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.
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