I don’t care what Stephen King says.  Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of The Shining is great.

One of King’s big complaints about the film is that Jack is obviously unhinged from the start.  King is right that Jack Nicholson plays Jack Torrance as being someone who has a few screws loose even before he starts to work as the caretaker.  But it works for the film, as can be seen in this scene in which Stuart Ullman tells Jack about what happened to previous caretaker.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-sLVxrT8tdw

Incidentally, Barry Nelson’s performance as Ullman is seriously underrated.  Ullman is a far more interesting character in the movie than he was in King’s book.  For that matter, the same can be said of just about every character in the movie as opposed to the way King envisioned them in his novel.  Maybe that’s the main reason King doesn’t like this movie.  Kubrick understood King’s story better than King himself did.