The Shining will always go down as one of the best horror movies of all-time and is usually considered one of Stanley Kubrick’s greatest masterpieces. If you haven’t seen the movie then obviously spoilers ahead. Also, if you haven’t seen the movie, what the hell is wrong with you? You’re probably way too young to be reading this site. The ending of the film is chilling in its own right (no pun intended). Jack Nicholson’s character, Jack Torrance is frozen in the snow after failing to murder his wife and son. Then the movie cuts to an old black and white photo of a group of people at a ball inside the Overlook Hotel. In that picture is Jack Torrance, from a time warp.
However it turns out there were a few alternative endings that could have made the big screen. Executive producer Jan Harlan and screenwriter Diane Johnson, who worked on the script with Kubrick, gave an interview to Entertainment Weekly and revealed that there were several alternate endings that the movie could have taken. The first one had to to with the book whick Kubrick rejected.
In the book, nobody gets killed except Jack. And Kubrick really thought somebody should get killed – because it was a horror movie. So we weighed the dramatic possibilities of killing off various characters and did different treatments. We actually talked it over in detail the possibility of having different people getting killed.
However, Kubrick wanted to focus more on Jack and son Danny:
Danny’s relationship with his father was the thing that most interested Kubrick. He was emotionally involved with the point of view of a little boy who is afraid of his father. I remember Kubrick saying that visually he could imagine a small yellow chalk outline on the floor like that they put around the bodies of victims. And Kubrick liked that image. But he was too tender-hearted for that ending and thought it would be too terrible to do …
Another ending features Jack’s wife Wendy doing the honors:
In one of the treatments – which has leaked online – Wendy kills Jack in self-defense in the third act. Then Hallorann arrives, and ALSO gets possessed by the hotel and becomes the finale’s surprise “big bad.” It was an intriguing twist that the murderous figure the audience is anticipating the whole movie was not really his father, but rather the hero the audience assumed was coming to the rescue.
And yet another ending sees Dick Hallerann (Scatman Crothers) getting taken over by the Overlook Hotel
That’s right. We always had the powers of the hotel in mind. So the hotel would have been warping Hallorann’s mind for quite a long time. It was an attractive idea that Hallorran is good [throughout the film] then he gets there and is possessed by the hotel into a monster surrogate for Jack.
Which ending do you prefer?
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