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!