SOURCE: “Resident Phantoms,” in Sight and Sound, Vol. 9, No. 9, September, 1999, pp. 8-11.

In the following essay, Romney examines the defining themes of The Shining.

The best place to enter a labyrinth is through its exit. So let's start with the famous final shot of Stanley Kubrick's The Shining (1980). Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson), the ill-fated winter caretaker of the Overlook Hotel-Sits statuefied in the snow, having met his frozen fate at the heart of the Overlook's maze, while his wife Wendy and son Danny (Shelley Duvall and Danny Lloyd) are long gone in the snow-mobile. The Overlook is quite empty now, apart from its resident phantoms and, in case we've forgotten, the corpse of chef Hallorann (Scatman Crothers), the only person Jack has succeeded in killing during his Big Bad Wolf rampage (but then, that's for the management to worry about when the hotel re-opens the following spring—and...