The shining a horror movie yet the horror is alcoholism...
King notes, “The man who wrote Doctor Sleep is very different from the well-meaning alcoholic who wrote The Shining.” King has talked openly and extensively about the autobiographical nature of The Shining’s Jack Torrance, which is a bit of an odd, damning connection to underline, given that Torrance is a character famed for attempting to chop up his family with an ax in a homicidal delirium.
The wild-eyed Jack Torrance played by Jack Nicholson is much different than the character King wrote to reflect his own compulsions, rage, and addictions, in a book he dedicated to his own young son Joe.
King was using the tools of his trade as a horror novelist to try to understand the nature of his disease and the corrosive effect it had on the people in his life, particularly his family. Underneath the ghosts and blood and supernatural fright in The Shining lies a human core: a father’s terror that he will lose control and hurt his family. King wrote a book about alcoholism from the inside out, as an addict. Kubrick made a film about alcoholism from the outside in, a film that doesn’t extend King’s deep empathy to Torrance and his condition. King felt deeply for Jack Torrance. He identified with him more than is probably healthy, whereas Kubrick views him from the same cold, clinical distance from which he sees most of his characters.
Jack’s most important relationship is with alcohol. His addiction tells him that this is the only relationship he needs and will ever need, and that he must destroy anything that gets between him and his passionately re-committed love affair with booze. For instance, the “outsiders” Lloyd ominously warns him Danny is trying to summon to the Overlook. For an alcoholic lost in sickness, the idea of accepting help from “outsiders”—like AA or a rehab center—is tantamount to failure, if not outright spiritual death. And like Jack, The Overlook is a dry drunk, a booze-saturated place that has managed to eschew alcohol for whole seasons at a time while retaining the toxic air and creepy vibes of a whiskey-addled pleasure palace of über-perversity.
The Shining’s climax, Jack Torrance’s worst fears are realized on a nightmarishly literal level. A man afraid of falling off the wagon and accidentally hurting his family returns to drinking (albeit at the behest of an apparition, and with what seems to be ghost bourbon) and races through the hotel in a frenzy as he attempts to track down and murder his wife and son. Alcoholism has a terrifying power to destroy families, and in the climax to The Shining, there’s nothing symbolic or metaphorical about that force. Instead, the film depicts a man who has completely given himself over to his demons, rather than facing the consequences of being sober.
