I had some problems with Stanley Kubrick’s (“Full Metal Jacket”/”Paths of Glory”/”Barry Lyndon”) adaptation of Stephen King’s terrifying second novel (King has stated in interviews that the book was meant as a metaphor for his own struggle with alcoholism, and took exception to the way Kubrick filmed it), which almost completely changed the book to make it more audience friendly (throwing out most of its originality but still retaining its banality). It became less of a frightening ghost story than it was in the book (in fact Kubrick and the cowriter, American novelist Diane Johnson, showed ambivalent feelings about the horror film genre and tried to make it less of a horror story by redefining the genre and instead used as their theme the disintegration of an American family when trust goes out the window–the wife never trusts hubby after he was in a drunken stupor and broke their son’s arm and the hubby never gets over his guilt-feelings). It’s arguably the talented director’s least appealing film, as it feels empty and soulless–relying far too much on studio-based shock effects to have much of a deeper psychological impact. Though cinematographer John Alcott keeps it visually striking, the music by the likes of Bela Bartok, Gyorgy Ligeti, and Krysztof Penderecki is sometimes effective in striking the right scare mood and the film has its few ironical moments of triumph about a failed marriage, it nevertheless suffers from a miscast over-the-top absurdly hammy performance by Jack Nicholson as the leering psycho who never lifts his character from being cartoonish, a Shelley Duvall characterization that’s reduced to only whimpering and acting hysterically semi-retarded, and under Kubrick’s vision it strays from a conventional classic horror story to look more like a cheesy crowd-pleasing (did a great box office) version of The Exorcist (1973). By using images such as the elevators full of blood, naked women ghosts coming out of a bathtub and mirrors that reveal ghostly signs to get cheap scares and erotic thrills, the film never builds in psychological tension or allows the frustrated couple to be sympathetic characters that the audience can empathize with.