouth and that's true but it has made me relatively wealthy not even relatively very but I have a lot of relatives though do you know where it all comes from I mean it comes out of your imagination but why this for you why not other kinds of novels no I don't know where it all comes from and that's the the literal unvarnished truth I don't know where it comes from anymore then I know where the color of my eyes comes from I like I do where I come from well all right that comes that's genetically inherited from your mother and your father and my mother used to enjoy writing and my father wrote a lot of stories and and mailed them to the pulp magazines of the 40s and 50s like Argosy and that sort of thing I guess some of them were pretty good but I've never seen any of them so I have a middle of that from my parents and my children have only one with it from me you wanted to write from an early age yeah it was what it was what there was for me I always did it I always took great pleasure in it I still take great pleasure in it the actual act of composition for me the part that I don't like starts when you turn a manuscript in to the publisher that's like you have your own private field that's full of snow in the in the backyard and nobody's tracked in it but you and you give it to them and then they open it to the public I mean that whole creation is only your's and only you know those characters our editor but forget that you were the only person who's live with them know them know where they're going what they think how they conflict it's going to happen to them and I'm the only one that has an opinion on them and then an editor comes along and says well we'll change this in that this new and nightmares & dreamscapes a lot of the stories go back half my lifetime actually and so some of them were written by a very young man and then the editor comes up and says well maybe if you change this or tweak that and it's not that they're wrong that's not what I'm saying it's that you say well that was mine for a long time now you come in here and it's maybe two I'm from Maine I'm a Yankee maybe that's a Yankee reaction you know leave my backyard alone do you create characters you like usually I do but I don't always create characters that I like sometimes I create the same sort of characters that I'm I'm afraid of when I was a girl right oh yeah when I was a kid I was a guy who maybe the first of the modern serial killers use a guy named Charlie dark weather right and he went I off the Texas right it's our little bania no no that's that's much later Starkweather was in Nebraska and it was in the 50s and I had a scrapbook I cut out all these clippings of him and my mother found this scrapbook it was 57 so I would have been about 10 years old and I think she decided right then and there that not all my wheels were on the road anymore your elevator was not going to the cell floor she said why do you why are you interested in this guy and because I was only 10 and what articulation I had then went into the stories and it really still does I'm a much better writer than I am a talker what I was not able to tell her was there was one picture of this young man who killed these people and what the was in his eyes was nothing at all I mean vacant rooms depopulated planets whose nothing and what I was not able to tell her was I need to look out for this guy I need to know everything about him so that if I ever meet him or anybody like him I can go around and in my fiction when I've created characters like John rain burden in firestarter or George stark in the dark half some of the real bad guys I'm telling myself reminding myself look out for these guys these guys are dangerous and they're really out there but when you were how old did you do this this is when you would not camp yeah did you try to write anything then when you were 9 and 10 oh yeah yeah and a lot of it was the sort of stuff that I write now there were horror stories fantasy stories see I grew up on a diet of let's say the sort of comic books that kids weren't really supposed to read like Tales from the Crypt and the vault of horror and that sort of thing one of the earliest stories that I remember my mother reading my my brother and I was dr. Jekyll and mr. Hyde so you see I was I was warped from an early age but the idea that this sort of thing you know somebody will sort of want to discuss your books if you write what I write and they'll sort of sidle up to you and say by the way what was your childhood like course they do but mine was perfectly normal as a as a you know a general case back to the question I asked about what kind of books do you write do you compare yourself with with no false modesty to anyone when you look back who would you like to be compared to where do you put your work generally once it's done and bound and in a book I put it on the Shelf it's a get it in I send it the Hollywoods i send the check yeah the writers that i like there are writers that that i admire tremendously and there are writers who whose styles have helped me at various times that I've sort of taken into my own mix and tried to make a part of myself I think that writers when they're forming are like what my mother always used to say milk in the refrigerator takes the flavor of whatever's next to it you know so that as a kid if I read a lot of HP Lovecraft I'd write like Lovecraft there are a couple of pastiches in the nightmares & dreamscapes the new book there's a Sherlock Holmes story that was written as part of a competition at a mystery weekend in Mohawk in upstate New York and there's also a Chandler esque Philip Marvel hard-boiled detective story because I admire that style tremendously you know what I'm like I don't necessarily want to be compared to anybody know but just tell me who you know because there are people the reason I asked the question there there many who say and this is complimentary to you look back years from there we look back at what Stephen King was writing and we'll see you in a very different way as the audience who loves you