2. The Shining
With its nightmarish imagery, direction from a madman who liked to emotionally break his actors and clever little tics like the Overlook Hotel's layout making absolutely no sense, The Shining was a mindf**k at the best of times. True to form, it carried this reputation for balls-out insanity right to the end, where we see a 1921 picture containing Jack Torrance along with the other revellers of the hotel. This picture operates as something of a gamechanger for what's happened in the rest of the film. Jack's affinity for the hotel had been hinted at numerous times, and the idea of other 'guests' in the hotel was made a reality when Wendy wanders in on the most bizarre sexual encounter you've seen outside of deviantART, legitimating Jack's hallucinations. Yet the photo reveal does more than that it's ambiguity in its best form, an open ending which asks legitimate, mind-bending questions of the viewer and what's gone on before, rather than adding a strand of cheap mystery for titillation. But still, just because it raises questions, it doesn't mean those questions can't be answered, and here's my attempt at just that. I personally think the theory that the Overlook is some kind of hungry purgatory is the best way forward that it seeks to devour souls to add to its menagerie of ghosts. It goes after Jack because he possesses the weakest resolve of the family, and when he dies in the maze it claims him, supernaturally adding him to the photo and the ever-expanding community of phantoms at the Overlook. It's simply an act of the hotel as a sentient, malevolent force making overtures toward the Torrance paterfamilias it drives the film, and offers a simple explanation to a true head-scratcher of an ending without getting bogged down in the more timey-wimey and spirtual theories which have sprung out of this particular dramatic well.