The Shining

THE SOURCE: Stephen King’s 1977 novel.  

THE ADAPTATION: This film stands as the most famous “failed” faithful adaptation to ever become a cinematic landmark. King famously detested the film, feeling Kubrick froze the “hot” emotional core of the book into a “cold” clinical study of madness. While the novel is a supernatural tragedy about a good man’s possession, Kubrick’s version is a masterpiece of psychological dread that treats the Overlook Hotel as an architectural labyrinth of the mind. Scholars now celebrate this infamous contradiction, noting that Kubrick didn’t just film a book; he deconstructed it to create a new, purely visual language for terror that arguably eclipsed the source material.