so much and buys 150 million copies sees you they may very well be responding to these sort of base emotions of a great story first of all I don't think that you would sell unless you tell a great story I assume that you believe that as well any if they remember me at all yeah I mean it's a it's amazing when you think about it the writers who come and enjoy tremendous popularity and sort of disappear so that you find their works on back shelves in hotel suites or in you know bargain barns in New England if if I if I could write one book let's say in my genre that would be remembered the way that Dracula remembered I loved the idea of the novel Dracula because it's it's shameless Pulp Fiction and it's it's melodramatic and it has a lot of things in it that that critics considered to be vices and yet it's it's enjoyed its own life it stood the test of time that's right yeah and do you believe yours will stand the test of time well I'd like to think so and I think some of it has a chance because horror fiction is a general rule lives its own guerilla life so that sometimes it's the kind of thing where one kid will tell another have you read this you know and they'll go and get it out of the library and I think that some of that stuff does have a tendency in alas what both on the superficial level at the top level not superficial but at the very top what is it that makes it so attractive so it sells something to cover yours and others what is it about whatever you don't call it Horeb your work Horeb you don't call yourself a horror novelist for whatever reason but yourself it but it's okay I'm not suggesting you're putting it down right you're not but what is it that grabs an audience at the first level forbidden some minutes forbidden so that you're saying to somebody come with me and I will say things to you that nobody else will say and I will show you things that nobody else they're so horrible to imagine to you that's right and again it shares the same attraction as comedy which says the same thing comedy humor says comedy humor get me out of here I just wash my mouth and I can't do a thing with it but a movie that's really funny that really makes people laugh is generally saying I'm going to show you something that you haven't seen before so that when Mel Brooks did Blazing Saddles back in 74 or whatever was and the Cowboys eat beans and then sit around the fire and they start to fart right well nobody had ever heard anybody actually fought in a movie and we all fell on the floor laughing you know it made that movie so it was something that had been previously forbidden you know we all know about it we all know that people pass gas but nobody had ever put it on the big screen and here what are you doing it's forbidden well for instance in Pet Sematary what I said was here's something that we don't talk about people sometimes have kids who died there are terrible things that happen and sometimes a child will die young and in Pet Sematary that happened and I followed the family through the grieving process and then the father goes out to the graveyard and digs his son up and tries to bring him back to life and there's that can't happen that is a total make-believe thing just in case any of your viewers out there thought that they could dig people up and bring them back to life it doesn't work that way but in fiction sometimes it can and the important part about it you know I like to say that fiction is a lie but good fiction is the truth inside the lie and the truth that any person who's ever lost a child knows is that you wish you could bring them back to life and the story explores what might happen if something like that could could happen so horror fiction a lot of it to me is the lure of the forbidden of the forbidden now at a Depot and or additional level is it also some sense of of dealing with your own fears I think it is I think that by comparison by what well by comparison saying as bad as things are you know they're not this bad there are two stories as scared as you might be this is the deepest and darkest deepest but on a level where I like to work now because I've been here for a long time I've done a lot of this stuff I'm terrified of self parody I'm terrified of running out of ideas and just recycling the old stuff the thing that interests me the most right now is the fact that sometimes things happen that are terrible and it doesn't seem to be any clear reason why there are two stories and nightmares & dreamscapes this one called rainy season and there's another one called the moving finger rainy season is about these tourists who are just sort of besieged by killer toads right in the moving finger is a story about a from Queens who one night sees a finger poked out of the bathroom drain just just a finger and it keeps getting longer and in neither case are these phenomena explain one of the things that particularly in Hollywood that filmmakers like you to do is to explain where these monsters came from or whatever the phenomena was what started this which is ridiculous why would they want to go ahead it is ridiculous yeah what why would they look at it why would they want to do that because that ruins the mystery of the whole thing does it not that's right and the reason that you're doing what you're doing instead of producing movies is because you're relatively rational you can understand that well let's get to that subject I mean what about the movies that have been made out of your novels I mean some of them they forget that whatever is in the inside the book and they take the title and they go off and make their movie mm-hmm now that you know that's simply trying to make a few bucks yeah but what about those that are more true to what you have written why do they fail I don't mean fail in terms of fail in terms of your liking them not in terms of an audience not in terms of making money but in terms of Stephen King saying by god they did a hell of a job well one movie that departs considerably from the from the book that's a failure is Stanley Kubrick's The Shining right