It’s a beautiful sunny day as Jack Torrance drives down the road to the Overlook Hotel in Sidewinder, Colorado. Hugging the curves along the path through the mountains, Jack appears at peace, comfortable and hopeful, a harsh contrast to the dreadful brassy tones that fuel the scene with fear; a sense of inevitable doom from composer Hector Berlioz with his epic Symphonie Fantastique. A piece of music originally meant to illustrate a man’s self-destructive love for the woman he adores, the orchestra thrashes out a warning, for Jack, too, will soon face the repercussions of falling prey to the Overlook’s charms. Inside, Manager Stuart Ullman awaits Jack for an interview, cramped in a small pink room; signaling a new beginning for Jack, as he temporarily takes over as caretaker for the hotel for the next five months. To him, this feels like the opportunity of a lifetime, especially after he lost his job and nearly his family as well after a drunken incident involving his latest writing project, and his son Danny’s broken arm. But all of that is behind him now, because he finally has the solitude he’s been craving to get back into the writing grind. Little does he know, this hotel has been waiting for him for years, like a forgotten lover, and now that she has him in her grasp, she’s never letting go.

In a way, Jack has always been in charge of most of the concerns in his life. He has his wife Wendy pinned under his thumb; a stay-at-home mom who spends most of her time looking after Danny and abiding to Jack’s every whim and desire. Not only is he the father of their boy, but to Danny, Jack is the end-all be-all of parents. Despite Wendy’s more prominent love and affection, Danny can’t help but show some favoritism towards Jack, cementing Wendy’s belief that if she ever left her husband, her son would never forgive her. Up until recently, Jack was also a school teacher, but his drinking left an irreversible stain on his record, in addition to a frightened family in his home. However, the loss of control Jack felt when he was fired has been regained somewhat since he took on his new title as caretaker of the Overlook Hotel. Now, he has a second chance to finish his novel, prolong his sobriety, and prove to his family once and for all that he is a man that they can depend on, as they wait out the five months of winter together on the hotel’s frozen grounds. Of course, this is where it all goes horribly wrong.

To Jack, the night that he broke Danny’s arm is just another event that he’ll always be blamed for, but to Danny, it is the first appearance of Tony. Tony is Danny’s imaginary friend that lives inside of Danny’s mouth and shows him things. Sometimes, the pictures Tony reveals are a simple harmless glance into the future, or a peek inside someone’s brain, but sometimes, they’re much, much worse. Lately, with the news about the Overlook Hotel came more horrid images; depictions of hallways permeated with gallons of slushing sticky blood, and the corpses of young girls strewn about like lifeless rag dolls, cursed to remain the same adolescent age for all of eternity. A similar thread between author Stephen King’s Carrie and his novel The Shining exist, in which children put under tremendous amounts of severe discipline begin exhibiting unusual talents when they are truly pushed to the brink. Despite director Stanley Kubrick’s extreme deviation from the source material, this important detail remains intact, and stands as a strong commentary for the impact parents have on their kids. Like an origin story for a superhero, Jack’s night of violent aggression has forced Danny to spring forth a new power, but even he does not understand the sheer strength of his gift. To this little boy, Tony is just an imaginary friend like any other, when in actuality, it is “the shining”.

It’s not until Danny meets Dick Halloran, the Overlook cook, that he begins to comprehend the overwhelming amount of power that he stores within his tiny skull. Halloran can “shine” too, as he informs Danny through telepathic communication when the two share a conversation without speaking a word. Being able to shine does not indicate an ability to speak with the powers that be, but rather, it presents a more open and honest interpretation of the world. Every single thought that a person thinks is not written out like a billboard made easy for Danny and Halloran to read, but if they are feeling inordinately guilty or frustrated about something, these two will know it. They can sense it. They do not choose what is shown to them, but sit back and receive calls, from the living and the dead, like an operator who waits on standby; stuck as a middle man between worlds. Sometimes it’s an evil thought, sometimes it’s a vision of what’s to come, and sometimes it’s an openness to the sights and sounds of the ghoulish bodies that occupy the Overlook Hotel, but undoubtedly, it is a gift that will come in handy when Jack falls into a maniacal trance towards the end of this tragic tale. Of course, Jack can shine too. It’s not as touched upon by Kubrick as it is by King, since the director prefers to present ideas visually as opposed to audibly, but Jack, too, shares this gift, which may actually be the reason why he is able to see the ghosts that haunt the halls so clearly, and why he is such an easy victim for these spirits to prey on.

