The Epilogue & The Aftermath

As most fans know, The Shining originally premiered in New York on May 23, 1980, and then went into wide release about a month later, mostly to mixed to negative reviews, the chief reason being that it strayed too much from Stephen King's original novel.

In the 237 Podcast interview, regarding the film's initial theatrical release, Dan Lloyd said that "it came and went". Funnily enough, the same could almost be said for its subsequent history on cable TV, starting with its premiere in September of 1981, disappearing for a while, becoming a cult classic, moving into "legendary" status, and most recently becoming an immortal piece of film history.

I have detailed my first viewing of the movie here, but I also wanted to add a few more things to it. Right after my first viewing of it, with my Dad, we were getting ready to go to bed, and he flipped onto another TV station for a few minutes before we turned the lights and everything else off. He'd switched onto one of the local channels, and I believe they were showing an episode of Chico & The Man, because who should be on it but Scatman Crothers! It felt a little weird seeing him on there, after seeing what had just happened to him in the movie that we had just watched, and I remember thinking, "How'd he get over there so fast???".

I woke up the next morning before anyone else, and spending the morning in kind of a daze, not believing what I'd just seen the night before; I didn't turn on the TV, I don't think I ate my usual bowl of cereal right away, and all I could do was think about what I'd just seen. And I knew I wanted to see it again from the beginning, hopefully with my sister Angie, and maybe our friend Mitchell would somehow be able to see it with us. As luck would have it, the very next week, it was on again, and the three of us were parked in front of the TV, and we watched it from start to finish. I know they enjoyed it, as I did seeing it again (and I had one up on them, for once!)

The next morning, the three of us wanted to "play" The Shining, which I guess would be doing re-creations of scenes from the movie, as well as there being some sort of object to the whole thing. Mitchell and I argued for a while over who got to be Danny; since I was the smallest and youngest of us three, I easily should have been Danny, but he somehow got to be him instead. You can imagine that I was so miffed at that, that I got to chase after him with an imaginary axe with a lot of glee.

We had some hedges and bushes at the apartment building on the corner, which served as the "hedge maze". And I remember seeing Angie running up this flight of stairs with an imaginary knife in her hand, just as Wendy did...only I can't imagine what Angie "saw" at the top of the stairs. To this day, whenever I go by the old place and see those stairs, I still remember that and have a chuckle about it.

I shouldn't say we forgot about it, but so many movies came out afterward that The Shining kind of got lost in the flow of them. We saw An American Werewolf In London and Poltergeist was a huge deal for a long time running; we also saw stuff like Friday The 13th, Halloween and their plethora of sequels, as well as a lot of forgettable and forgotten stuff that we somehow found ourselves watching at night. Angie and Mitchell thought they were great, but not me.There's even a recording of us from around that time talking about movies we'd seen recently, but I regret that it was mostly the aforementioned titles that got the most attention.

For all intents and purposes, the movie virtually disappeared from cable-TV airings, or at least I didn't see it on any of them for quite a while, which was a shame, as I really wanted to see it yet again, and we had the three main ones: Showtime, HBO, and then Cinemax.

The first showing of the edited-for-TV version was on ABC in May of 1983, as the Friday Night Movie. I remember being excited about seeing it again, but it was stretched out to three hours, due to inclusion of commercials during it. My sister and I watched it on the upstairs TV, although I don't remember if we finished it, as it ended way past our bedtime, but it was nice to see it again.

In May of 1984, we got this new electronic apparatus in the living room, underneath the TV, something called a Video Cassette Recorder, known as a VCR. We were the only ones on the whole block who had one of these things. In addition to taping things off of various cable and TV channels, Dad and I would visit different video-rental places in town, just to see what they had, and we'd often return home with two or three tapes to watch.

At one place called Video Village, I was poking around in the "Betamax" section, just seeing what they had in that similar but smaller format, and there it was...the green Warners "clamshell" box, with the legendary "Heeere's Johnny!" photo on the front. Wow!, I thought, holding it in my hands and instantly remembering scenes from it, I wanna see this again!. I remember we took the box up to the counter and asked the guy there if he had the movie in VHS format, but he regretfully said that that was the only copy and format he had it on. What a letdown!

