The Shining Ending Explained: Why Jack Is In The Photo

Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining is regarded by many as one of the greatest films ever made, and one that to this day continues to be the subject of many debates and discussions. Kubrick deliberately didn’t explain The Shining‘s ending during the film, but he did, however, later explain why Jack Torrance appears in The Shining picture at the end. Based on the book of the same name by Stephen King, 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, Wendy (Shelley Duvall), and their son, Danny (Danny Lloyd), with him, but little do they know, the Overlook has some dark secrets of its own. Triggered by Danny’s psychic abilities, the hotel releases some dangerous supernatural forces that mess with Jack’s sanity — and the safety of Wendy and Danny.

The film is very different from the novel — so much so that Stephen King has said he hates The Shining many times. It’s understandable: Kubrick asked for freedom to change whatever he wanted, and he wasn’t kidding. Although King didn’t oppose that at the time, he wasn’t expecting Kubrick to go as far as to change the essence of the book. Because of that, The Shining book and movie are very different entities, and details that are explained — or at least easier to interpret — in the novel are either not included or left very ambiguous in the film. Among those are the ending of The Shining and some of the scenes that come moments before that final shot of the photo. Here’s the end of The Shining explained.

How Wendy & Danny Escape

After being freed from the kitchen pantry by Grady’s ghost, Jack (whose sanity was already shattered by that point) goes after Wendy and Danny, axe in hand. Wendy and Danny lock themselves in the bathroom, and Wendy sends Danny through the window. Unable to pass through that same window, Wendy is trapped when Jack arrives and breaks through the door with the axe — the famous “Here’s Johnny!” scene. Wendy defends herself with a knife and slashes Jack’s arm, causing him to retreat. The Overlook’s cook, Dick Hallorann, arrives to help Wendy and Danny after the latter reaches out to him through “the shining,” but is ambushed and killed by Jack.

Jack then goes after Danny, who runs into the hedge maze – all this during a snowstorm. Meanwhile, Wendy runs through the hotel looking for her son. At the hedge maze, Danny manages to escape by laying a false trail to mislead Jack. Wendy and Danny reunite and leave the hotel in a Snowcat, and Jack freezes to death. What happens to Wendy and Danny after that is unknown (in the film, at least), although a deleted scene features them in a hospital, recovering both physically and mentally from everything they went through.

Redrum & The Elevator Blood Explained

In The Shining, Danny and Hallorann are the two characters with “shining” abilities, which allows them to communicate with each other even when miles apart. Danny’s “shine” reaches its peak at the Overlook Hotel, which mixed with the hotel’s spirits and own evil, unleashes some real horrors. Danny has visions about the hotel right after Jack gets the job and during his time at the hotel, and has a traumatizing experience when drawn into the “forbidden” room 237. When the hotel’s forces get a hold of Jack, Danny starts chanting and drawing the word “REDRUM,” which Wendy later sees reversed in the mirror, revealing the word “MURDER.” Danny was warned by the Grady twins that something terrible was going to happen, and “REDRUM” was the warning passed on to Danny and Wendy through Danny.

One of the most memorable scenes from The Shining is the blood coming out from the elevator. This is one of the film’s unique scenes (along with the Grady twins) and there are a number of ways to explain The Shining‘s elevator scene. As mentioned above, Kubrick left many details open to interpretation, whether for viewers to come up with their own explanations or just to mess with them. The elevator blood scene first appears as a vision to Danny, and materializes near the end of the film when Wendy is looking for him. Because the movie’s Overlook Hotel was built on an “Indian burial ground”, the blood coming out from the elevator has been interpreted as that of the Indigenous people buried there. Others believe it’s the blood of all the lives claimed by the forces of the hotel, which might be the most convincing explanation.

Why Jack Torrance Is In The 1921 Photo

Perhaps the most challenging part of The Shining‘s ending to explain is the final shot: a 1921 photograph showing Jack with other guests in the hotel’s ballroom. This scene has been interpreted many ways, and one of the most popular explanations is that it represents the hotel “absorbing” Jack’s soul. Although this makes sense, Kubrick himself has said the photo actually suggests Jack being a reincarnation of an earlier official at the hotel.

The reincarnated Jack explanation makes sense when going back to his conversation with Grady in the bathroom, where the butler tells Jack that he has “always been the caretaker.” It also fits with the role of both Grady characters mentioned in the film: the past caretaker and the ghost. The ghost is Delbert Grady, and the past caretaker was Charles Grady. The latter is the one that Jack says he saw in the newspaper (and the one who killed his family in the hotel), and thus he is the reincarnation of Charles Grady.

The Shining’s Real Meaning

Kubrick failed in adapting Stephen King’s book, but he succeeded in making a film full of metaphors and symbolism that have made way for countless interpretations of its true meaning. Of course, there are some more convincing (and coherent) than others, but The Shining is explained as, at its core, a story about violence and abuse and how these are often cyclical. Jack had a history of anger issues and violence, mainly against his family. When Wendy finds Danny after he enters room 237, he’s in shock and physically injured, and Wendy immediately blames Jack for it as he has hurt their son before.

Jack is a recovering alcoholic and relapses at the hotel. He might have had his anger under control for a while before taking the job, but he went back to it there. The Shining‘s Overlook Hotel itself also has a history of cyclical violence: it was built over a Native American burial ground, and its existence is a testament to the violence of colonization. Charles Grady killed his family with an axe, and Jack was on track to replicate that. The abuse part of the story is both physical and psychological: both Wendy and Danny are clearly scared of Jack, even before the hotel’s influence took control of him, and yet they stayed with him.