and I think that that would fail because Kubrick was going to make the horror movie that was going to be the benchmark horror movie the one by which other horror movies are judged and he didn't really know the field and he didn't take any time to educate himself in the field so that I think that might be a failure of Oubre s-- and with the case of another movie like firestarter which was the book literally exactly point-to-point it is the book I think it's a failure because it doesn't have the sparkle and the life of the novel I've been waiting for this to happen to John Grisham but there's only one film out wish him I love his stuff and one of the reasons I did I love his stuff I love his stuff because we all have a little sensor inside our heads that stands at the gate what we really think and what we actually say or write down and Grisham's is out on a permanent coffee break whatever comes into that guy's mind boom it's on the page and that's what makes him really work he's really alive in the books are really alive they may be a little bit unbelievable in places and they may be a little bit rough edged in terms of style but the firm worked really well as a movie as a movie and but the first movie ever made from one of my books Carrie also really worked well and another thing that they have in common is in both cases the film departed significantly from the book but still work it will be interesting to see how future films have hit work whether or not they can catch what I'm trying to say to leave back to your question is the movie has to capture some of the spirit of the writers heart and mind and if it doesn't generally speaking what the reader went to the book and found and loved the movie audience well how many screenplays have you written I've written you had to ask me that as well tough maybe the ones that you rough I think here wait a second just bear with me folks I'm looking at the what they call the masthead page where I essentially has it I've written Creepshow cat's-eye Silver Bullet Maximum Overdrive Pet Sematary Golden Ears sleepwalkers in the stand and of which of those did you like the most the one that I like the best is the stand which is going to be a okay that's an eight-hour miniseries on ABC and that's why I like it because it got a chance to spread and and did you have more of a direct involvement with the director and the producer so that more of the passion of the writer Lee I was the producer so the best way I've always said that well either that or it's like I sold out completely now I've met the unity in here so you had control I had a fair degree of control listen the Stan was a huge project but it's the one where readers come to me and say the stand has to be a movie don't make the stand into a movie all in the same breath is this feeling like they want to see it but they feel like it can't be done and for 10 years we tried to do it as a theatrical and it could because it was too long but the standards of TV have changed so much you can do more it's not the same or the license yeah oh yeah all right take a look here's a clip from the stand produced by written by and in this case with me in it and with him in it Stephen King wrote eight but the problem is you didn't learn one basic thing if you have a crow in there if you have a dog in there if you have a cat in there it'll steal the scene every time well we've got a we've got a dog in the stand it was actually very difficult to work with the dog's name was Kojak and I said well let's replace him with a crow I'll call him crow jack but above all I did you you're happy with this did you like the acting yourself you mean yeah I think yourself the actor acting the something that I've done ever since college I'm not very talented there are a lot of critics would say I'm not a very talented writer but compared to my acting skills I'm Jon Stark well let's speak about critics that's the other thing you do such great segues into what I want to talk about how do you feel about the critics and what they say about you and what do you think of literary establishment in America I think that that those are big feels I can and cover I'll take critics first I think the critics by and large have been very fair to me over the years as I've gotten more successful in terms of copy sold the critical reaction to my stuff has been stiffer and that's the way that it should be when a lot of people are reading a lot of stuff it deserves to be evaluated with a real strong edge of what would you say that devil's advocacy feel like so that there's been some of that but I also think that there's a critical view in this country that says we critics of the few the proud the brave and we understand what real literary quality is and there aren't very many of us guys us real pencil neck geeks who understand the true meaning of the game all in aren't you now well I sort of find that in there but the idea is that it tends to be critical approval for people who have a fairly narrow range of appeal and there is a feeling among the real critical intelligentsia that anybody who's being read by a lot of people I can't be very good because the middle range is fairly low and that's that's total bull and how much of it though is the fact that they don't think that the horror genre or even suspense genre is real literature I think to some of that but on the whole because it has a real a real openness to allegory and symbolism I've been better treated and a lot of horror novelists have been better treated Peter Straub for instance Patrick McGrath right we've been better treated in Clive Barker then say really good Western novelists like Llewellyn well I don't know about when he warned pretty pretty well probably better than he deserves my mind about Larry McMurtry McMurtry is a good case in point there are a lot of people who are working in the Western field you know one thing I'm curious about that a field that's been totally overlooked by the critics except when they want a sneer so I wonder if anybody's done anything good in the romance feel well answer