Many horror fans consider The Shining to be one of the best horror movies of all time, but the ending slightly holds it back from being an “all-time great” in the eyes of others. Stephen King published The Shining in 1977, his answer to the haunted house subgenre whose masterpiece remained Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House. However, when Stanley Kubrick adapted it, the haunting of the hotel almost took a backseat to the idea of a man losing his grip on his sanity, which is largely why Stephen King hates The Shining movie.
Jack Nicholson stars as Jack Torrance in The Shining, a recovering alcoholic who accepts a job to serve as caretaker for the Overlook Hotel over the winter break. He and his family will be the only people in the hotel and his job is to relieve the pressure on the hotel’s unstable boiler consistently. That plays into the novel’s ending, which helps lead to the big climax where Jack can fight back against the hotel’s evil spirits. However, with the movie focusing more on Jack’s mental issues, the hotel and its boiler aren’t as important for The Shining‘s ending.
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The Shining remains one of King’s most popular novels. King wanted to make a haunted house novel, pointing to his love for Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House. King even later adapted that exact novel in his book, Rose Red. However, in The Shining, King primarily wanted to do two things. He wanted to create a story about a haunted hotel while also dealing with how those deadly spirits would affect someone dealing with mental health issues.
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Kubrick doesn’t ignore the haunting elements of the Overlook Hotel. In fact, he brilliantly focuses on them with his shot selections. Anytime that Jack Torrance speaks to the ghostly Lloyd (Joe Turkel), the ghost is backlit in a white light, either from the bar itself or from the lighting in the bathroom. The director also ensures to create terrifying moments with the twin Grady girls and the woman in the bath. However, Kubrick focuses more on Jack Torrance.
From the start, fans know that there is something wrong with Jack.
This worked for the movie, although it disappointed King. From the opening interview, fans knew that there was something wrong with Jack, and he seems dangerous from the start. When the hotel changes him, it seems natural. In the novel, it happens slowly. However, Kubrick ends up developing a brilliantly paced film that is ranked as one of the best horror movies in history.
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Even King, who hates the movie, sees Kubrick’s brilliance when discussing The Shining in his non-fiction novel, Danse Macabre. He mentioned how fearful he was about his books succeeding and said that people like Kubrick never felt that fear when making their movies:
“There are, of course, filmmakers who either don’t know this kind of fear or whose particular visions are so clear and fierce that such fear of failure never becomes a factor in the equation… This factor of vision is so real and apparent that even when a director such as Stanley Kubrick makes such a maddening, perverse, and disappointing film as The Shining, it somehow retains a brilliance that is inarguable. It is simply there.”
In the end, The Shining has an 83% fresh Rotten Tomatoes score. Even with hardcore Stephen King fans dismissing the movie, it also has a masterful 93% fresh rating from the audience score. The Library of Congress even added it to the National Film Registry in 2018 for its “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.”
Stephen King’s Original Ending For The Shining Is Better Than The Movie Ending
Jack Defeats The Evil Overlook Hotel To Save His Family
There is a massive difference between the endings of the movie and the book version of The Shining. Not only does Kubrick make Jack the actual villain instead of the Overlook Hotel in the movie, but he takes away the father’s actual moment of redemption. Fans of the movie know Jack kills Dick Hallorann, tries to kill his wife Wendy Torrance, and then chases his son Danny into the snow-covered hedge maze, trying to kill him as well. The Shining helps save Danny’s life and Jack dies in the hedge maze.
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That didn’t happen in the book. Instead, King ensures readers know that the Overlook Hotel is the main villain, and it is corrupting Jack Torrance. Jack needs to pay for what he did to his family, but he also deserves the retribution he never receives in the movie. The boiler plays into that. Since Jack is so enraptured by the hotel, he forgets to relieve the pressure. Jack has one moment of clarity and sends Danny to escape with his mother before smashing the boiler and blowing up the hotel. Jack kills the evil hotel and saves his family.
With Stephen King’s Ending, The Shining Would’ve Been An All-Time Great Movie
Jack Torrance’s Redemption Would Have Made The Movie Perfect
What makes Doctor Sleep such a great sequel is that Mike Flanagan takes the book and the movie and made a sequel to both of them. This is important because Flanagan delivers the ending The Shining movie should have used. In the Stephen King follow-up novel, Danny Torrance, now an adult, goes to where the Overlook Hotel once stood and realizes the spirits still roam the grounds. In the movie, Danny goes to the actual hotel, since it still stands after the first movie.
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This allows Danny to destroy the hotel and stop the evil True Knot, who have been murdering other kids possessing the Shining. This is a brilliant decision because this was what Jack should have done in Kubrick’s movie. While The Shining is a masterpiece of horror cinema, having the ending with Jack saving his family at the cost of his life would have been more satisfying than freezing to death as a killer. Jack’s redemption would have made The Shining even better than it already is.
Sources: Danse Macabre
The Shining
8/10
- Release Date
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June 13, 1980
- Runtime
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146 minutes
