The Shining

King returning to his own structure and pushing it further. In both a family moves to an isolated place, the father is the one the place works on, and the danger is finally that he will do the harm himself. Pet Sematary is the version with the consolation removed. The Shining lets Danny and Wendy escape and gives Jack a moment of resistance; Pet Sematary allows neither, and King has said he put the manuscript in a drawer because he thought he had gone too far. Filed MEDIUM: an author's own development.

Kubrick's film adapts King's 1977 novel, credited on screen. It is also the most famous quarrel between an author and an adaptation: King has said for forty years that the film misses the book, because his Jack Torrance is a decent man destroyed by the hotel and Nicholson's is unstable from the first scene. The topiary animals, the boiler and the father's redemption are all gone.

King has praised Hill House at length in Danse Macabre, calling it one of the few great supernatural novels of the century, and quotes its opening paragraph as a model. The Overlook is built to Jackson's specification: an isolated building with a recorded history of deaths, a small party sealed inside it, and a haunting that works by selecting the most vulnerable person present and speaking in their own voice. Eleanor is chosen by the house; so is Jack Torrance.