The Shining: The Strange TV Show That Inspired Stanley Kubrick's Movie
The Shining (1980) is more of a Stanley Kubrick movie than it is a Stephen King one, and the director drew inspiration from some interesting places that were far-removed from the source material. Kubrick used only as much of King's novel as he wanted to. For the rest, he took inspiration from a number of sources. One of those was a show that is so far removed from the horror world, that it seems unlikely, yet it's true.
Stanley Kubrick's The Shining is a horror classic, but the director wasn't concerned with staying true to Stephen King's novel. Instead, Kubrick wanted to create his own horror movie, and in doing so, he found inspiration wherever he could, such as with David Lynch's debut film, Eraserhead. Still, that wasn't the strangest thing that inspired him.
Perhaps the strangest thing that inspired Stanley Kubrick as he was making The Shining was a TV show called Omnibus. Omnibus was a television show that aired from 1952 to 1961. It featured live programming that aimed at educating its audience. Its programming was diverse and included interviews with famous people, performances, and original work from playwrights and authors. However, it was one episode in particular that inspired Kubrick, one that featured a story by novelist and short story writer Stephen Crane.
How The Omnibus TV Show Inspired The Shining
Stephen Crane is best known for his novel, The Red Badge of Courage, a war story that is sometimes read in schools. Nevertheless, one of his lesser-known works was adapted for an episode of Omnibus, a short story called "The Blue Hotel". In it, a couple of men are playing poker. One man convinced his opponent is cheating kills the other. Because he comes across jumpy and paranoid, the audience thinks he's wrong and he has killed an innocent man, but it turns out at the end that he really was being cheated.
For Stanley Kubrick, this misdirection employed in Crane's story inspired him to use a similar technique in The Shining regarding the supernatural. In The Shining, the audience goes in thinking the Torrances are headed to a hotel haunted by the supernatural. It then misdirects the audience by explaining the shine as a sort of overactive imagination that shows Danny things, but ones that can't hurt him. Then, the story flips back and by the end, the supernatural elements turn out to be true and present the entire time. The ghosts are real.
It's an odd connection that has more to do with storytelling techniques than it does the actual story. Stephen King rarely writes about card games, although he did play poker with George R. R. Martin during science fiction conventions back in the 80s. Other than that, however, there's really no connection here to Stephen King. Kubrick had his own ideas for the kind of film he wanted to make and found inspiration from all over the place. Despite King's dislike of Kubrick's movie, The Shining remains a masterpiece.
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