In May of 1985, the movie was shown again on ABC, this time as the Sunday Night Movie. This time, we had a tape ready for record it, and I put myself in charge of cutting the commercials out while it went on, since Dad always had a habit of falling asleep while something was going on, and I didn't want any mess-ups during this. I was thoroughly enjoying it, but also watched it like a hawk, noticing that the picture would fade to black rather quickly, which was a cue to hit the "pause" button. I did so good with cutting out the commercials that it was hard to tell upon casual viewing. In fact, we would watch the movie with people, and they couldn't believe that I did it so well. I also racked up extra viewings while showing it to neighborhood friends who hadn't seen it, and they were blown away by it.

 Here's the little opening trailer they cobbled together just before the movie began...

Then, something interesting happened. In the opening months of 1986, Showtime began showing it, as did Cinemax. But Cinemax also began showing a 7-minute featurette, showing some behind-the-scenes footage of the movie being filmed, noting that it was filmed by Stanley Kubrick's daughter Vivian, which also included some interview excerpts with the stars of the movie. I didn't know that this was from a 35-minute documentary that she made (more on that later), but seeing this was exciting, especially as this didn't get shown much afterward, so good thing we recorded it.

Our local TV station, KSTW-11, began showing it later on that year, sometime around November, and then it had a few airings after that in the next couple of years. It also began turning up on the USA Network, where it became a staple for a long time running. I think I saw it turn up on there more than any of the other pay-TV channels.

Also, that same year, Warners reissued the movie in the slip-case boxes, getting rid of the "clamshell" boxes, and it was always visible in the rental places we went to. It was also available on Betamax (though I began seeing that format less and less), as well as LaserDisc...and as the years went on, it turned up on a new format called a DVD. And now (currently!) Blu-Ray. And it's soon to be on 4K UHD format...and no telling what other future formats that haven't been invented yet!

As the '80s came to a close, more and more people were getting cable, including various channels, such as Showtime and HBO. More and more people at school were now seeing it for the first time, and I remember a few middle-school acquaintances raving to me about this Jack Nicholson movie that they saw a couple of nights ago, where he goes crazy in a big hotel. I could only smile and nod, knowing full well what they'd seen, and proud that they'd experienced it for themselves. To be honest, I don't think I'd ever heard anything bad or negative about it from anyone who braved watching it!

Sometime in 1999, after the great director was gone, the movie was re-packaged as part of a boxed set with a number of his other movies, and was also available on its own with new packaging. But what grabbed me was that it also included the aforementioned documentary. Man, I grabbed that tape and practically ran to the cash register with it, and couldn't wait to get it home. It was a fascinating look at the filming of many scenes from the movie, as well as interview clips with the players, although these were presented as they originally were. Jack was being the total comedian throughout the whole thing, hamming it up for Vivian's camera. It was great to see Danny smiling and laughing in his clips, which was something we didn't see in the movie. I also liked the closing montage with quick shots of things being filmed, Jack juggling small cereal boxes, and the luckless crew members who had to swab up all of the fake blood that had poured out of the elevator doors.

Between the original liner notes on the back of the VHS slipcase and reading many Stanley Kubrick biographies, finding out that the Overlook Hotel wasn't exactly real was almost like finding out that neither were Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny. A huge letdown, yes...but then you realize that this is spectacular Hollywood magic, and it wasn't even filmed in Hollywood! I was shocked to learn that the majority of it was filmed in England, and I initially thought that Kubrick himself was British, since A Clockwork Orange is such a quintessentially British movie. Imagine my surprise to learn that he was from New York!

As for the players...well, I think we all know what became of Jack. This newspaper clipping from the film's 1980 release came to light recently. When producer Michael Uslan was first thinking about how to bring a darker version of Batman to the big screen, he saw a photo of Jack from The Shining in the newspaper — and he started drawing on it. Uslan turned Jack’s famous “Heeere’s Johnny!” face into the Clown Prince of Crime. Without even knowing it, he created another future legendary role for Jack. Many more would follow. And although I actually first saw him in the 1975 adaptation of The Who's Tommy as "The Specialist", this movie was my first real introduction to Jack.

