First up in our INK-King October is “Enjoy Your Slay,” from the band’s The Silver Scream album (2018). “Enjoy Your Slay” is inspired by King’s novel The Shining (1977) and Stanley Kubrick’s acclaimed 1980 film adaptation. 

The relationship between King and Kubrick’s visions of The Shining is a complicated and contentious one, and King was outspoken about his dislike of Kubrick’s film for years after its release (though part of the deal that enabled King to write his own 1997 miniseries adaptation included an agreement that he would stop publicly criticizing Kubrick’s film). With both King’s novel and Kubrick’s film being horror classics in their own right, Ice Nine Kills’ “Enjoy Your Slay” offers a fascinating opportunity to explore how these intersections and potential tensions are dynamically engaged through adaptation and homage. 

As I contend with my own complicated King / Kubrick feelings, I find myself recalling Linda Constanzo Cahir’s argument on adaptation as an act of translation, as she argues that “each individual translator must determine what is most crucial … The literal letter of the parent text? Its structure? Its unique music—its rhythms and sounds? Its meaning? Its accessibility to a popular audience? Its beauty?” (15, emphasis original). Using this ethos as a guide, I would argue that Kubrick’s The Shining captures many of the themes of King’s novel (and does so with some striking and effective imagery), though I don’t think it does an effective job of capturing the depth of King’s characters and it misses the heart and emotional resonance of King’s novel completely. 

Ice Nine Kills’ “Enjoy Your Slay” lyric video captures these themes and Kubrick’s iconic imagery of the Overlook Hotel, including the patterned carpet and labyrinthine hallways, as well as the memorable images of Jack’s typed repetitions, the Grady twins, and the ax with which Jack pursues Wendy and terrorizes her as he chops down the bathroom door. Lyrics include the phrase “last resort” and advise listeners not to “overlook the past,” which highlight the unique setting and the dissonance between what ought to be a transitory stop—both for the Overlook’s long history of guests and for the Torrance family specifically—and the hotel’s position as a purgatorial site from which many people find it impossible to escape. Sam Kubrick, grandson of the legendary director, is a musician and featured in “Enjoy Your Slay,” which provides another layer of interconnection, artistic interpretation, and homage. The acoustic version of “Enjoy Your Slay,” recorded at the Stanley Hotel and featured on the band’s EP Undead and Unplugged: Live from the Overlook Hotel (2020) offers another riff on these familiar themes, with a sound that evokes the Eagles’ “Hotel California,” where, much like the Overlook, “you can check out any time you like / but you can never leave.” Overall, “Enjoy Your Slay” draws on King and Kubrick, including both the intersections and divergent perspectives on the shared narrative of The Shining and its central themes. 

Ice Nine Kills extends their narrative and negotiation of King, Kubrick, and “Enjoy Your Slay” through their film, The Silver Scream, which provides a frame narrative for the album’s music videos, and the true crime-style book The Silver Scream (2023) attributed to Roy Merkin. The narrative of the The Silver Scream film features Ice Nine Kills frontman Spencer Charnas and his sessions with Dr. Ian Black, a psychiatrist who suspects Spencer may be a serial killer, as Black quickly becomes obsessed with his patient and how he might leverage Spencer to advance his own professional reputation. Merkin’s The Silver Scream features chapters named after each of the album’s songs, providing new narratives beyond the scope of both the songs and the film. The “Enjoy Your Slay” chapter chronicles Black’s Thanksgiving visit to his sister and her family in Colorado, where they run a hotel. Black drinks in the hotel bar, finds himself unable to make any progress on his book (channeling his own inner Jack Torrance), and has an unsettling encounter with his twin nephews, Danny and Tony. Like Jack, Black’s ability to distinguish between reality and fantasy is crumbling and he is losing his grip on his own sense of self, as he finds himself unable to write and equally unable to put his medical knowledge into action when his new friend Dick has a heart attack in the hotel lobby. 

The lyrics of “Enjoy Your Slay,” the music video, the acoustic version, and film and book versions of The Silver Scream offer layers of interpretation and interrogation of the familiar narrative of The Shining, creating a kind of echo chamber of allusion, adaptation, and the creation of new narratives that highlight not just The Shining—in all its many permutations—but the significance and legacy of the story as a whole. 

Cahir quote comes from Linda Constanzo Cahir’s Literature Into Film: Theory and Practical Approaches (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2006).