10 Alternate Endings That Almost Ruined Classic Horror Movies

The Proper Ending: After being chased around the haunted Overlook Hotel by an axe-wielding Jack Nicholson, hysterical Wendy Torrance and her weird psychic kid Danny manage to escape via snowcat while crazy Jack freezes to death in the hotel’s hedge maze.

In the final scene, we see the camera zoom in on an old photograph of an Overlook Hotel soiree dated 1921 with Jack Torrance front and centre grinning that unmistakable maniacal grin of his and we’re left asking what the hell it all means.

The Awful Alternate Ending: The creepily confusing ending was originally The Shining’s penultimate scene and followed by another that showed Wendy and Danny safely recovering from their ordeal in hospital and being visited by the Overlook Hotel’s manager Ullman who informs Wendy that Jack’s body hasn’t been located before giving Danny a yellow tennis ball suspiciously similar to the one that lured him into Room 237 earlier in the film.

Cutting away from the Overlook Hotel and randomly reintroducing Ullman who we only saw very briefly at the start of the film at the end clearly didn’t work and director Stanley Kubrick had the scene removed a week after The Shining’s original release.