I have always resented the fact that Shelley Duvall was always regarded as nothing but a "scream queen" due to her role in this movie, as there was so much more to her than just that here, and in subsequent productions right afterward. I enjoyed her "Fairie Tale Theatre" show that she produced for the Showtime channel in the '80s, and seeing her in a few other things like Popeye, Time Bandits and Roxanne with Steve Martin. She always seemed very genuine and likable. She became less visible as the years went by; the last thing I remember seeing her in was a small role in a forgettable horror film called The 4th Floor. I won't go into the subsequent stories that we've all heard about her, and how Stanley Kubrick is solely is to blame for it while making the movie.

And Danny Lloyd? Wow....considering that I was the same age as he was on the screen upon my first viewing, I pretty much considered him the star of the movie. I remember Angie, Mitchell and I wished he lived in the neighborhood so that we could all hang out and get in trouble together. I didn't see him in anything else afterward, and then didn't really think about it until watching the ABC Sunday Night Movie airing, and it made me think, "Wow...whatever happened to Danny?". As the years went on, and whenever I'd see the movie, I'd still think, "I wonder where he is now and what he's doing?", which later led to "Well, whatever he's doing these days, I hope he's doing okay!".

Turns out, we needn't have worried. I think we all know now what he's been doing in the years since then, and much respect to that.

Although everyone else we see on the screen does great in the roles they play, it must be said that Scatman Crothers, Philip Stone and Joe Turkel really put in some fantastic performances, to say the least. What I've always found interesting about the movie is that it moves along with mainly just five people (we could say six, including Lloyd the bartender, but Lloyd sort of cross-fades over to Grady almost seamlessly, and they're both equally as menacing).

And how does the movie stand up? To be honest, it stands way above the usual stuff that it gets lumped in with. Lots of people like to regard it as "a great Halloween film", but it's almost more surreal to watch it when it's dark and snowing outside; it makes you feel as if you're in the movie with everyone else. Also, it's great to put the movie on just as the sun is setting outside, but don't turn on any lights as the movie goes on...trust me, it just works the best that way!

Recently, in November of 2018, the film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant". Not much more needs to be added to that.

Lastly, about the UK/Euro edit of the movie. It was last in print around the time that "The Stanley Kubrick Collection" reissue series was released in the late '90s and early 2000's (I've seen an Australian VHS copy of the short version on eBay), but with recent DVD releases, and the upcoming 4K UHD version coming out, all of them adhere to the 144-minute cut, so I think that has been the "standard" and "definitive" version that will serve. There are some who swear by the shorter version, and then there are those who aren't aware of it, almost not believing that such a thing exists. Well, it does, and once did. Hopefully, it will see a restored release someday, if only for completist's sake.

Well, that's it for me. Thank you for coming along with me, and reading all of this.

For everyone involved in and with the movie...Thank You.

And as Wendy would say, "It's been real nice talking to you. 'Bye. Over and out". 

Part 12

Nothing is missing from this last section.

Wendy comes running out, following the tracks leading over to the SnowCat, then realizing with horror where they're leading to, and what may be at the end of them. Danny is still booking it, throwing the occasional glance over his shoulder, and then trips and falls down into the snow. Wendy cries out to him, throwing the knife away as he runs to her. We can only imagine the weight lifted off of her after all she'd been through by this point.

And then something interesting happens. Just as Danny is in Wendy's arms, Jack begins faltering, slowing down and shouting out, rather groggily. Exhaustion aside, it's almost as if he's lost his mojo and is no longer on a murderous rampage, but just stumbling around in a somewhat drunken state.

Wendy and Danny climb into the SnowCat, close the door, and Wendy starts gunning it while Jack is falling down in the snow, and also realizing what he's hearing off in the distance. When it roars into life and begins making a U-turn out of there, he begins hollering out to them. I used to always wonder what would happen if Wendy and Danny suddenly appeared in front of him...would he still "correct" them, or would he drop the axe, and everything would be okay?

Here's something rather bizarre that was brought to my attention some years back. Someone mentioned watching this part of the movie with the closed-captioning on their TV, and the subtitles that appear on screen make it seem is if Jack is drunkenly singing while the SnowCat is turning around, and then cuts back to him staggering around in the maze. It could be a highly imaginative guess (at best), or maybe someone was convinced that that was what Jack was really saying.

The SnowCat goes forward at top speed, going over the hill leading to the rear of it, and then disappears in a rolling cloud of fog. We have no idea of what's to become of Wendy and Danny.

