In this section of our Colossus Movie Guide for The Shining, we will explain the film’s ending.
Cast
- Jack Nicholson – Jack Torrance
- Shelley Duvall – Wendy Torrance
- Danny Lloyd – Danny “Doc” Torrance
- Scatman Crothers – Dick Hallorann
- Barry Nelson – Stuart Ullman
- Philip Stone – Delbert Grady
- Joe Turkel – Lloyd
- Anne Jackson – Doctor
- Tony Burton – Larry Durkin
- Diane Johnson – Writer
- Stanley Kubrick – Writer and director
The end of The Shining explained
Recap
As The Shining hurtles towards its climactic conclusion, the tension in the Overlook Hotel reaches a fever pitch. Jack’s descent into madness is complete. He’s no longer the man who arrived at the hotel with his family. Instead, he has transformed into a deranged murderer, intent on fulfilling the macabre legacy of violence in the hotel.
The climax begins when Jack, driven by the malevolent forces of the Overlook, takes up an axe and begins to stalk his family through the hotel. Wendy, terrified but determined, manages to fend Jack off momentarily and escapes with Danny, but not before knocking Jack out with a baseball bat and locking him in the pantry.
Wendy tries to escape with Danny, but cannot because Jack has sabotaged the hotel’s two-way radio and snowcat. Danny begins to repeat the word “redrum” and then writes it in the mirror. In this moment, Wendy realizes the word is “murder” spelled backwards.
Soon, Jack is released by the ghostly apparition of Delbert Grady, the former caretaker who murdered his own family. Free again, Jack resumes his murderous pursuit. By this time, the hotel’s cook, Dick Hallorann, who also possesses the “shine” (a phenomena discussed in the Title Explanation section) and had sensed trouble at the Overlook, arrives to help. He is murdered by Jack upon entering the hotel.
Meanwhile, Danny, who has been evading his father, runs into the hotel’s hedge maze in a bid to escape. Despite Jack’s best efforts to find him, Danny manages to trick his father by walking backwards in his own footprints before jumping to the side and covering his tracks. This leaves Jack wandering in the maze, disoriented and confused.
Danny manages to escape the maze and reunites with his mother, Wendy. The two find Hallorann’s snowcat, a vehicle he used to get to the Overlook, and use it to escape the hotel’s horrifying grasp. In the film’s final moments, we see Jack, lost and freezing in the maze. Overcome by the cold, he eventually collapses and dies, his frozen face bearing a chilling testament to the horrifying ordeal.
The last scene of the film takes us back into the hotel, towards a wall adorned with photographs from the hotel’s past. We zoom in on a photo from a 1921 ball, and there in the crowd, smiling, is Jack, as if he has been part of the hotel’s history all along.
Meaning
In the broader context of The Shining‘s themes, the ending encapsulates the struggle against inherited violence and the attempt to escape its repetitive cycle. It underscores the dangers of ignoring or failing to reconcile with past atrocities, and hints at the potential for both the continuation and interruption of destructive patterns.
Through its layers of symbolism and narrative implications, the ending of The Shining leaves the audience with plenty to ponder, long after the credits roll. The resonance of its closing scenes, like the echo of a chilling laughter in the empty halls of the Overlook Hotel, serves as a testament to the film’s powerful exploration of human nature and history’s haunting echoes.
Now let’s discuss some of the ending’s more intimate details.
The Maze
Throughout The Shining, the Overlook Hotel functions as a symbolic maze—a labyrinth of haunting memories, past atrocities, and malevolent energies. Its corridors echo with historical violence, its rooms teem with specters of its blood-soaked past. It’s a place that twists and turns around its inhabitants, slowly disorienting them, just like a real maze. The hotel’s psychic labyrinth mirrors the mental disarray and chaos that Jack succumbs to, as he’s led deeper into his own mental maze of madness, manipulated by the violent history of the hotel.
Contrasting this symbolic maze is the literal one, the hedge maze, where the film reaches its climax. This physical labyrinth embodies the confusion, fear, and disorientation that the characters have experienced within the Overlook Hotel. But unlike the symbolic maze, it also becomes the site of liberation. Danny uses his wit and bravery to outsmart his deranged father and escape, thereby symbolically conquering the labyrinthine horrors of the Overlook Hotel.