A popular theory, and one that has gone very deep into the symbolism of The Shining, says that the film also addresses sexual abuse. The scene with the man in the dog costume and the man in a tuxedo is the one used to support this theory, which says the dog represents young Danny Torrance (who earlier in the film is shown to have a plush toy) and the man in the tuxedo represents Jack. Tony, Danny’s imaginary friend, is believed by some to be Danny’s way to cope with the trauma of sexual abuse from his father.

The dog/sexual abuse interpretation hasn’t been confirmed by those involved in the film, so it’s up to each viewer if they accept it or not. Either way, The Shining is not so much a ghost story in a literal sense, but a story about the “ghosts” (or “demons,” in some cases) of violence and abuse, and how these can come back to continue with the cycle. Even when looked at more literally, The Shining‘s meaning is still up for debate, as some fans disagree on whether the ghosts in The Shining are even real. Of course, the ghost of Grady freeing Jack from the freezer remains hard to explain away, although that doesn’t stop some from trying.

How The Shining Movie’s Ending Differs From The Book

As mentioned above, the film ends with Wendy and Danny escaping during a snowstorm thanks to the Snowcat Hallorann arrived in. Jack is left in the snow and freezes to death, and it’s implied that the Overlook Hotel continued with its cycle of murder by bringing in more reincarnations of past workers. The Shining novel, however, has a very different ending, and one that even made way for the sequel Doctor Sleep.

In the novel, Jack manages to fight the hotel’s possession long enough for him to tell Danny to run for his life. Unlike the film, Hallorann in the book doesn’t die and helps Wendy and Danny escape. The hotel makes one last attempt to possess Hallorann, but he successfully manages to avoid it. As for Jack, he does die but not in the snow: a malfunctioning boiler explodes and kills Jack while also destroying the hotel.

The novel ends with Danny and Wendy spending the summer at a resort in Maine where Hallorann works as head chef. The three remain close, and Hallorann comforts Danny over the loss of his father and teaches him to fish. Interestingly, in the 1997 Shining miniseries, which King himself wrote, there’s a brief epilogue in which a graduating Danny is visited by the ghost of Jack, beaming with pride, suggesting that Jack’s spirit was fully freed when the Overlook blew up.

The meaning and topics addressed in the novel are very different from those in The Shining movie Stephen King hates so much, given Kubrick’s many changes to the story in order to fit his vision. The Shining novel and film work best as separate piecesm, with each ending having a different meaning. The aforementioned sequel, Doctor Sleep, got a cinematic adaptation that serves as both a sequel to The Shining novel and Kubrick’s film, in a way.

What The Shining Producer And Screenwriter Say About The Ending

Funnily enough, director Stanley Kubrick had a couple of different endings in mind for The Shining, each of them very different. Kubrick was never into the idea of making a typical horror film, and he certainly got what he wanted out of the film, even if Stephen King didn’t like it. In an interview (via EW), executive producer Jan Harlan and screenwriter Diane Johnson both expand on the final scenes of The Shining, including The Shining picture at the end. Diane Johnson said this of Stanley Kubrick’s non-horror vision: “The ending was changed almost entirely because Kubrick found it a cliché to just blow everything up. He thought there might be something else that would be metaphorically and visually more interesting.”

Despite all the changes Stanley Kubrick made to the ending, one of the director’s visions remained in place throughout all of it: The Shining picture at the end. In the same interview, the screenwriter says, “The photograph was always in the ending. The maze chase grew out of the topiary animal hedges that move around in the book. Kubrick thought topiary animals might be too goofy and cute, but he always liked the idea of a maze.” The maze in The Shining went over better than the hedge animals would’ve in Kubrick’s vision. It’s certainly an impactful moment that brings the movie full circle, seeing Jack become a part of the famous Overlook hotel ghosts once and for all. While it may not work for Stephen King, Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining ending can be explained as perfectly fitting the film he created.

What Doctor Sleep Revealed About Jack’s Fate

The sequel to The Shining, 2019’s Doctor Sleep movie managed to walk a delicate tightrope between adapting King’s Shining sequel book and being a follow-up to Kubrick’s Shining movie. Directed by modern horror master Mike Flanagan, Doctor Sleep offered an unexpected treat in the form of an extended cameo by none other than Jack Torrance himself, now played by Henry Thomas. This appearance doesn’t clear up the question about why Jack is seen in the 1921 photo at the Overlook, but it does suggest that the theory about his soul being somehow absorbed by the haunted hotel is actually true.

In Doctor Sleep, adult Danny Torrance is forced to head to the Overlook in order to unleash a greater evil on villain Rose the Hat, but while there encounters the ghost of his father. Yet, this isn’t Jack, rather, it’s Lloyd the bartender, albeit not the same Lloyd Jack himself encountered. Some believe this suggests Lloyd the bartender was never a real person, and instead just a role the Overlook assigns to one of the souls it owns. While Danny’s barbs do eventually seem to wake up part of Jack’s consciousness from inside his Lloyd identity, whatever good he had left in him was clearly erased once Jack was fully taken over.

The Shining Was Based On A Real Hotel Stephen King Visited

One of the most chilling details about both the novel and film versions of The Shining is that the Overlook Hotel is based on a real (possibly haunted) location that Stephen King once visited. The Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, Colorado made a strong impression on King thanks to its long, eerily empty corridors during his stay right before the hotel closed for the winter. What’s more, while staying at the Stanley Hotel, King reports having caught glimpses of a young boy roaming the halls even though he and his wife were the only registered guests at the time.

Like The Shining‘s Overlook Hotel, the Stanley Hotel also has a haunted history, even possessing a particularly haunted room (number 217) just like the Overlook’s room 237. For all the supernatural twists and turns in The Shining‘s ending and story, knowing that it’s based on a real location makes the film (and its difficult-to-explain ending) all the creepier.