From the moment he enters the hotel with his family, Jack never again steps foot outside of its walls — engulfed by its aura from the very beginning, Jack is the hostage in this situation; the hotel, the captor, and his family is just along for the ride. Wendy and Danny take walks and chase each other outside; running and laughing with glee, but Jack is always within the confines of the walls, staring out at his wife and child through a window like a soulless stone; a man who became a ghost long before he takes his final breath. Though his expression remains dull and void, the mirror in his bedroom offers some insight into his warped brain, and acts as chapter markers in Jack’s state of sanity. In the beginning, we see Jack reflected in the mirror as a little on edge, but happy as he scarfs down the eggs and bacon Wendy has brought him. Halfway through the film, however, when Danny interrupts Jack’s nap to retrieve his fire engine from their room, we see Jack reflected as a zombie-like figure in the glass; holding his son emotionless as he tells him that he wishes they could stay at the Overlook “forever…and ever…and ever…”. By the end of the film, the biggest indication of Jack’s plunge into madness is when Danny writes “Redrum” on the mirror — the same mirror that has been signaling Jack’s slow decay as he transitions from human to vengeful ghost. Moments after Wendy looks into the mirror and sees “murder” reflected back at her, Jack barges into the room, ax in hand, eyes empty and hollow, lips grinning in triumph — the hotel has won.

But perhaps the loudest, most significant piece of symbolism in the film is the hedge maze; an item that shockingly does not even exist in King’s original text. The maze and the hotel are one in the same, with the maze representing the Overlook as Jack enters and quickly becomes lost in its dreamy white glow; a place where time is irrelevant and spins in fragmented loops like a skipping record. He may have been sober for five straight months, but the five months he spends as caretaker of this damned property inevitably due him in. It’s not long before he’s back on the bottle, losing himself metaphorically with “the white man’s burden” long before he literally is inadvertently trapped within the snow-caked shrubs outside. His brief bathroom encounter with Delbert Grady signals a turning point in his story, a momentary pause that might have allowed Jack to travel down a different path if had decided that his family did not need “correcting” as Delbert Grady’s did, or more recently, as Charles Grady’s did. But alas, Jack was always meant to be here, at this hotel, on this date, and here he will stay forever. There’s a party in the ball room now, and it might as well be to honor Jack’s long-awaited coming home.

Wendy is on a journey of her own, not into madness, but rather, to heroism. At the beginning of the film, she is a wounded animal, in denial, making up excuses for her husband who hurt their son, and always the first to admit fault and back down from a fight, so long as there is peace, or a quiet resemblance of it. She does her best to keep their marriage together, for Danny’s sake, for she knows what future lies ahead for broken boys who grow up without a father. In her mind, it’s better to stay with an abusive husband and an adequate father rather than no father at all. She is impish and afraid of confrontation, but when Jack becomes possessed by the seething hatred that echoes throughout the establishment, Wendy is forced to convert to a fiercer, more primal presence; a person that is capable of doing things that she cannot. Delbert Grady was right in assuming that Wendy had gotten the better of Jack, because it was her that threw a wrench into the gears of the mechanism that had claimed so many lives throughout the years; it was she that refused to become another cautionary tale for the next caretaker of the Overlook Hotel. Wendy, the complex female character with a traumatizing arc, is the only component in this repeating tale that has been any different from the previous loops, and for that, she not only becomes the hero of the story, but one of the only people to see the underbelly of the beast and live.

Jack, on the other hand, is devoured slowly, over time, engulfed in a frozen sarlacc pit where time ceases to exist and he is forced to carry out the same fate as the previous caretakers. Delbert Grady murdered his wife and two daughters in 1921, inciting a hostile presence that would forever float and claim any other that would come along and take on his position. In the tragedy of the winter of 1970, Charles Grady, a man who seemed perfectly normal at the time, watched over the hotel during the months when the specs of light from the windows poked out like sleepy eyes from the snow-covered Overlook. A few months into his tour of duty, he, too, murdered his wife and two daughters before swallowing a bullet himself. Just a few years later, the Torrance family set up their new home in the haunted hills of Sidewinder, Colorado, and endured the same treatment from the terminal guests during their stay. In his own way, the original Delbert Grady has been dueling out corrections and leading families through the tricky winding path of the Overlook Hotel ever since he checked in, back in the 1920s. Wendy and Danny might have escaped, but the impression that the hotel left on their lives signifies that no one ever truly escapes the Overlook without having a piece of themselves caught in the spirit’s jaws; forever sprung open, awaiting its next tasty morsel.