James Brolin and Harrison Ford were considered for the role of Jack Torrance. Ford was probably not the right type as his closest Shining-type role would ultimately be 1986's Mosquito Coast (1986), also about an obsessed man terrorizing his family, it a movie that was not very well received. Brolin on the other hand might have been too on the nose, having just completed Amityville Horror (1979) a year earlier which had almost exactly the same plot: a man, George Lutz, is disturbed by ghosts in his house of another man who killed his family, and is almost moved to do the same. Brolin was definitely scary enough, and could have probably done a more convincing arc from normal guy to psycho than Jack Nicholson did, and probably would have pleased some skeptics of the film like Stephen King. But if Brolin was cast, all people would see is the plot similarities between the two stories, and would have dismissed this movie as a ripoff, losing the striking originality of this subsequent movie. The casting of Nicholson takes typecasting and turns it on it's head. In Qualcuno volò sul nido del cuculo (1975), Nicholson played Randall McMurphy, a lovable, heroic psycho who is terrorized by a female villainous woman, Nurse Ratched. In this movie, he's still a psycho, but instead of being lovable and heroic, he is evil, a symbol of mankind's never-ending depravity itself. Instead of being terrorized by a woman like he is in Cuckoo's Nest, he is instead terrorizing his wife. And unlike in Cuckoo's Nest, where he is trying to escape his home - a mental institution - he loves his home, the Overlook Hotel, and desperately wants to stay there, even after Wendy desperately asks him to leave.

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