The literal maze brings thematic resolution to the film by symbolizing the possibility of escape from inherited cycles of violence. It illustrates the power of confronting the maze-like complexities of history, trauma, and violence, and navigating through them successfully. The survival and escape of Wendy and Danny from both the hedge maze and the Overlook Hotel underscore a potent message: the cycle of violence (an important theme discussed in the Themes and Meaning section), while daunting and complex, is not inescapable. It’s a triumphant, albeit haunting, resolution to the film’s exploration of history’s violent echoes and the human capacity to endure and survive. This contrast between the hotel’s symbolic maze and the literal one amplifies the film’s thematic depth, enhancing its narrative resonance.
The Photograph
The enigmatic 1921 photograph, displaying Jack as an attendee at a lavish Overlook Hotel party, serves as a chilling conclusion to The Shining. This image, intriguing and unsettling, captures one of the film’s central themes: the inescapability of history and its insidious impact on the present.
The photograph suggests that Jack has become part of the hotel’s legacy of violence, further accentuating the cyclical nature of the destructive patterns explored throughout the movie. The visual implication that Jack has always been a part of the hotel’s history is symbolic of the film’s exploration of inherited evil and repetitive violence. It underscores the idea that the consequences of past atrocities linger, even when those who perpetrated them are long gone.
By revealing Jack’s image in the photograph, the film ingeniously ties the personal narrative of its protagonist to the broader historical narrative of the Overlook Hotel. It suggests that Jack’s descent into madness wasn’t an isolated incident but a repetition of the hotel’s violent history. This clever cinematic twist serves to emphasize the enduring, haunting power of past violence and its capacity to ensnare present and future generations.
Yet, while this image brings an eerie resolution to Jack’s storyline, it simultaneously raises questions about the fate of Wendy and Danny. If Jack, despite his death, is trapped within the cycle of violence as suggested by the photograph, what does this imply for his wife and son, who have escaped the hotel’s immediate threat?
Ultimately, the final shot of the 1921 photograph does not offer a comforting resolution. Instead, it extends the film’s thematic exploration beyond its immediate narrative, leaving the audience with lingering questions and interpretations. In doing so, it underscores the complexities inherent in breaking cycles of violence, hinting at the enduring struggle that survivors may face in their quest for true liberation from a violent past.
Redrum
“Redrum,” the reversed form of “murder,” is a critical element of The Shining and provides a crucial turning point towards the film’s terrifying climax. Danny’s utterance of this word is a symbolic and literal harbinger of the impending violence that’s about to unfold in the Overlook Hotel.
The reversed spelling and Danny’s cryptic introduction of it mirror the unsettling, disorienting atmosphere of the hotel. It suggests that something is awry, a hidden danger is lurking beneath the surface of apparent normalcy. The backward nature of “redrum” is reflective of the backward glance into history that the hotel demands, uncovering the concealed violence and horror that have permeated its past.
The timing of the “redrum” revelation is noteworthy. It happens when Jack’s descent into madness is near complete and the safety of Wendy and Danny is under severe threat. As such, it acts as a chilling prophecy of imminent danger, a forewarning of the terrifying transformation of their husband and father into a would-be murderer.
But why does Danny say it backward? One interpretation might be that it’s an insight into how Danny perceives and processes the world around him. His psychic abilities, or his “shine,” allows him to perceive things others can’t, but these premonitions come to him in a distorted, disorienting manner, much like the confusing and disconcerting nature of “redrum.” It’s a testament to his unique worldview and his struggle to comprehend and communicate the horrors he senses.
Thematically, “redrum” underscores the film’s exploration of inherited violence. It’s through Danny, the innocent child, that the echo of the hotel’s murderous history comes to light. In this sense, “redrum” becomes a symbol of the legacy of violence being passed on to younger generations. Its revelation is a chilling reminder of the horrors children might inherit and bear witness to, thereby highlighting the necessity of breaking violent cycles for the sake of future generations.
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