Part 7

When last we left them...Wendy and Jack are sitting on the bed together. Wendy wonders about the bruises on Danny's neck, and how they got there. Jack suggests that Danny did it to himself, saying that it could be possible; the line "It wouldn't be that different from the episode that he had before we came up here...would it?" was deleted. Good thing it was, as it would have not made any sense here.

Danny, meanwhile is wide awake in bed, hearing them in the next room. Very strange echo effect on Wendy's voice, considering she's just a few feet away.

More visions entering Danny's mind. The elevator vision is shown again, with blood knocking the furniture around.  I like how this shot is establishing that something is boiling over by this point, and there's nothing to be done about it.

She suggests that they get Danny out of the hotel, right away, and Jack does not like that. Does not like that at all. In fact, he goes up to about a "6" on the Richter scale when he gets up and blames yet another potential failure in life all on her, then storms out of the room.

Everything else is still pretty much intact for the next 8-odd minutes, even the scene where Hallorann calls up the ranger station to see if they can put a call in to the hotel via the two-way radio. Meanwhile, Jack is puzzled by the sight of balloons and streamers decorating the lobby, with music playing in the background and wanders off to the Gold Room again.

Is it all really happening? Are they ghosts? Is it all in Jack's mind? I like how we don't know for sure, and we aren't told as such. If anyone else did this scene today, it would be shown that Jack is imagining it all, and the camera would periodically cut to Jack talking to himself out loud in the vast, empty Gold Room, and spoil the whole thing.

Another thing I really admire about the direction and photography is that it's pretty much at eye-level at all times. No swooping shots done with a boom crane, floating from the ceiling to the floor (or vice-versa), going in concentric circles the whole time. It really gives you the feeling that you are there, right along with Jack, seeing what he's seeing going on around him.

After another chat with Lloyd at the bar, Jack wanders off to go mingle with the other people, but literally runs into an affable butler carrying a tray of advocaat drinks, who invites Jack into the men's room to clean the stuff off of his jacket.

Into the loo they go, but Jack seems to recognize the man's name when he says "Delbert Grady".

Another strange juxtaposition here. A very '70s-looking bathroom, but the music playing in the background seems to evoke a whole different era altogether. Is the music playing out in the ballroom for real, or is it playing over the speaker system in there? This part gets a little claustrophobic and unsettling.

Jack nervously prods for a bit more info on the man as he'd getting cleaned up, but is trying not to blurt out where he apparently heard and/or read about him...not right away, but he does, and insists that Grady was the caretaker of the hotel at one point, some years back.

Grady calmly begs to differ there. "But YOU are the caretaker. You've always been the caretaker. I should know, sir. I've always been here", Grady tells him.

Jack chortles nervously and confusedly in response. What could Grady be getting at?