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Stanley Kubricks The Shining ending explained that Jack was connected to The Overlook by showing him in the infamous photo of the guests at the party. Based on Stephen King's novel, The Shining follows Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson), an aspiring writer and recovering alcoholic who takes a job as the off-season caretaker of the Overlook Hotel. Jack takes his wife and son, but the Overlook has dark secrets. Triggered by Dannys psychic abilities, the hotel releases some dangerous supernatural forces that break Jacks sanity.

The Shining film is very different from the novel so much so that Stephen King said he hates the adaptation. Kubrick changed the essence of the book and added elements that weren't present in the novel. The Shining book and movie are very different entities, and details that are explained or at least easier to interpret in...

Kubrick changed The Shining's ending, forgetting the book's boiler explosion, which is key to the original story. Kubrick's ending differed to be unexpected, killing Hallorann & preserving the hotel's villainous presence. Doctor Sleep offers closure by exploding the Overlook, mirroring Jack's fate in the book and fixing The Shining's mistake.

Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining made many changes to Stephen King’s novel of the same name, and it subtly set up the novel’s ending but, ultimately, completely forgot about it. King’s novels have been a source of inspiration for many artists for decades, especially filmmakers. Various King’s novels and short stories have been adapted to the big screen, some more successfully than others, and one of the most famous yet controversial ones is Kubrick’s version of The Shining. Kubrick took the premise and characters of King’s novel but made many changes to it, to the...

For hardcore fans of “The Shining,” this Fourth of July marks an important anniversary in the history of the infamous Overlook Hotel…and it all comes down to a photo.

If you’ve seen Stanley Kubrick’s iconic 1980 adaptation of the Stephen King novel, then you know about the photograph shown at the very end of the film after Jack Torrance (played full throttle by Jack Nicholson) suffers a chilly demise. The photograph shows Jack at the front of a grand Fourth of July ball at the Overlook Hotel, and if the inscription on the photo is correct, then today is the 100th anniversary of that mysterious party.

Over the past four decades, the photo has captured the imagination of horror fans and spawned theories about what the photo could mean. One popular theory is that the photo shows the picture of all the victims that the curse of the...

“For an intellectual product of any value to exert an immediate influence which shall also be deep and lasting, it must rest on an inner harmony, yes, an affinity, between the personal destiny of its author and that of his contemporaries in general.”—Thomas Mann, Death in Venice Barry Lyndon. I can’t believe there was a time when I didn’t know that name. Barry Lyndon means an artwork both grand and glum. Sadness inconsolable. A cello bends out a lurid sound, staining the air before a piano droopingly follows in the third movement of Vivaldi's “Cello Concerto in E Minor.” This piece, which dominates the second half of the film, steers the hallowed half of my head to bask in the film’s high melancholic temperature. Why should I so often remember it? What did I have to do with this film? I only received it with...

Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 masterpiece is full of doubles, doppelgängers, and alter-egos.

Mirrors, ghosts, doppelgängers, reflective surfaces, repetitions, and perfectly symmetrical frames…these are just a few cinematic devices which Stanley Kubrick uses to create an uncanny atmosphere in his 1980 adaptation of Stephen King’s The Shining. Sigmund Freud defines the term “uncanny” in his essay “‘The Uncanny’” as something which is familiar yet somehow frightening. The Shining tells the story of a family of three — Jack (Jack Nicholson), Danny (Danny Lloyd), and Wendy (Shelley Duvall) — whose lives are terrifyingly disrupted when they move into the Overlook Hotel for the winter. Family is, by definition, the most familial subject matter, and therefore it is all the more terrifying when one’s family members somehow seem different. The Shining is filled with uncanny doubles, where those who look or act familiar are mysteriously different, which provoke feelings of terror. Kubrick creates this uncanny atmosphere by meticulously crafting a story-world...

Every week, EW will imagine a sequel to a movie that we wish would happen — no matter how unlikely the idea really is.

In the case of Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 adaptation of the The Shining, the event of a movie sequel isn’t as farfetched as we might think. As announced at the beginning of the year, Stephen King has already penned a sequel to the thriller classic. The novel, titled Doctor Sleep, will follow an older Dan Torrance and hits shelves and online retailers this September.

But the written sequel delves into a drifting Danny’s encounter with another...

There is an expression, "A mother's love is forever," and this could not be more true. However, when looking back through our favorite horror movies, another expression comes to mind: "A face only a mother could love."

In celebration of the upcoming film Mama, directed by Andrés Muschietti and executive produced by Guillermo del Toro, creator of Pan's Labyrinth, we decided to take a walk down memory lane and honor the top scariest, freakiest kids in horror. And there are some real doozies out there with truly a face only a mother could love!

Let's warm up with some horrible mentions. The young Drew Barrymore certainly fit the bill of creepy kid in her unforgettable role of Charlie McGee in Firestarter. As did the pumpkinheaded little monster, Sam, in Trick r Treat. (He counts, right? He's definitely child-like). Glen/Glenda, Chucky's seed in Seed of Chucky, was skin-crawlingly strange, and...

This Halloween, the greatest horror movie ever made will be back where it belongs: up on the big screen and inside your head. The Shining is getting a re-release courtesy of the BFI, and for the first time UK cinemas will be playing host to the original American version of the film. This digitally-buffed urtext edition of Stanley Kubrick’s waking-nightmare masterpiece is 24 minutes longer than the cut we’re used to seeing on European shores. Unfamiliarity lends it an extra dimension of creepiness, an unsettling sense of déjà vu. It’s the same film but different, and sitting through it is like having an old, bad dream for the first time in years.

There are new characters, such as Danny’s quietly troubled social worker (‘Can I speak to Tony?’), and fresh shocks, among them a glimpse of spookhouse skeletons swilling champagne in the lobby of the Overlook hotel.

The final shot of The Shining, it’s ambiguity forever helping Stanley Kubrick’s most popular film carry on it’s enduring legacy for nearly thirty years. But what does the final image from the film actually tell us about the story we have just witnessed?

Released in 1980, The Shining is in my opinion, Kubrick’s best and most satisfying work but even though I’ve seen it a dozen times, I still don’t think I’ve figured out what he was trying to tell us before the credits rolled.

The final shot is a photograph of our lead protagonist Jack Torrence (Jack Nicholson), impossibly photographed as a resident of the Overlook Hotel at the July 4th ball in 1921, some sixty years before The Shining is set where Jack is now the caretaker of the hotel during a winter break. I say impossible because he hasn’t aged a day,...

Filed under: Halloween, Horror

The Movie: 'The Shining' (1980)

The Scene: After slowly going mad during a snowy winter spent at the haunted Overlook Hotel, Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) finally snaps as the supernatural forces around him push him over the edge. The evil stalking the halls of the stately hotel wants one thing: Torrance's son, Danny, a gifted young psychic who could make the hotel more powerful than ever. Jack succumbs to the Overlook's wishes and sets out to slaughter his family -- just like previous caretaker Charles Grady did years before. Nicholson aims to start with his wife, Wendy (Shelly Duvall), who locks herself in the bathroom. Undeterred, Jack grabs an axe and starts chopping his way through (while pretending to be the Big Bad Wolf of 'The Three Little Pigs' fame). As the door falls apart under his repeated blows, Nicholson sticks his face through the opening and yells "Here's Johnny!