The Shining

As the harsh Colorado winter isolates the Overlook Hotel, the malevolent forces within finally succeed in breaking Jack Torrance. After destroying the two-way radio and sabotaging the snowmobile to prevent escape, Jack is lured by the hotel's ghosts into a drunken party where the specter of Delbert Grady, a previous caretaker who murdered his own family, pressures him to kill Wendy and Danny. Jack briefly resists but ultimately submits to the hotel's will. When Wendy and Danny manage to lock him in the pantry, Grady's ghost frees him, extracting a promise that Jack will bring Danny to the hotel and kill Wendy.

Jack attacks Wendy with a roque mallet, badly injuring her, but she escapes to the bathroom of the caretaker's suite and slashes his hand with a razor blade to keep him from breaking in. Meanwhile Dick Hallorann, the hotel's chef who shares Danny's psychic "shining" ability, receives a desperate telepathic call from Danny while working in Florida and rushes back to the Overlook, only to be ambushed and badly hurt by animated hedge animals and then by Jack himself.

Jack corners Danny on the top floor of the hotel. For a moment his own will resurfaces and he begs Danny to run, but the hotel reasserts control, forcing Jack to smash his own face and skull to pieces with the mallet, effectively erasing him and leaving only the hotel's puppet. Danny, remembering that his father never vented the hotel's failing boiler, tells the hotel-thing that the boiler is about to blow. As Danny, Wendy, and the wounded Hallorann flee outside, the entity rushes to the basement to try to relieve the pressure, but too late — the boiler explodes, killing what remains of Jack and destroying the Overlook Hotel entirely.

In the epilogue, set the following summer, Hallorann has taken a new job as a chef at a resort lodge in Maine. He spends time with Danny, comforting the boy over the loss of his father, while Wendy continues to recover from the severe injuries Jack inflicted on her during the hotel's final assault.

Kubrick keeps the hotel and changes almost everything about how it lets the Torrances go. In King's novel the Overlook dies with Jack: the hotel drives him to batter his own face to ruin with a roque mallet, and the boiler he never relieved the pressure on explodes, killing him and destroying the building. Dick Hallorann — mauled by the hotel's topiary animals on his way in and badly hurt by Jack — survives, and leads Danny and Wendy out. An epilogue the following summer finds him working at a Maine resort, comforting Danny about his father.

The film ends colder. Jack ambushes Hallorann and murders him with an axe, then chases Danny into a hedge maze on the hotel grounds. Danny doubles back through his own tracks to throw him off and slips out to Wendy; the two drive away in Hallorann's snowcat and leave Jack to freeze in the maze. Then Kubrick cuts to a photograph on the hotel wall — a July 4, 1921 ball, and a man among the revellers who is unmistakably Jack.