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‘The Shining’. I love Stephen King’s writing and enjoy a lot of his books, but ‘The Shining’ was slow, uninteresting and ultimately boiled down to a very simplistic ‘haunted house’ story, which was already a dead trope when the book was released.

King says the Kubrick movie was nothing like his book. I agree, that’s why the film was good.

A lot of people are bringing up Jaws, and it’s not good, but I’ll give it one credit in that it has moments where the narrative switches to the shark’s perspective. It’s not for long and it’s not very detailed, but it does show that the shark isn’t some cackling evil monster killing innocent children because it likes to see people crying, but rather that it’s an animal that needs food to survive, and it happens to be in a big body of water full of ‘food’.

Considering how the film’s popularity led to so much misguided hatred for sharks, I think the book deserves at least some credit for that one element, showing the shark as a genuine animal just trying to survive, not necessarily doing anything wrong, and not even having a morality we can understand.