Jack is slowing down even more, the snow-covered walls of the maze practically closing in on him as he mutters incoherently, more to himself instead of to anyone out there, while it seemed to be even colder than inside the Overlook's walk-in freezer. I'm always surprised he didn't drop the axe into the snow by this time, for he certainly couldn't use it now.

He sits down into the snow, his back up against a hedge wall, with one solitary light off to his left.

And, presumably, the next morning...

Talk about a haunting image, right there. The stuff of a thousand humorous memes now, but what a striking image it is, even now. We can only imagine he keeled over not long after he sat down. I've always wondered where Jack was, if we were to look at the maze from the top, like he did, so long ago. He was probably on the far end of it, directly opposite from where the entrance/exit was, but knowing his luck, all he would have had to make were just a few corner-turns, and he would have been out of there. Guess we'll never know.

And then we're slowly being taken along the lobby in daylight...the same morning? And where did the dust-covers on the furniture come from? We can only imagine that this is maybe a week later, after the mess is all cleaned up, and the hotel is completely empty until opening day in the following month of  May.

We seem to be zooming in on a wall full of photos we've never noticed before. Getting a little closer, we see a ballroom filled with people dressed to the nines, seemingly a very long time ago. Meanwhile, "Midnight, The Stars And You" is striking up in the background, hollow and echoey, sounding just as haunting here as it did in the Gold Room.

It cross-fades into a closer shot of it, showing a closer detail of someone in the middle, and then dissolves even closer to...Jack! Front and center, with that big, devilish smile of his. Then it pans down to show us:

Overlook Hotel
July 4th Ball
1921

Fade to black. And then the credits begin to flash.

But one final mystery needs to be mentioned here....

When the movie first premiered, the letters for the ending credits were originally in blue, not unlike the blue letters that appear in the opening credits. When the movie was re-released on home video (and cleaned-up film prints for cable broadcasts) in later 1986, they were changed to stark white, and have remained that way ever since. For the most part, anyway. On all of the broadcasts of the edited-for-TV version, they always used the version with the blue letters, until around 1999 or so.

On this UK/Euro version of the movie, the credits are white.

But why was this done? 

For me, that's more of a mystery than the film's final photo scene, and we may never know why.

Part 11

We see Hallorann coming down the hallway, which leads over to the darkened lobby, calling out "Hello?...Anybody here?". It's eerily quiet, we don't really hear the whine of the outside winds here, just the clunk of his boots on the floor. No matter how many times we've seen this part, and we know what happens, we just feel the dread and doom accompanying his solitary walk down the hall.

If anyone else did this scene now, we'd hear little whispered voices in he background, making Hallorann look around, or something would fall onto the floor with a loud crash, or a ghostly figure would streak behind him with a fwooosh!...all hallmarks of a cheap scare these days. Just the dead quiet, and the dread of the situation Hallorann is in is pretty scary enough.

Speaking of which, many people have raised the question of why Hallorann didn't have any kind of premonition of this happening. Some have said that Hallorann didn't really have the "shine" after all, or that Danny's was much stronger. Me, I've always felt that the hotel had "turned it off" for its own benefit, as he didn't have any visions of anything happening on the way there, or when he got there.

And then, as soon as he reaches the end of the lobby hallway...it happens...

Man!...when I first saw this, as soon as the axe-head hit home, I slapped my hands upon my eyes, probably not unlike the way Danny did when he saw the Grady girls' corpses.

Danny belted out one hell of a scream when it happened. We now see the terrorized look on his face that we saw long ago, back at the Boulder apartment...only now, we see what it means.

Jack rises up from doing part of his "duty", with a Charlie Manson-esque leer on his face, knowing where his next intended target is, and he hobbles down the lobby hall to another hall where he sure he's heard Danny's scream. Danny opens the cabinet door, scrambles out and runs down the far end, leaving Jack to shamble his way after him.

Wendy has gotten out of the apartment, and begins running up what I've always imagined is the upward flight of stairs, just outside the apartment door, running up about three flights of stairs, going up floors that all seem to look the same. She begins to slow down at the top of one particular staircase, and sees something bizarre happening.

