One of Kubrick's wiliest moves may have been to suggest Torrance's lurking anger and unsatisfactory home life made him receptive to possession. The pure genius, though, lay in how _visual_ that psychological exploration was. Style, not substance, was the director's strong suit, which made him a perfect foil for King, whose themes of the supernatural lurking in the banal (and the banal in the supernatural) were often eclipsed by the breathless redundancy of his prose.