Walking Dead’s Glen Mazzara to Pen Shining Prequel
When you try to interfere with the legacy of Stanley Kubrick, you’ve got a really hard act to follow. A prequel to The Shining has gained a writer in The Walking Dead executive producer and writer Glen Mazzara, Deadline reports, which means that the project isn’t just floating around in limbo anymore – it’s really happening, despite any major concerns surrounding the Warner Bros. project.
Whilst Mazzara had brought forth great dramatic entertainment during his stint as showrunner for The Walking Dead, it’s not just the weight of his achievements and skill that the prequel can be carried on. The choice of director will be crucial, and judging from the quality of today’s horrors there will certainly be slim pickings in decent ones that will be up for the project – although we’re all remaining hopeful.
With regards to the plot, the two obvious choices would be The Shining’s excised prologue Before the Play or the tale of Grady’s stay at the infamous Overlook hotel before he “corrected” his family. Perhaps we could also learn the history of the hotel itself and the beginning of its paranormal problems – only time will tell what Mazzara develops.
It seems natural to push for the prequel now, with last year’s documentary Room 237 and Stephen King’s recent novel sequel to The Shining in Doctor Sleep (following an adult Dan Torrence, due to be released in a few short months) both bringing the classic ghost story back to the public’s attention, but developing a project like this is a massive gamble. Especially without the blessing of novelist Stephen King, as he told Entertainment Weekly:
“There’s a real question about whether or not they have the rights to Before the Play, which was the prologue cut from the book — because the epilogue to the book was called After the Play. So they were bookends, and there was really scary stuff in that prologue that wouldn’t make a bad movie. Am I eager to see that happen? No I am not. And there’s some real question about what rights Warner Bros. does still have. The Shining is such an old book now that the copyright comes back to me. Arguably, the film rights lapse — so we’ll see. We’re looking into that. I’m not saying I would put a stop to the project, because I’m sort of a nice guy. When I was a kid, my mother said, ‘Stephen if you were a girl, you’d always be pregnant.’ I have a tendency to let people develop things. I’m always curious to see what will happen. But you know what? I would be just as happy if it didn’t happen.”
Even though King didn’t care for Kubrick’s adaptation of The Shining, it has become one of the most beloved and important horror films ever to grace the world of cinema. It would be horrendous if a trashy, half-hearted prequel were to be posted alongside it. But even if the prequel is terrible, purists can – just as some of us did with the horrible new Star Wars trilogy – forget it exists and enjoy the original. Although we could be surprised – we could get a terrifying new vision of the Overlook hotel that we never thought could exist. Let’s keep our fingers firmly crossed.
News sources – Deadline, Entertainment Weekly