Talk about creepy, weird, and just plain disturbing. And that's only just the face of the strange dog/bear costume we're talking about. We get an idea of what the guys were up to, but not what they were doing in such an obscure part of the hotel. Again, much has been made of the situation we are seeing, mostly by people with rather sick-minded imaginations, but I don't see it that way. It seems to be a very slight reference to Stephen King's novel, involving a long-ago manager of the hotel and his secret extracurricular activity, but seen here with Stanley Kubrick's way of doing it, it just has a "What the f--- was that???" feeling you're left with.

Jack reaches one of the entrances, which has been left open, and seems to be opened much wider since Hallorann came through them. He opens the electrical panel and begins flicking the lights on, while we see Danny hiding behind the SnowCat. Jack begins coming out to look for him, and Danny runs into the maze, and Jack begins charging after him.

Ever notice that the entrance to the maze is now facing the back of the hotel? Very strange.

And off they go, Danny leading the chase, although he seems to remember which way to go. Jack is a ways behind him, hollering away while he trudges on, axe in his hand, and his other hand holding the front of his jacket closed.

Wendy, meanwhile, is now on the first floor, passing by the lake of coffee-urn parts and pots that Jack had thrown around the day before, and there was no-one else to pick them up again. She goes around the corner, into the darkened hallway leading to the other end of the hallway...and then sees Hallorann's body lying on the floor. I like how her reaction goes from shock to sadly realizing who it is, and why he had come there.

I need to point out something rather strange here. A few people I knew many years ago, after they had seen this part of the movie, they asked something about why Jack had cut Hallorann's left arm off. And I have to admit, when I first saw the movie, that's exactly what I thought I had seen in that shot, since the old film-print that used to be shown was on the dark and slightly grainy side. It wasn't until seeing a slightly "cleaner" print of the film that it was simply Hallorann's dark-gloved hand pointing toward the camera. Besides, wouldn't that have been even messier? And what was Jack going to do with the arm...save it for later?

And as if that wasn't bad enough, Wendy catches a reflection of something in the blade of the knife, spinning around to see this guy standing there, head split down the middle, with a glass in his hand.

"Great party, isn't it?", he asks, raising his glass in a toast.

Again, more than a few people assume this man is Delbert Grady upon first viewing.

All while the strains of Penderecki are bellowing away underneath it all, Danny is still running like hell, while Jack is trudging along after him, shouting, "You can't get away! I'm right behind ya!".

And one scene is scissored out, rather abruptly (you can all but hear the scissors snip when it happens). It's where Wendy is coming down toward the opposite end of the lobby, now shrouded in dark and blue light coming from the outside...and we see the lobby is now full of cobwebs and skeletons. A strange scene, to be sure, but does it mean anything, regarding the hotel's dark past, or is the hotel really messing with Wendy's mind by now?

One thing that always struck me as odd is that Wendy was only just there a few minutes ago, and now it's turned into this? Even more odd is, where did Hallorann's body go? Did it disappear?

We cut back to Danny in the maze, retracing his footprints in the snow, going back a number of yards, then jumping away to make a decent hiding spot from Jack.

Wendy is still looking for Danny, only now in some other strange nook of the hotel's first floor, coming down a hallway that's painted a shockingly bloody shade of red. She stops at some glass-paned doors, only to see the elevator's doors open up, unleashing the rivers of blood that haunted Danny's mind more than a few times, but now she's seeing it.

Poor Wendy...her mind must be on "sensory overload" by this point.

Danny is wedged into a section of a wall of the hedge-maze, and right in front of it, here comes Jack, watching the footprints in the snow...and then seeing them disappear completely. He begins hollering for Danny, looking around, and then begins to hobble away into parts unknown, maybe thinking the footprints will begin again somewhere.

Danny cautiously comes out from hiding, sees the coast is clear, and begins running back the way they both came in, using both of their footprints as the trail to follow. It cuts away between this, and shots of Jack still in the warpath, looking for new tracks, and seemingly getting more and more lost in the maze. Again, some people viewing this for the first time think Jack is suffering a heart attack by the way he's holding his jacket by one hand on his chest.

A couple of shots of both Danny and Jack have been trimmed out, and it's almost hard to tell upon first viewing, but one shot of Jack turning all the way around, looking down for more footprints and continuing on is the dead giveaway. Plus, by the time Danny falls down as he reaches the entrance to the maze, you think, "Wait, that part seemed shorter!"...and you'd be right!

