Stephen King, horror's überscribe, is still setting the pace with new novels. If 2013's print-only Joyland doesn't get you going, check this: a recent Los Angeles Times article details Doctor Sleep, a sequel to The Shining penned 35 years after the original. Doctor Sleep focuses on a now-adult Danny Torrance, the child with “the shining,” drawing intriguing parallels to youngShining-era readers who are now adults themselves. But the article's final paragraph bears the most divisive news: Hollywood is also talking about a prequel.

NO. No, no, no. Look, some doors do not need to be opened. Where's Hallorann when we need him, warning Danny (or us, or the filmmakers):“You ain't got no business goin' in there anyway. So stay out.” Take my hand through this Shining survey, from the late 70s original to futures unknown. 

1977, Stephen King's novel horror: King's first hardcover bestseller is terrifying to this day, a modern haunted house tale enveloping a semi-autobiographical core: the tormented, alcoholic writer terrorizing his own family.

The good: Father Jack Torrance wields a sadistic roque mallet: “Roque...it was a schizo sort of game at that. The mallet expressed that perfectly. A soft end and a hard end. A game of finesse and aim, and a game of raw, bludgeoning power.” The bad: no "all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy" (typed by Jack, perhaps in subconscious homage to Christopher Knowles). The ugly: Danny's skin-crawling encounter with the old hag: “Still grinning, her huge marble eyes fixed on him, she was sitting up. Her dead palms made squittering noises on the porcelain. Her breasts swayed like ancient cracked punching bags. There was the minute sound of breaking ice shards.”

1980, Stanley Kubrick's film: It's rare that a film stands so vividly over its source material, but Kubrick's Shining does. His Overlook is my Overlook. 

The good: Kubrick transformed the Overlook Hotel into a practically living, breathing entity, a frightening, temporal maze of impossible passageways, sometimes containing Grady's twin daughters (also absent from King's novel), intoning: “Come and play with us, Danny. Forever...and ever...and ever." The bad: not a damn thing. The ugly: the old hag, or rather, the young woman who seduces Jack and turns into the old hag.

1997, Re-adaptation as TV miniseries: King's major disappointment in Kubrick's adaptation was casting wild-eyed Jack Nicholson, as King preferred a more believable everyman for the role of Jack Torrance. Hence King's screenplay for an ABC miniseries, arriving nearly two decades later.

The good: As in King's novel, Hallorann survives the horror, and it's Danny who discovers the old hag. The bad: the Stanley Hotel location, while true to King's writing, lacks the labyrinthine dread of Kubrick's environs. (And don't get me started on the soap-worthy acting.) The ugly: those hedge animals, wisely absent from Kubrick's film, proved scarier in print than on screen. ABC gave King's verbose IT similar treatment in 1990 (without King's screenwriting credit), traumatizing coulrophobes everywhere and proving that living topiaries are no Pennywise the Dancing Clown. Did you even know there was a Shining miniseries?

2013, Doctor Sleep, a three-decades-hence sequel: I got into King as a preteen, probably around the same age as younger Shining readers, tackling Desperation (disgusting) and Bag of Bones (heart-wrenching) in the late 90s. It's notable, and unfortunate, that both became avoidable TV movies. I approach Doctor Sleep guardedly.

The good: We'll know in wintery January if Doctor Sleep is crud or an early classic. The bad: King's preview of Doctor Sleep at the 2012 Savannah Book Festival, featuring a still-young Danny revisited by the old hag, closely mirrors The Shining in disgusting descriptives. The ugly: Evidently, adult Danny will be fighting quasi-vampiric immortals.

201?, The Shining filmic prequel: I don't need Danny's “shining” ability to foresee this as a very bad idea.

The good(?): Screenwriter Laeta Kalogridis (who penned claustrophobic Shutter Island) is involved. The bad: I fear this “Outlook origin story” becomes a near shot-for-shot remake like The (2011) Thing and/or casts Ryan Reynolds or Channing Tatum as the Outlook's caretaker. The ugly: old hag in her carefree pre-bathtub days?

If a more authentic TV miniseries couldn't shake Kubrick's masterpiece as the definitive cinematic Shining, what more could a prequel possibly afford? I hope it ends like Jack in Kubrick's film—spoilers!—lost and frozen in a (developmental) maze.

