10 Best The Shining Moments
8. Wendy Talks About Jack’s Alcoholism
“On this particular occasion, he just used too much strength and injured Danny’s arm.”
In a conversation with the doctor (who has come to see Danny because he blacked out after his first vision of the blood elevator), Wendy reveals that Danny’s imaginary friend Tony appeared around the time that Danny received an injury. She begins to explain, rather tentatively, how Jack had come home drunk one night and had grabbed Danny’s arm to move him away from some papers he had messed up. Wendy stumbles over her words, laughing nervously as she explains that something good did come out of it because Jack hasn’t had a drop of alcohol since.
Ahead of this exchange, Jack has come across as a very level-headed man, appearing only in his job interview, where he is polite and well-mannered. There have been no opportunities to see him as anything else, so this revelation from Wendy paints a clearer picture of what kind of man Jack really is. It is not unlikely that Wendy diluted the extremity of what happened; she seems almost embarrassed to let the words come out. If this is the version that she has told the doctor, how extreme could the truth be?
This scene is calm, nobody shouts, no external sounds can be heard, but there is a quiet bubbling of pain between each line. It is almost as if the sounds from the hotel are playing underneath the surface of the scene. Shelley Duvall’s performance is incredible, she seems to command the camera to focus on her, taking her time to explain what happened as carefully as possible. The shot slips away from her only once, to show us the face of the doctor, who has not smiled or nodded or said a single word, urging Wendy on to try and give the nicest record of events that she possibly can.
Kubrick removed this scene from the film after its US release, when he cut ‘unnecessary’ moments from the film. It is interesting to note how different The Shining is without this key scene revealing Jack’s history with alcohol. Without it, we don’t find out about Jack’s alcoholism until he reaches the golden ballroom and discusses it with Lloyd, completely altering the context of his interactions with his family before this point. With this scene, we anticipate the possibility of Jack returning to alcohol as he descends into madness.
7. The Twins in the Corridor
“Come and play with us Danny. Forever and ever and ever.”
The iconic Shining “twins” make their first appearances right after the Torrances arrive at the hotel, when Danny spots them in the games room. But their most memorable appearance comes later in the film, when Danny is riding through the hotel on his trike. As he rounds a corner, there is a dreadful thud in the score as the two girls appear, hand in hand.
The girls pose no threat to Danny, unlike the woman he later encounters in room 237, but that doesn’t make them any less terrifying. As they invite Danny to play with them (forever and ever and ever) his vision flickers between the girls just standing there and the image of them lying on the floor, covered in blood.
Whilst Kubrick had a reputation for being a bit of a tyrant as a director, he was incredibly careful with the way he treated his child actors. The young boy who played Danny (who was also called Danny) was under the impression that he was performing in a drama, and never actually shared the screen with anything horrifying. In this scene, where Danny sees the girls covered in blood, he never actually appears on screen at the same time as this gory image – these shots were filmed separately and cut into the film.
By this moment in The Shining, the unusual quirks of the Overlook Hotel and the unbalancing effects of Kubrick’s world-building and directorial choices have already infected us, making this particular moment all the more effective. All these years later, the two Grady girls standing eerily in the hallway remains one of the most iconic images in horror cinema.
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6. The Maze Chase
“You can’t get away! I’m right behind you.”
The chilling final chase of The Shining sees Danny run into the maze, followed by an axe-wielding Jack. Everything in the film is reaching a new peak, the music groaning and clicking as Jack relentlessly pursues his son. Jack has completely lost any semblance of who he was before, intent only on killing, his cries of “Danny!” deteriorating into Neanderthal-like yells. This is the only time we have seen Jack leave the hotel since their arrival, whereas Danny has already traversed the maze and is somewhat more familiar with its pathways. This moment acts as a crescendo to all of The Shining’s tension.
Each corner Danny goes around potentially brings him closer to Jack. We have no idea how to escape this situation, no bird’s eye view of the maze to reassure us that Danny is going to get out. It is only when he stops and begins to carefully walk backwards, stepping where his feet have carved divots in the snow, that we realise that this smart little kid has a plan to get out.
In Stephen King’s novel, the hotel burns down at the end, whereas Kubrick’s interpretation goes another way and ends with a maze chase through the snow, eventually leading to the (quite literally) chilling image of Jack, frozen to death amidst the hedges of the maze. King was famously not a fan of Kubrick’s interpretation of The Shining, claiming that it had no heart, and that is was very cold. It seems only fitting then, that it ended as it did.
The chase through the maze offers an incredible dichotomy between themes of good and evil, emphasising Danny’s innocence in contrast to Jack’s brutish manliness. We are placed in Danny’s tiny shoes, running from something bigger than us. The final shot of Jack frozen and finally stopped in his tracks is iconic, but the power of the scene is in the fight between a father and his son who are completely opposed – a bear pursuing a deer.