Part 10

Another 10-minute slice where nothing has been cut or altered!

"I fear you'll have to deal with this matter in the harshest possible way, Mister Torrance", we hear Grady warily say, "I fear...that is the only thing to do".

Jack: "There's nothing I look forward to with greater pleasure, Mister Grady".

The bolt noisily slides across the lock, the pin is taken out, and the handle is pulled. The door is opened. And thus, the film's biggest mystery of them all: who lets Jack out? Is Grady simply a ghost or some supernatural entity that was able to accomplish that physically? Some people theorize that Danny is the one who did it. Again, I like how we don't know, and we aren't spoon-fed an answer to that.

As soon as that's happened, a SnowCat is noisily rolling toward the camera, down a rather narrow hallway of very tall pine trees. We dissolve to Hallorann in the cab, who is driving the SnowCat. Without the earlier scene of Hallorann on the phone with Durkin at his garage, we have absolutely no idea how or where he got it from.

That's another one of my favorite (though underrated) shots. Very closed-in feeling, almost claustrophobic in the cab, and you can practically feel the cold that Hallorann is plowing through as the SnowCat lumbers up the road. You almost have to go back to the beginning and watch Jack's ride to the Overlook again, and now imagine Hallorann taking the same roads, only now covered in a few feet of snow. That could not have been an easy journey.

Danny, meanwhile, is still in a trance, croaking the mystery word REDRUM over and over as he finds the big knife that Wendy has with her, as she's catching up on some badly-needed sleep. Danny slowly takes it, and then picks up a red lipstick from another drawer, wanders over to the bathroom door, and (watching from the side) scrawls the word REDRUM across the door, in a shot that has since become the stuff of legend (and memes).

Danny's voice begins to go back to normal, seeming to snap out of his trance as he begins hollering the word over and over, loudly, waking up Wendy. She tries to comfort him, but then has a horrifying revelation in the mirror of what the word means, and we realize that it's also a warning.

As soon as that's shown, Jack is outside the door, bashing in one of the door's panel with a fire axe.

Wendy grabs up Danny, they lock themselves in the bathroom, and Wendy begins an attempt for them both to go out the bathroom window. Danny gets help sliding out, and down a massive snowdrift against the hotel, but Wendy can't get out of the window, which doesn't open all the way. Jack, meanwhile is edging closer to the bathroom door.

We know the rest of the scene here. Nothing missing. Funny enough, during the TV edit, when the camera is on Wendy while Jack is bashing away at the bathroom door, the first three whacks have been scissored out; it picks up just after Wendy screams, "Jack!...Please!".

I try not to make a lot of comparisons to the original novel, but this is definitely one instance where the fireaxe and the knife are very well thought-out methods of (respectively) destruction and self-defense. The original scenario would not have worked and would really have looked silly with Jack breaking the door open with a wooden roque mallet, and Wendy fending him off with a teeny razor blade.

Much has been made about the missing second panel in the door, just after the legendary "Heeere's Johnny!" shot. If we look back at the TV trailer (above) at the 0:24 mark, we see that the other panel is being smashed into, in a scene that didn't make the final cut. Hard to tell if we were spared more trashing and screaming, but it is always rather jarring to see that second panel broken into and not see it happening, just after it shows Hallorann's SnowCat arriving at the back of the hotel.

Wendy is practically having a heart attack by now, and Jack is snorting like a bull, at being cut with the knife, and realizing who it is that is pulling up outside. I'm surprised she didn't holler out the window once the SnowCat came to a stop.

Danny is seen running down the service hallway, stops, and finds a hiding spot in one of the cookware cabinets. Jack is limping through the kitchen, the camera sliding alongside him, and we see him turning the axe in his hands, deciding whether to use the blade or spike end of it. Wendy is trying to pull herself together in the bathroom, realizes she must get out of there, and proceeds to whack away at the damaged door with the knife, although we don't see what the problem is, or what it is she's trying to accomplish there.

Hallorann walks across the backyard of the place, sees the door open and has to scrunch it open a little more through the piled-up snow to get himself in.

Jack, meanwhile, is limping through the hallways, on alert, looking around, waiting to see who's here, and ready to attack. Great shot of him going down the darkened hallway, trying to be quieter, and slowly going up a small flight of stairs that leads over to the lobby and surrounding area. Meanwhile, we hear Hallorann's voice echoing down the hallway: "Hello?......Anybody here?".

