10 Sudden Time Jumps In Horror Movies That Completely Change Everything
2. The Shining
A different kind of time jump now, with Stanley Kubrick's inimitable The Shining.
Though the movie itself jumps forward one month early on, the bulk of the film's events take place within a relatively compressed timeframe, and there isn't any sort of conventional time skip really worth mentioning. But the film's ending offers up one of the most unexpected, head-scratching temporal tinkerings the genre has ever seen.
Following Jack Torrance's (Jack Nicholson) demise in The Shining's climax, a photo in the Overlook Hotel's hallway shows Jack standing amid a crowd of partiers. The date on the photo? July 4, 1921 - many decades before the Torrances apparently ever set foot in the hotel.
This departing visual has been feverishly debated and analysed by fans ever since, though Kubrick himself asserted that it implied Jack was a reincarnation of a prior custodian of the hotel. By lingering on this dated photo, we're immediately flung back decades into the past and left to ponder the precise nature of Jack, or whoever this is we're looking at, and of course the hotel itself.
A brilliant final provocation to conclude one of the greatest horror films of all time.