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.

Part 8

The conversation between Jack and Grady. What else can be said?

Again, it's great how we're never quite sure if it's really happening, if Jack is imagining all of this, or somewhere in between. Someone else making this scene today would blow it at the end, and show that Jack was standing there in the bathroom by himself the whole time.

This seems to be the crux of the entire movie. It's very unsettling and uncomfortable, but so intriguing at the same time. Funny how it almost mirrors the first conversation between Jack and Lloyd at the bar: it starts out affable, with aimless chit-chat, then it takes a more serious tone once Jack downs a couple of shots, then it begins to border on violence, and becomes a blood-letting.

Almost literally here. As soon as Grady begins telling Jack about Danny's "talents", he becomes a lot more authoritative in tone. As Grady tells Jack how he dealt with the problems he was having, he goes from that to a cold-blooded murderer.

If HAL-9000 had a perfect human equivalent, it would be Delbert Grady.

"And when my wife tried to prevent me from doing my duty", he tells Jack, "I...corrected her!". And with a little forward tip of the head, it's as if he were saying, "And you damn well know what I mean by that!". Jack chortles nervously again. Grady responds with a satisfied but chilling grin, as if to say, "And it appears you do, sir!".

If Stanley Kubrick had put an INTERMISSION title card right then and there, it wouldn't have been out of place, but that practice was unfortunately all but dead by then. (On a side note, funny enough, when The Shining was on Laserdisc format, it was cut into three sections, and this is where the second section ended).

One thing has since popped up in my mind during that scene: why did the Grady girls try to burn it down? Did they have the "shine" themselves and found out about the evils of the hotel (like Danny), and then try to destroy it? Is that why they appear to Danny, to warn him?

But as soon as the bathroom scene ends, it cuts to Jack walking across the lobby, over to Ullman's office, while the park ranger monotonously calls out over the two-way radio. Jack looks at it drunkenly, manages to get the lid off, tosses it aside, plucks one of the transmitters out of it...

And as soon as he's done that, it cuts to Hallorann sitting on a plane, going...somewhere.

And just as soon as the lady on the side turns the page of the magazine she's reading, it cuts right away to Hallorann in a car, driving in some very dark early-morning snow and ice, passing by a terrible-looking accident on the side of the road.

 

And then it cuts away to Wendy walking across the Colorado Lounge, with baseball bat in hand.  Awesome atmospheric look and feel to this scene. Again...this was done on a soundstage? I mean, just look at that fluorescent-looking early winter morning coming through the windows...all artificially done? Amazing.

The place is empty. But what's this in Jack's typewriter?

Not good. Not good at all. But what's in the ream box next to the typewriter?

Pages and pages upon pages of the same sentence, over and over. Very interesting how it's in separate lines, paragraphs, stanzas, even written in inverted pyramids. What's unnerving is that it's damn near an entire ream of paper, and a ream is 500 sheets. Was Jack aware of what he was writing out, or did his mind make him think he was writing something other than what he was actually typing?

And there he is, coming in right behind Wendy, menacingly. This may not end well.

Danny, meanwhile, is upstairs alone in the apartment. He's now seeing the bathroom door with the word REDRUM scrawled across it, and that corridor with the elevator at the end, now engulfed in blood, with the furniture and tables floating around in it.

Jack begins confronting Wendy about what she's doing down there, why she's down there, becoming more enraged at her, mocking her, and generally letting loose some rather pent-up frustrations at her. Sort of like the night before, in the apartment, only worse, and much more dangerous. As he's walking toward her, she's walking backward, away from him, the whole time.

But wait! We were shorted a few scenes!

A while back, after the conversation with Grady, Wendy is spelling out plans to leave the hotel with Danny, but he's sitting up in bed, yelling out "Redrum!", and when Wendy tries to reach him and see what's wrong, Danny only answers back in Tony's voice. He seems to be in some sort of deep, traumatized state of mind, and letting Tony answer for him.

Another scene that was cut was Hallorann on the plane, asking the stewardess what time they'll be arriving in Denver (so that's where he was going!), Jack typing away in the Lounge, and then a call that Hallorann makes to Larry Durkin's garage, which seems to be the last-chance stop before the Overlook Hotel.

An interesting part of the phone-call scene is that there was a slightly different edit to it in the middle. Larry asks why Hallorann is going to the Overlook in such conditions; "Larry, just between you and me, we got a very serious problem with the people takin' care of of the place", he says on the airport's phone, "They turned out to be completely unreliable assholes. Ullman phoned me last night, and I'm supposed to go up there and find out if they have to be replaced".

Larry checks his watch and asks, "How long is it going to take you to get up here?".

In the TV edit, after Hallorann says that there are problems with the caretakers, it cuts to Larry on the phone, and we can hear Hallorann: "They turned out to be completely unreliable, and I'm supposed to go up there and find out if they have to be replaced".

Larry says, "Sorry to hear about that, Dick", and glances at his watch, "How long is it going to take you to get up here?".

On a related note, during the part where Hallorann is driving his car in the snow, f you listen to the deejays on the radio, you hear that Hallorann had just narrowly missed getting there, as the Stapleton airport was just about to close down.

Another scene taken out is where Wendy is sitting with Danny in the apartment, with Danny staring blankly at the TV while Looney Tunes blares away. When Wendy says that she's going downstairs to talk with Jack, he answers via Tony, "Yes, Missus Torrance", showing that Danny still hadn't snapped out of whatever had a hold of him the night before. Not much happens here, admittedly, but it's simply showing that things were still not well with Danny.

Some people would say that those scenes were superfluous anyway, but to me, they highlight some growing tension and anxiety in other areas, not to mention that the hotel is increasingly hard to get to.