Part 9

Spoiler alert...nothing has been taken out of this 10-minute section.

When last we left them, Jack is advancing toward Wendy, who is walking backwards away from him the whole time, clutching Danny's baseball bat. The whole time, Jack is going well past a "6" on the Richter scale, going on a filibuster about "responsibility" about looking after the hotel, and of his potential future reputation if he'd failed at it. At one point, Wendy confusedly asks him what he's talking about...many people wonder the same thing, since she seems to be doing most of everything around there!

Pretty intense scene here. Even though there are a few cut-aways, it's great how the scene plays out as one continuous shot, still at eye-level the whole time. No cuts here; then again, there would have been no possible way to shorten this scene without it being noticeable.

On a side note, a chunk of this scene appeared in the 1984 horror-movie compilation Terror In The Aisles, although I remember that the background music was different, as if Stanley Kubrick had sent them a print of this scene without the original Penderecki background score.

Jack is pushing her toward the grand staircase, and up they go, slow and steady, while Jack himself  tries to get Wendy to hand him the bat. He makes a grab for it. She "gives" it to him, alright!

And then she has the un-envious task of dragging him unconscious from there and through the kitchen, while he groggily seems to wake up, and trying to figure out what's going on. The shot where Wendy is having trouble opening the pantry door has always looked a little unflattering. It also happens in the book, but she's so frazzled by what she'd been through and what had been going on that she simply had forgotten to pull out the little pin that unlatches the lock, but this shot has always made Wendy not look terribly bright.

She lugs him in, just as he's trying to get up, runs out the door, and then bolts it shut. Jack tries to get up to kick it open or something, but he discovers that he's twisted his right ankle a pretty good one in that fall down the stairs. He cradles his ankle, falling against some stacked boxes, and a few fall down on top of him, adding insult to injury.

When I first saw this, I think I had to run off to the bathroom, because when I came back in, I found the "looking up from below" shot of Jack rather puzzling. I thought Wendy had locked him into some sort of bunker in the floor of the place, but when the camera cut to Wendy in hysterics next to the knife-rack, the door that Jack is behind is in a normal spot there in the wall.

Funny how Jack tries to put on a "oh, poor me!" type of voice when he whines that he's feeling dizzy and needs a doctor, and we see him pause and for Wendy to open the door right away. When she doesn't, he really pours it on when he whines, "Honey!...Don't leave me in here!".

Wendy is about to set forth on the tentative plans she's made to get Danny out of the hotel, and perhaps bring back some help for Jack...but he thinks otherwise.

"Go check out the radio and the SnowCat and see what I mean!" he shouts, and begins laughing like the madman he's become, and perhaps was all along, while slamming his hands on the door.

Great shot and scene of Wendy pushing the door open into the accumulated snow outside, running across the backyard of the place, knife in hand, and into the garage.You can just feel the cold of the outside, and of the increasingly desolate situation that she and Danny are now in. And also the sheer panic when she discovers what Jack had severed beneath the SnowCat's hood.

4pm

 
Very haunting shot of the Overlook, almost buried to the rooftop in snow. Something about those exterior shots of the hotel every time there's a title card showing what day it is, it gets a little farther away each time, and now it's practically disappearing here.

Jack's catching some Z's on a makeshift sort of mattress in one corner of the pantry, with a small banquet of crackers, peanuts, cookies, and a mammoth jar of peanut butter next to him. There's a knock at the door, and as Jack is woken up by it, you just know he feels like absolute crap now.

"It's Grady, Mr, Torrance...Delbert Grady".

Something about Grady's voice really sets the tone for this scene and conversation. He sounds wary, disappointed and foreboding all at once, like a very stern judge who is about to pronounce a pretty heavy sentence. It's also great how we only hear him and not see him, making you wonder if he's really there on the other side at all, if we're hearing him in Jack's mind, or if he's some sort of floating specter there in the pantry. And all the while, we hear the uneven, whining howl of the winds outside.

What's also interesting is that almost all of Grady's lines are the same as in Stephen King's novel, especially in this scene. I think Kubrick must have really found Grady's character quite interesting, as well as menacing.

"I can see you can hardly have taken care of the 'business'...we discussed", he warily says.