At what point do you think Jack goes truly "bad" in this movie? Was he bad even before he got to the Overlook? Why or why not?

One of the central ambiguities of The Shining is whether Jack goes mad or is possessed by the evils of the hotel. Wendy tells the doctor who comes to see Danny after his first vision about Jack's history of alcoholism and accidental violence towards Danny. Later, we see that Jack's resentment of Wendy for failing to forgive him for such mistakes, and for holding him back from his destiny as a successful writer, were present long before the family's move to the haunted Overlook Hotel. However, the hotel's ability to "shine," as Dick Hallorann puts it, also seems to push Jack over the edge, suggesting that he is not going mad but rather is possessed by the traumatized spirits of the hotel's past. This conclusion is supported by the increasingly real presence of the hotel's ghosts, beginning with Jack's first encounter with Lloyd, the Gold Room bartender of yore, and culminating in Wendy's romp through the hotel at the end of the film, wherein she finally sees what Jack and Danny have seen throughout the film: the hotel's partying skeletons, the Grady twins, and the bloody elevator.

This conflict calls into question the role of fatalism versus free will in the film, as Jack seems both destined to be driven mad by the hotel and predisposed to go mad of his own troubled volition. This tension is likewise present in Danny, whose possession by Tony, "the boy who lives in [his] mouth," initially seems benign, but who later loses control to Tony when danger is at its height.