your own question I don't know because I don't know I don't know the feel yeah I don't know sort of like swim savage love Lana somebody has in fact I don't even know that I can name five romance novelist it's tough rosemary Rogers and then I'm sort of Danielle Steele and you'll still I assume being there yeah yeah um what about the notion of a part of you wanting to wanting I mean a little part of you having all the success you've had both in terms of readers both in terms of enthusiasm for your latest book your name alone will sell the book now I mean if it's a Stephen King novel they want it and there's a built-in audience as there is in a different genre for Tom Clancy and and others there's still a part of you hunger for sort of someone to say this guy is a great writer yes yes there's always a feeling here that I would love to be allowed to go around to the front door instead of always having to use the tradesmen's entrance that would be wonderful but essentially I'm sort of resigned to the idea that I'm going to be regarded as a popular novelist with a popular novelist virtues and a popular novelist fault and in a sense that's all right I'm running my own race now what do you mean I mean my family is well provided for there's no need if it were a matter of money I would never have to set yeah my pen to paper or turn on my word processor again in the world if it were a matter of critical acceptance I would stop right now because that's never going to come on the level that you just mentioned I don't think never I don't know no I don't think so not in my lifetime certainly and probably not after but are you going to reach for it oh yeah yeah always every time that I sit down that's why I say I'm running my own race I'm writing to please myself and I want there's AI I'm my own toughest critic I've never been able to reach to the place that I want to be at so but the last two novels this is a compilation of a lot of things the last two novels were the best reviewed and some say a new direction for you more in the genre of suspense than harm yes well I think that that's true I think that as if you were reaching stretching growing moving somewhere else yeah I think the people look at Gerald's game indoors Clayborne Dolores comes out in in paperback next month and I'll be interested to see how that how that does those are straight novels in the sense there's no supernatural element there's no hocus-pocus there's no why you'll notice that my arm goes all the way up this shoulder and all that they're straight novels have that child's game same thing same thing right but the basic thing is I never said that I was a horror novelist I never said that I was a suspense novelist I never said I was anything except a guy who writes books and any any labels that go on me I don't accept those or reject those why do you write so prolifically why so many I mean those stories that in there that have to get out or is it yeah I think that they do but I also think that some of it has to do with simply being fairly facile with words that is to say this is story I don't know if it's apocryphal or not about James Joyce friend comes in and Joyce has got his hands up on his head like this and he's all not and the guy says James what's the matter did you have a bad day how many words did you write in Joyce cuz I wrote seven words today that's not bad for you James he says but I don't know what order they go in and I know I've never been I've never been that kind of a writer I've always known what what order they go in and I think that sometimes that very facility has caused me problems with the critic so that I am to popular novelist sort of what algin and Swinburne was doing well it's business you're just turning them out you're just spending them out and that's in fact it's almost case it and what in fact that's not the case is it hard yeah it's hard and it gets harder it doesn't get any easier at all there's no formula there is no magic elixir that works for you know you get an idea you play with the idea you get to the point where you say well I'm certainly not going to try to write that that would be much too difficult and I don't have the time anyway and then you find yourself doing it anyway and once you get the idea set and once you get to do you know where the ending is before you start writing I usually think I do it doesn't surprise you quite often it will not end the way that I expected it to do at all so it does usually surprise because that's what if that happens it means that you've got an organic living piece of work that you're dealing with there it's alive it's changing it's evolving as it goes along if it's just sort of on the page I remember reading one time that Erle Stanley Gardner's had all these notebooks and he would pick and mix and match you know like a chess sketch and write like paint numbers so yeah right and who would want to write that way when you between what you finish in the editor does the editor have much influence on your stuff was it pretty much now they look and say 150 million copies Stephenson looks pretty good to me Steve why if I had an editor who felt that way I would get a new editor because they really do help you yeah and the thing is there was a time in the 70s where you know the I'd read criticisms that would say Oh Stephen King could publish his laundry list if he wanted to and the horrible thing is probably now I could publish my laundry list I don't know how many copies it would sell but I could probably well a lot except the next time you published a book yeah it would really hurt so I want an editor that's it's fairly tough on me I'm in the process of rewriting a book now and I've got a manuscript it's covered with with line edits the editors name is Chuck Barrow he's very very good at this stage in the manuscript I could kill him what does he do for you he is it plot to Malone let me be Stephen King that's the most important thing he won't let me be treat you as a vision table table Yeah right as somebody who has to answer for the things that they've done he