Images: Main image via The Overlook Hotel; Danny via GoneMovie.com;Here's Johnny! + Grady Twins; Pennywise + Hedge Animals; Overlook Hotel party photo via Haunted American Tours

I owe my childhood fear of clowns and feral felines to Stephen King. His brick-sized bestsellers dominated my bedroom bookshelves, although I supplemented historical horror with a leatherbound volume of Edgar Allan Poe. I remember wondering who bridged Poe's masterful 19th-century macabre and King's contemporary terror. Today, King's ubiquity remains unchallenged—New York has ranked his entire published oeuvre, and he's got two novels planned for 2013—but contemporary horror trends contain an undercurrent of something unspeakably scarier, originating from the cosmos-chilled, slime-soaked legacy of the writer who not only greatly influenced King, but has his own sub-genre. I give you H.P. Lovecraft.

King himself acknowledges the genre's debt to Lovecraft in his book Danse Macabre: “The reader would do well to remember that it is Lovecraft's shadow, so long and gaunt, and his eyes, so dark and puritanical, which overlie almost all of the important horror fiction that has come since.” With that in mind, I offer this brief primer to help you navigate the Lovecraftian goo.

The Necronomicon

A purely fictional book of the dead that figures greatly into Lovecraft's work. Consider The Case of Charles Dexter Ward and its central tale “The Dunwich Horror.” A librarian senses “a hellish advance in the black dominion of the ancient and once passive nightmare” upon opening the cursed tome. In Sam Raimi's film The Evil Dead, the titular antagonists are (un)wakened by the Necronomicon, while HR Giger's debut monograph(and painting Necronom IV, which inspired Alien's iconic xenomorph) shares the name. Unfortunately, The Dunwich Horror is also a ridiculous B-movie starring Sandra “Gidget” Dee. Tread carefully with “direct” Lovecraft film adaptations.

Arkham

A fictional Massachusetts town (like King's Castle Rock, Maine) and the setting for Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos. Meet “Herbert West—Reanimator,” who proved “rational life can be restored scientifically," and proceed to the decent '85 bloodbath Re-Animator, but I advise eschewing the slasher atrocity The Unnamable, based on Lovecraft's 1923 story. “The Thing on the Doorstep” revolves around Arkham's sanitarium, preceding Arkham Asylumand its gallery of Batman villains, and its personality-shifting plot is a bit Lost Highway. Just think: Lovecraftian and Lynchian!

Indescribable terror

“The Call of Cthulhu” birthed Lovecraft's famous extradimensional, malevolent entity, yet it simultaneously underscored the crippling bafflement of fear. Here's Cthulhu's setup, after a very late reveal: “the Thing cannot be described—there is no language for such abysms of shrieking and immemorial lunacy, such eldritch contradictions of all matter, force, and cosmic order.” Frank Darabont's 2007 film The Mist, based on King's 1980 novella, keeps its besieging, otherworldly fauna masked by the enveloping haze. Jorge Luis Borges, preeminent engineer of enigmas, dedicated The Book of Sand's “There Are More Things” to Lovecraft. The narrator's abstracted inability to describe a house's monstrous inhabitant recalls Lovecraft's scientific barrage of the frozen...things in his singular novella At the Mountains of Madness: in either case, we are no closer to understanding the horror in front of us.

This brings me to Guillermo del Toro's much-delayed dream-project: translating At the Mountains of Madness to cinema. Despite the aforementioned Lovecraft-flavored films, there's little out there that successfully combines “proper Lovecraft adaptation” with “quality viewing” besides 1992's The Resurrected, which didn't even have a proper theatrical run. Del Toro aimed to change this, but after Universal's balking at the blockbuster price tag and Del Toro fearing similarities between ATMOMand Ridley Scott's Prometheus—which draws tellingly from Lovecraft's “Promethean trespass”—its fate is in limbo.

I'm not ready to close this chapter just yet. If Michael Bay gets the OK to helm yet another schlock-and-awe Transformers sequel—whether or not it stars Rosie Huntington-Whiteley—then I say we need a philosophical sci-fi horror film of ATMOM's stature more than ever. In Lovecraft's words from “The Nameless City”:

That is not dead which can eternal lie,

And with strange aeons even death may die.

Main image: H. P. Lovecraft Wiki + ToyVault, photo-chopped by the author; At the Mountains of Madness via The Furnace