Stephen King: True compassion lies at the heart of horror Stephen King is in a minority of one. The world's best-selling horror writer has declared himself to be decidedly not a fan of Stanley Kubrick's 1980 film version of the 1977 King novel The Shining - routinely voted the best horror film ever made. The film is "cold," King declared in a BBC interview yesterday, echoing a previous description of Kubrick as "a man who thinks too much and feels too little." This may be a case of authorial sour grapes. After all, the first thing many people will think of when you mention the words "Stephen King" is the moment in The Shining when Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson), hacking his way through the bathroom door, maniacally declares: "Here's Johnny!" Or it might be the appearance in the hotel corridor of the terrifying ghost twins; the tidal wave of blood from the elevator; or the discovery that Torrance's latest manuscript consists of nothing but the line "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy" typed thousands of times. Iconic moments all - none of which can be found in King's novel. It is not surprising, then, that King has sought to reassert his proprietorship of The Shining in the week that he publishes a belated sequel, Doctor Sleep. And yet, if you compare the original novel with the film, it is impossible not to feel that King is on to something. For all Kubrick's brilliance, his movie lacks a quality of warmth that is found in abundance in King's work and may hold the key to his popularity. The horror novel ought to be moribund by now. Making people jump out of their skin is something that the movies will always be able to do better than books: all it takes is someone leaping out of a cupboard while the director deploys a judicious diminished seventh, and even Scary Movie 3 can get you scattering your popcorn. But of course King's novels still sell in their millions, suggesting that they offer the horror aficionado something that the movies just can't provide. This was certainly my view the first time I stayed up late as a teenager to scare myself silly watching The Shining on TV. Yes, I jumped in all the right places. But it didn't have the same effect on me as reading the book (the copy I read was the only King in the school library. Twenty years on, I suspect the situation is different, because many of today's critics grew up reading King and so permit him some literary respectability.) In the book we are allowed to see the process by which Torrance is driven mad by the supernatural elements that haunt the hotel. There is none of the film's borderline-campiness: this is a moving portrayal of a dysfunctional family in meltdown. Torrance's wife, Wendy, is a rounded character, unlike the simpering, screaming bore played by Shelley Duvall in the film, who would be more at home in a Hammer Horror. King has always known the value of making his readers truly care about his characters (this is partly why his novels are so long as to make Dickens look costive: they give the reader time to get to know the people in them). He has always written about "blue-collar people who drink in bars and fight in parking lots," people his readers can know and identify with. This makes King different from the horror writers of a previous generation - Dennis Wheatley with his wicked aristocrats or H P Lovecraft with his luxuriant, ornate prose. It is interesting that King's first novel, Carrie, was published in 1973, within a few months of the appearance of The Rats, the debut novel by the British horror writer James Herbert. Both King and Herbert hit on the notion that a bit more realism in their character portrayals would make the horrid bits seem all the horrider. Martin Amis, the first reviewer of The Rats, described it as "wearyingly compassionate" - the inference being that emotional depth in a horror novel got in the way of the thrills. But the astonishing success of King and Herbert proves Amis wrong. Paul Sheldon, the romantic novelist who has his foot hacked off with an axe by a deranged fan in King's 1987 novel Misery would probably think he got off lightly if he saw Tom Six's The Human Centipede, in which people are kidnapped and made to do unspeakable things to each other. The audience for these films demands to be shocked more outrageously each time - but soon a limit will be reached. The more psychological approach taken by King and Herbert has spared them from going down the cul-de-sac that horror movies are now finding themselves trapped in. Kubrick's Shining will endure, of course, but most of the films based on King's horror novels prove rather forgettable because the compassion is synthetic. You never care about the gamine Sissy Spacek in the 1976 film of Carrie the way you do about the fat, ugly, acne-ridden character in the original novel. King knows that he has to warm his readers" hearts first if he is to make their blood truly run cold. Jake Kerridge is the Telegraph's crime reviewer