Tony Sokol
News
March 31, 2017
Stanley
Kubrick’s horror masterpiece The Shining had almost as many multiple endings as
the Overlook Hotel had ghosts.
Stanley
Kubrick’s adaptation of Stephen King’s haunted hotel story The Shining is a classic horror
movie in spite of the director’s intent. The author is on record as saying he
was more than merely disappointed in the liberties the filmmaker made. One of
those variants was perpetuated to avoid a cinematic cliché, the ending. Jan
Harlan, who executive produced the film, and novelist Diane Johnson, who wrote
the screenplay with Kubrick, gave up the ghost about some of the different
original endings that Kubrick considered for The Shining.
King’s
novel ends with Jack Torrance, played by Jack Nicholson in the film, trapped
inside the Overlook Hotel as it was devoured by flames. His wife Wendy (Shelley
Duvall in the film), his psychic son Danny (Danny Lloyd in the film), and the
psychic Dick Hallorann (Scatman Crothers in the film) all survive the night. In
the 1980 movie Jack whacks Dick with an axe and freezes to death in the
Overlook Hotel’s wooded labyrinth. The hotel is left standing.
“The
ending was changed almost entirely because Kubrick found it a cliché to just
blow everything up,” Diane Johnson told Entertainment Weekly. “He thought there
might be something else that would be metaphorically and visually more
interesting.”
“Danny’s
relationship with his father was the thing that most interested Kubrick,” Jan
Harlan told EW. “He was emotionally involved with the point of view of a
little boy who is afraid of his father. I remember Kubrick saying that visually
he could imagine a small yellow chalk outline on the floor like that they put
around the bodies of victims. And Kubrick liked that image. But he was too
tender-hearted for that ending and thought it would be too terrible to do.”
Johnson
explained that there were versions of the screenplay where Wendy killed Jack in
self-defense, and where Jack killed Danny.
“In the
book, nobody gets killed except Jack,” Johnson told EW. “And Kubrick really
thought somebody should get killed — because it was a horror movie. So we
weighed the dramatic possibilities of killing off various characters and did different
treatments. We actually talked it over in detail the possibility of having
different people getting killed.”
In
spite of the slaughter of innocent victims, the director didn’t want to leave
audiences on a cute and cuddly note.
“The
maze chase grew out of the topiary animal hedges that move around in the book,”
said Johnson. “Kubrick thought topiary animals might be too goofy and
cute, but he always liked the idea of a maze. Kubrick didn’t want it to be too
gory, he thought a lot of blood was vulgar. He wanted it to be mostly
psychological. Of course, there’s the image of the blood coming out of the
elevators, but that was more ornamental and metaphorical. So there was some
discussion about trying to find a way of ending it without a lot of blood.”
Kubrick
didn’t necessarily envision the movie as a genre picture.
“Stanley
was fundamentally not interested in a horror film,” said Harlan. “He doesn’t
believe in ghosts. When the book was offered to him by Warner Bros., he said,
‘Well, all right, it might be challenging to do this, but I must have the
freedom to change whatever I like.’ Stephen King was perfectly happy with that
[at the time], it’s obviously a prerequisite to making a film. And Stanley
certainly changed it drastically.”
One of
the treatments saw Hallorann get possessed by the Overlook Hotel as in a
different twisted ending.
“We
always had the powers of the hotel in mind,” Johnson said. “So the hotel would
have been warping Hallorann’s mind for quite a long time. It was an attractive
idea that Hallorran is good [throughout the film] then he gets there and is
possessed by the hotel into a monster surrogate for Jack.”
Johnson
and Harlan told EW about the deleted and destroyed hospital scene which spiked
the ball and confused audiences at early screenings in New York and Los
Angeles.
“The
tennis ball is the same thing as the photograph — it’s unexplainable,” said
Harlan. “It makes Ullman now another ghost element. Was he the ghost from the
very beginning? The film is complex enough because nothing is explained. That
non-explaining is what was bad for the film initially.”
“The
fact they were left puzzled was exactly what Stanley Kubrick wanted. And when
the film [screened for critics] and wasn’t well received, Warners quite rightly
suggested, ‘It’s enough, just take [the hospital scene] out.’ So Stanley did
it. He’s not stubborn, especially since this is a film mainly to entertain
people. But Stanley was actually very sad that he misread the audience, that he
trusted the audience to live with puzzles and no answers, and that they didn’t
like it.”
As to
the puzzling coda to the film, the photograph showing a smiling Jack standing
at the forefront of a Fourth of July ball in the hotel’s Colorado Lounge in
1921.
“The
photograph was always in the ending,” said Johnson.