will not let me be a Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade Float you know big inflated cartoon figure I'm supposed to still fulfill the yeah he'll change plot developments and sometimes suggest that a lot of stuff should be switched around the most valuable thing from my standpoint is he will cut what I've written because I have a tendency to write long but you know you're doing it so therefore it's not very painful it always hurts I had always heard your wife is a novelist that's right do you show her chapter-by-chapter you wait until you end it generally speaking I will show her a book in progress in about three chunks so she will read the first third and then the first two thirds and then the whole thing he's the first person to see it she's always the first person to see it and when she writes her novels she has a tendency not to show me what she's involved with or even talk about it very much and I certainly couldn't go into her office and pick it up because she works in a way that makes me want to scream there's pages here and this page is there and this page is somewhere else and I just don't understand how anybody can work in that clutter but she probably doesn't understand how I work either so we do show each other our stuff yeah and and she makes changes and suggests changes and talks about character development those kind of things yeah she's very tough I saw this was just amazing a Harper magazine I remember I think Harper maybe Atlanta one of the two and they won't be thrilled that I don't remember which one it was a list of all the ways that you have killed people yeah it was amazing yeah I do but I've had a long career and I've killed a lot of people well what's been the most for you the one that was the most delicious and I choose the word delicious on purpose yeah I think probably does a story called survivor type it's a short story it's not in nightmares & dreamscapes which should you wonder is on sale at a bookstore near you even as we speak from seeking press there's an earlier collection called skeleton crew there's a story this story survivor type was in that and it didn't appear anywhere else because I couldn't sell it to a magazine it was about a doctor who's smuggling heroin who's on a boat that shipwrecked and he lands on this desert island and there's nothing to eat and so because he's a surgeon and he has all this anesthetic he eats himself a piece at a time and I remember going to this this retired doctor who lived next to us and saying how much of a person could have personally cut off before they died of shock or trauma and here's a I did and his aunt this is the same guy a year before I gone to him and asked if it would be humanly possible for human being to swallow a cat so he gotten to a point where you can quite really it was really weird mikono much more weird than I thought didn't you ever expect it expected so he told me a person with a strong survival instinct could actually remove quite a bit of this person recently we've had a couple of examples of that where people who have been trapped and have cut off limbs in order to get loose otherwise they would have died yeah I mean that's exactly what you're talking about it yeah well this guy except this guy sort of eats when I cut right off although he did make a fire and cook some of it so I guess so but that's the worst I well you said the tasty tasty delicious yeah what's the most Highness the worst boy you put me on the spot like I said I think of a lot of injured man I think there was a guy in in firestarter well I think let me put it this way in nightmares & dreamscapes there there are this this couple that are eaten alive by carnivorous toads so have you well that worked yes that'll I'll take that have you ever gone too far and said no no no I've gone over the line well like I say generally speaking I will go ahead and write them anyway because at this point I am sort of racing myself and I'll tend to put him away so that there are several times where I thought I had gone too far I thought Pet Sematary right was a step too far and it was a tremendously popular book which shows that it's almost impossible to gross out the American people and at this point in my career the British the French of the Germans either but I can tell make a paraphrase of that I think I have a couple of ideas that are probably a little beyond the pale yeah what's your worst fear that one of my kids would die that's the basis of Pet Sematary I think the call in the middle of the night with a cop saying brace yourself for some bad news that would be the most horrible yeah having done all that you've done to to bow for me I don't know about you I'm a control freak and for me some say well when your kids grow up they go out on their own and you can't protect them or insure them from the whips and scorns of outrageous fortune and you simply have to let them go and I understand that because I'm a relatively rational human being in spite of the guy who eats himself you know and the carnivore Toad's I'm a rational human being but there's a part of me that just does not want to let go that wishes that I could ensure their yeah their success you can't bargain with God you once said that the readers are interested in your secrets not in what you read meaning what well it goes back to what I was saying earlier about how if you if I give an interview about my my career what I do for a living sooner or later somebody will kind of say by the way what was your childhood like people want to know where the bodies are buried they want to know what what twisted me to do what I'm doing and the truth is even more horrible the answer is nothing I'm just this way naturally that's what I figured yeah it's great to have you it's great to be here Stephen King nightmares & dreamscapes it's a collection I'm going back and people say that it's delicious to read some of those that are have a little bit of age on them yeah vintage great to have you thank you very much the pride of Bangor Maine Stephen King we'll be right back stay with us

