Summary
Having resigned himself to being locked in the storage room, Jack has fallen asleep. He awakes when he hears a knock at the door, and a voice identifying itself as that of Delbert Grady.
Grady expresses doubt that Jack has the ability to deal with the situation he's in, and Jack begs him for one more chance. Grady says the only course of action is to deal with the matter "in the harshest possible way." Jack assures him that he's looking forward to doing just that. The door unlocks.
Meanwhile, Dick heads up the mountain in a Snowcat.
Wendy returns to her room and goes to sleep. Danny, repeating "REDRUM" in Tony's voice, approaches her in bed while holding the kitchen knife that Wendy stole. Danny spots Wendy's red lipstick on her dresser and uses it to write the word REDRUM on the bathroom door, fulfilling his visions. He seems to grow even more frantic once he sees the word spelled out, causing Wendy to wake up. She grabs the knife from him and embraces him.
Seconds later, they hear the sound of an axe at their door and realize that Jack is attempting to break down the door. Wendy grabs Danny and retreats to the bathroom, opening the window in hopes of escaping. She panics, however, when she realizes the window is partially jammed by the snow drifts outside.
Wendy sends Danny out the window, and he slides down the snow drift to safety, but she realizes that she won't fit. Wendy tells Danny to run and hide. As Jack spouts references to Johnny Carson ("Here's Johnny!") and "The Three Little Pigs" (impersonating the Big Bad Wolf), he makes his way further into the apartment, eventually reaching the bathroom door. Wendy begs him to stop, but he swings his axe at the door and reaches in to grab her. She uses the kitchen knife to stab his hand.
Both Wendy and Jack pause when they hear the sound of Dick pulling up to the hotel in the Snowcat. Danny re-enters the hotel and hides in a kitchen cupboard, narrowly escaping the notice of Jack, who leaves Wendy and stalks through the kitchen trying to find the source of the noise from outside.
Dick walks through the hotel, calling out for any sign of life. Suddenly, Jack surprises Dick by jumping out with the axe, chopping into Dick's chest. Danny, still hiding in the kitchen, seems to know what has happened and screams, causing Jack to pursue him.
Having recovered slightly from her close encounter with Jack, Wendy leaves their bathroom to find Danny. She hears voices and descends the hotel's staircase, growing hysterical again. Behind an open hotel room door, she sees a man in a suit in the middle of a sexual act with another man dressed in a bear costume. She screams and keeps running.
Jack follows Danny outside and turns on the exterior lights. He chases Danny into the hedge maze and smiles maniacally when he realizes he can track Danny using his footprints.
Wendy continues to search for Danny and notices Dick's bloody corpse in the lobby. She turns around to find another strange man with a bloodied head. He remarks, "Great party, isn't it?" She panics and runs to the Colorado Room, where she finds the whole ballroom covered in cobwebs and skeletons positioned as if in the middle of a lively party. Finally, she runs to the elevator bank and sees blood pouring out of it, fulfilling Danny's first vision.
Danny notices his footprints while running from Jack and backtracks slowly in an effort to throw his father off track. It works, and Jack continues hunting Danny while Danny runs out of the maze. Wendy sees Danny emerge from the maze, and they both hop into Dick's Snowcat, escaping down the mountain. Jack reaches the center of the maze, muttering incoherently, and falls down.
In the morning, Jack is frozen solid in the maze.
A disembodied camera glides through the hotel to the Gold Room, where cheerful music plays. Finally, it gradually zooms into a black and white picture hanging on the wall outside the Gold Room that depicts one of the hotel's classic parties from the good old days. As the camera gets closer, it becomes obvious that Jack is in the center of the picture, smiling broadly. The caption on the picture reads "July 4th Ball, 1921."
Analysis
In this final chapter of the film, the danger that has been looming throughout the entire film culminates in actual bloodshed. Although Wendy is technically the first character to strike a blow, Jack's revenge comes in the form of an axe through the Torrances' hotel room door, a symbol of his own identity fusing with that of Charles (or Delbert) Grady's.
Themes of identity are especially significant in this chapter of the film, which marks Jack's transformation into a killer, as well as Wendy's transformation—albeit out of necessity—into a survivor. These transformations are perversions of the roles that they occupy at the start of the film, when together they function as a classic, all-American nuclear family. For example, Jack's weapon, an axe, perverts the classic image of a father cutting wood for his family, and the allusions to late-night television ("Here's Johnny!") and bedtime stories (The Three Little Pigs) that Jack spouts as he chops his way towards Wendy and Danny likewise bend elements normally associated with a peaceful night at home with one's family.
A similar perversion underlies the kitchen knife that Wendy uses to defend herself, as it twists the traditional domesticity of the mother into a gruesome image. This is a prevalent theme throughout this chapter, since Wendy spends much of it in a desperate, frazzled state of perverted motherhood. For example, when Danny writes REDRUM on the Torrance's bathroom door, he uses Wendy's red lipstick to do so, bending a traditionally feminine tool into a warning sign whose color links it to other motifs of red in the film, such as the bloody elevator and the red room in which Jack decides to murder his family. It is likewise significant, then, that Jack traps Wendy in the bathroom, a setting that is culturally associated with time-consuming female primping rituals.
Wendy's final run through the hotel on her search for Danny, in which she witnesses numerous horrific images, is the culmination of the breakdown of the American nuclear family that has pervaded the action of the film. In this sequence, Wendy dashes from one space of the hotel to another, accenting the hotel's perverted geometry, a symbol of her own family's utter fragmentation. Indeed, Jack, Wendy, and Danny are literally isolated from one another in this sequence, each one searching for another in a kind of twisted family ritual. Importantly, in this sequence Wendy finally sees some of the images by which her husband and son have been haunted throughout the film, such as the partying skeletons and the bloody elevator, understanding all at once the loss of innocence that has perverted her once-idyllic family.
This breakdown of familial connection, however, is best embodied by the final chase through the hedge maze. Whereas Jack once towered over the scale model of the maze, a symbol of his sadistic surveillance of his own family's every move, he is in this sequence forced to explore the maze himself, no longer a godlike figure but a man. Once inside the maze, Jack loses track of his son, symbolizing the loss of both physical and emotional connection with his family. Ultimately, it is this perversion of fatherhood and familial ties that undoes Jack, trapping him in a prison of his own inability to connect with his fleeing son.
In the film's final sequence, the family is notably absent, and the camera seems to glide along, disembodied. This lends the camera the same ghostly presence that it had when it seemed to watch Jack's car on its way up the twisting mountain passes, in the film's first sequence. Here, however, it seems to communicate more directly with the audience, showing us a picture of Jack at one of the hotel's lavish parties in 1921. This final twist ending is a parting instance of dramatic irony aimed at the audience—only we can know that Jack was always somehow a part of the hotel's supernatural past.
