MOVIES · STORY NOTES

The Shining

The Shining is a 1980 psychological horror film produced and directed by Stanley Kubrick and co-written with novelist Diane Johnson. It is based on Stephen King's 1977 novel and stars Jack Nicholson, Shelley Duvall, Danny Lloyd and Scatman Crothers.

Description adapted from Wikipedia contributors, The Shining (film) · CC BY-SA 4.0. Text adapted for this entry.

FULL SPOILERS AHEAD

The story, including the ending.

These write-ups discuss major events and outcomes for this listed work. Each source and its coverage are identified below.

Source plot synopsis — includes the ending

Jack Torrance takes a caretaker position to look after the remote Overlook Hotel in the Colorado Rocky Mountains while it is closed for the winter. On arrival, hotel manager Stuart Ullman informs Jack that a previous caretaker, Charles Grady, killed his wife, two young daughters and himself in the hotel a decade prior.
At home in Boulder, Jack's son Danny has a premonition and seizure; Jack's wife, Wendy, tells the doctor about a past incident when Jack accidentally dislocated Danny's shoulder during a drunken rage. Jack has been sober ever since. Before leaving for the seasonal break, the Overlook's head chef, Dick Hallorann, informs Danny of a telepathic ability the two share, which Hallorann's grandmother called "shining". He tells Danny that the hotel also "shines" due to its residual and unpleasant history and warns him to avoid room 237.
A month passes, and Danny starts having frightening visions, including those of the murdered Grady sisters. Meanwhile, Jack's mental health deteriorates; he suffers from writer's block, is prone to violent outbursts, and has dreams of killing his family. Danny gets lured to room 237 by unseen forces, and Wendy later finds him with signs of physical trauma, for which she blames Jack. Jack defiantly sulks in the ballroom, where ghostly bartender Lloyd entices him back to drinking. Wendy tells him that Danny was attacked by a "crazy woman" in room 237. Jack investigates and encounters a hideous female ghost in the bathroom, but tells Wendy he saw nothing. He blames Danny for inflicting the bruises on himself and reacts angrily when Wendy suggests leaving the hotel. Danny enters a trance and telepathically contacts Hallorann. Returning to the ballroom, Jack finds it filled with ghostly figures, including waiter Delbert Grady, who urges Jack to "correct" his wife and child.
Wendy finds Jack's manuscript written with nothing but countless repetitions of the proverb "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy". When Jack threatens her life, Wendy knocks him unconscious with a baseball bat and locks him in the kitchen pantry, but she and Danny are snowed in—Jack previously sabotaged the hotel's two-way radio and snowcat. Back in their private apartment, Danny begins to chant, from a murmur, "red rum" more and more loudly ("red RUM") and writes it out in lipstick on the bathroom door. Wendy sees the word in the mirror which shows that it spells MURDER in reverse, and she panics.
Grady frees Jack, who goes after Wendy and Danny with an axe. Taking shelter in the bathroom, Wendy fights off Jack with a knife when he tries to break through the door; Danny escapes out the bathroom window. Hallorann, having flown back to Colorado from his winter home in Florida, reaches the hotel by snowcat. Jack ambushes and murders him with the axe, then pursues Danny into an expansive hedge maze on the hotel grounds. With trepidation Wendy runs through the hotel looking for Danny, encountering the hotel's ghosts, Hallorann's bloody corpse, and a vision of cascading blood from an elevator similar to Danny's premonition. Danny carefully backtracks in the snow to mislead Jack and hides behind a snowdrift. While Jack rushes ahead without a trail to follow and becomes lost, Danny exits the maze and is found by Wendy. The two depart the Overlook in Hallorann's snowcat, leaving Jack to freeze to death in the maze. Meanwhile, a photograph in the hotel hallway pictures a man, by all appearances Jack, standing amidst a crowd of party revelers from July 4, 1921.
Sources and content license

Source and revision history ↗ · Adapted from Wikipedia contributors, The Shining (film). Section headings and formatting adjusted. · Content license