Channel: Manufacturing Intellect

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Id: bDyN8d3xM0U

Length: 34min 16sec (2056 seconds)

Published: Tue May 24 2016

Reddit Comments

[u/deadandmessedup]

While King's been quote-unquote bitter about the whole thing, he's also spoken admiringly of the film's artistic success and even included it as a must-watch in his horror analysis book Danse Macabre.

The big thing, I figure, is that King put so much of himself into Jack Torrance's character, and Kubrick took the book and decided, more or less, Jack's just a shit. Sarcastic and insincere from the word "go," never really granted any of the empathy the novel generates. I completely understand why King would look at the film and take umbrage with the liberties taken and feel that Kubrick stripped the story of its engine.

It's not ignorant of him or short-sighted, and he's not "too close" to the material, because how could he be less close? What, just forget that the soul of the book comes from his darkest moments as a father and husband?

Thankfully, we're not King, and so we can watch it without all that context and respect its own distinct ambitions more.

[u/vengefulwill]

The problem is, had Kubrick done a true adaptation of The Shining, it would've been nowhere near as good.

Just look at that horrible TV mini series.

I can understand King not being happy about the narrative being changed, but he always came across as incredibly bitter about the whole thing.

[u/MartyVanB]

I LOVED that miniseries of The Stand. It was a watershed moment in my life.

[u/frooschnate]

I found it to be painfully tedious and not nearly as suspenseful as I was led to believe.

[u/[deleted]]

I respect King and his opinion on this, but The Shining is in my mind the greatest horror film ever made, so...i'm glad Kubrick did what he did.

[u/herpderpedian]

On the other hand, Maximum Overdrive is a masterpiece (King wrote the screenplay)

[u/[deleted]]

If I remember correctly Stephen King has warmed to Kubrick's film over the years and made some positive comments about it. This video smacks of the artistic ego. I get it, I would be a little butt hurt if someone took a great idea of mine and made it better. It sounds douchey but it's really just passion.

I believe Kubrick made a comment along the lines of "what's scarier, mental illness or ghosts?" It's a good point, in the book, Jack Torrence eventually resists the spirits in the hotel urging him on, in the film, there is no going back.

[u/RedCornSyrup]

I though the sequel to The Shinning was a great read. Nothing mind blowing mind you, but it was a blast getting into Dan's head space as an adult.

[u/[deleted]]

Having read both The Shining and Doctor Sleep before I saw Kubrick's Classic (forgive me), Hallorann getting an axe to the chest was a bit of a shock to say the least.