10 Horror Movie Endings No One Understands

The greatest to ever do it.

A Clockwork Orange helmer Stanley Kubrick created some of cinema’s most iconic endings in his screen career, with unforgettable sequences such as Full Metal Jacket’s post mercy-kill Mickey Mouse singalong and Dr Strangelove’s infamous blackly comic nuclear apocalypse. None of the endings throughout his long CV are as well-remembered and divisive, however, as the closing moments of his 1980 horror The Shining.

Loosely adapted from Christine scribe Stephen King’s novel of the same name, the film ends with the villainous protagonist freezing to death outside the Overlook Hotel after failing to murder his wife and child during the chilly snowstorm. However, a final image which follows shows Jack as the smiling subject of a photo taken in the hotel way back in the twenties, standing front and centre amongst the revellers and apparently the same age as he was at his time of death.

So, was Jack literally always there?

If so, how? If not, what does the metaphor mean?

The final shot seems deeply confusing, but many interpretations see it as evidence that Jack’s rage and inescapable control issues meant he was predestined to be drawn into the allure of the seductive Overlook. The hotel's history of violence and corruption, according to this reading, make it a sort of locus of evil energy, drawing the easily corrupted and already unstable likes of Jack toward it.