Sketch o’the Week: Shelley Duvall!

HEEEEEEERE’S JOHNNY! We continue our horror film series with Shelley Duvall in her iconic role as Wendy Torrence in Stanley Kubrick‘s masterpiece “The Shining”. I considered drawing Shelley as her character from an even scarier film, “Olive Oil” in “Popeye”, but went with her Wendy. Jokes aside, I think “Popeye” gets a bad rap. It’s actually a great film that just ran out of money and steam at the end.

I consider “The Shining” the perfect example of how different film and books are as storytelling mediums. Stephen King, who wrote the novel that the film is based on, famously hates Kubrick’s movie. Despite being a HUGE fan of King, I feel safe in saying the author doesn’t know what he is talking about. “The Shining” film is actually an example of a film being BETTER than the book.

Don’t get me wrong, I love King’s book and consider it among his best, but it is also an example of how some things may work in a book but not in a film. For example, one of the scariest parts of the book is when young Danny is being terrorized by these giant hedge animals when playing outside the hotel. The hedges behave like the “weeping angels” in “Doctor Who”… they only move when you aren’t looking at them. In the book Danny barely escapes them as they close in while he struggles to get to the hotel’s front doors. Sorry Mr. King, but while your writing managed to make that scene suspenseful and frightening, it would have looked stupid onscreen. In fact one of the weakest part of the film was when Kubrick tried to shoehorn in the weird “dog suit” fetish from the books into the movie. This became a brief and odd non sequitur near the end of the film, and only someone familiar with the book would have gotten what it was about.

The slow descent into madness that was helped along by Danny’s father’s research into the history of the hotel was part of the richness of the book missing in the film, but at least in my opinion Kubrick’s masterful construction of the feeling of extreme isolation and the pervasive presence of a malevolent entity through it more than made up for the missing book elements. Different paths to the same result, and overall the film made for the better story and scare. “The Shining” remain the most frightening film I have ever seen. Granted this might be because I first watched it on Showtime (or HBO… I forget) back in 1982 late at night when my parents were gone overnight and I was watching my younger siblings. I slept with the light on that night!