The Movie: Stephen King famously disowned Stanley Kubricks 1980 adaptation of his classic horror novel The Shining, which says a lot about how bad an adaptation it actually was, if little else. In actuality, Kubricks movie is a great, dark and ambiguous film, and has rightly been branded as one of the greatest horror movies ever made. The two indeed share a few common plot elements, but the style is totally different. Both great, both entirely different. The Ending: Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) has become a murderous psychopath, hell-bent on murdering his son and wife with an axe. Jack eventually freezes to death in a snowy maze while chasing his son, and the final shot of the film provides one last provocation; it is an image of Jack in the now-infamous Overlook Hotel dated 1921. What does it mean? Who the hell knows? With this ending, Kubrick purposely created a cinematic enigma that he knew viewers would be trying to understand for a very long time. In a beautifully simple way he made it as hard as possible to figure out because the more you look, the more you notice. And the more you notice, well.