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Dealing With Our Bloody Past: Repression vs. 
Recognition of American History in Stanley 
Kubrick’s The Shining
Kameron McBride, Ball State University

This essay explores how director Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining establishes the Overlook Hotel 
as an environment where conservative complacency has become the norm and all hope of 
progression is lost. By using a maze motif and the backdrop of Native American genocide The 
Shining  explores and critiques how modern America was constructed.

Introduction

In 1980 anticipation was high in the United States for Stanley Kubrick’s new film The	
Shining,  as it would be the iconic director’s first foray into the horror genre. Yet, when when 
the first trailer for The	Shining premiered in the U.S., audiences only witnessed one horrif-
ic image to tease the film. The trailer started on a shot of a hallway ending in an elevator. 
Audience members may have noticed the Native American motif on the elevator doors and 
the columns in the hallway, or perhaps the mezzo-American red paint covering the hallways 
and columns. Names began to scroll up the screen in the electric blue font that was used for 
the credits in The	Shining as menacing music built louder and louder in the background. 
There was a slight pause as the name “Stanley Kubrick” passed before blood suddenly 
began to trickle out from the corners of the elevator. The doors never opened, yet they could 
not contain the river of red that gushed out of every crevice of the door, engulfing the cam-
era and audience itself. This image, one of the signature scenes of The	Shining, is the most 
literal portrayal of the blood upon which the Overlook Hotel was built. Film historian Geof-
frey Cocks interpreted this image as “…the blood of centuries, the blood of millions, and, 
in particular, the blood of war and genocide in Kubrick’s own century” (185). Even though 
the doors of the elevator desperately try to contain and conceal the blood, they cannot, for 
the blood is the very structure of the hotel itself, or as film critic Bill Blakemore interprets: 
“the blood upon which this nation, like most nations, was built as was the Overlook Hotel” 
(Blakemore). 

 In The	Shining, director Stanley Kubrick uses ghosts and the motif of being trapped in a 
maze in order to critique how contemporary America was built and how individuals choose 
to interpret this history. The Overlook Hotel is constructed as a haunted environment where 
characters must choose to interpret or repress America’s own bloody past, a choice that ul-
timately decides their own fate. The resort hotel buries its bloody history within itself to the 
point where it cannot be contained and leaks from the walls themselves. However, 

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Dealing With Our Bloody Past, McBride

the ghosts within the hotel are not the spirits of the Native Americans but instead those 
of the previous residents of the hotel, those who have also been lost within the macabre 
trappings of the hotel and are doomed to repeat the same cycles of violence over and over. 
Jack Torrance, the doomed caretaker of the hotel in the film, is an individual corrupted and 
entrapped by the bloody history of the hotel and, by extension, America. The ghosts of the 
hotel haunt Jack and lead him to not only accept the history of the hotel but allow him to 
become obsessed and eventually entrapped forever within it. By contrast, Jack’s son Danny 
resists this corruption and is able to escape the metaphorical and literal maze by taking 
a more objective view of the Overlook Hotel. While much scholarship has been written 
about the motif of the maze in The	Shining and the idea of genocide’s presence in the film, 
there has not been an exploration of Danny and Jack as representations of differing paths 
of confronting American history. This paper will examine how Jack grows to represent the 
complacent conservatism of the hotel while Danny offers the audience some hope for a 
progressive future.

Jack as damaged goods 

Jack Torrance is not a mentally stable person at the beginning of The	Shining. This fact 
might seem obvious to those who have seen the film; certainly by the end we have seen 
enough evidence to conclude that Jack has been brought to madness by the ghosts of the 
hotel, but it is important to note that Jack is not exactly a model citizen prior to the events 
of the film. He is a recovering alcoholic with a history of abusing his only son, Danny, and 
who mistreats and clearly does not love his wife, Wendy. When he accepts the responsibil-
ity of looking after the hotel for an entire winter, in his mind he is starting over. He even 
mentions several times that he is starting to outline an ambiguous “writing project.” The 
ultimate irony ends up being that there could not be a place more ill-suited for Torrance to 
start over than the hotel. In fact, his own history of violence fits perfectly with the Over-
look’s own grisly past.

The history of the Overlook Hotel is mostly parsed out in two conversations with the 
hotel’s manager, Stuart Ullman. The first of these takes place as Jack is interviewing for the 
position and meets Ullman in his office. During this conversation, Ullman tells Jack about 
an incident where a previous caretaker “hacked his family to pieces, and then neatly stacked 
them in a room before putting both barrels of a shotgun in his mouth.” This is information 
that Jack brushes aside, claiming that Wendy will love it, since she’s a “horror film and 
novel buff,” implying that the haunted history of the hotel is more of an attraction than an 
actual deterrent. This moment is where we first see how the history and violence linked to 
the hotel is treated in such a candid manner. Randy Rasmussen, an author who breaks down 
films scene-by-scene in his work, thinks this moment is so ridiculous that he relates it to Dr. 
Strangelove, another Kubrick film: “like President Muffley trying to tell Premier Kissoff 
about a nuclear attack on Russia, he [Ullman] alternately acknowledges and minimizes 
the horror” (Rasmussen 239). Essentially, the idea of Ullman withholding this information 
about the hotel seems so ridiculous that it is comparable to a black comedy.

Ghostly representations and Native Americans in The Shining

The second of these history lessons occurs as Ullman leads Jack, Wendy, and Danny 
on a tour of the hotel and the grounds. Here, we quickly learn that the hotel was built on 

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an ancient Native American burial ground. Ullman passes over this casually, remarking 
that a few attacks were even repelled during the construction of the hotel. Once again, 
Ullman talks about a violent episode in the hotel’s past without much consideration. 
Rasmussen also notes this in his analysis: “His casual manner reduces a once passionate 
cultural conflict to a trivial footnote in history” (245). From this very early point in the 
film, Kubrick is planting the idea of the hotel’s history being repressed. What we as an 
audience can infer from Ullman’s actions is that the denial of the history of the hotel has 
been passed all the way down to the present day. This is further evoked when Wendy asks 
whether famous people had stayed at the hotel in the past. Ullman replies: “Oh yes, in 
its heyday movie stars…all the best people.” As he says this the group walks through a 
hallway leading to the Colorado Lounge, a room rife with visible Native American décor 
and even a portrait of what looks to be a chief hanging on the wall: “We are invited to 
read the cues in the room historically and clearly in relation to the violent history of the 
American frontier and the destruction of the Native Americans” (Luckhurst 43). From 
the get-go, The	Shining is anything but subtle about presenting the history of the hotel as 
haunted by the genocide of Native Americans, and yet nobody at the hotel seems unset-
tled by this fact.

By introducing the possibility of Native American ghosts, Kubrick is evoking a pop-
ular trope that has haunted American horror stories for a long time. The presence of a 
Native American haunting brings out a very unique response in American audiences, and 
can even lead to questioning the basis upon which the United States is founded:

…the ghosting of American Indians presents us with a  host of doubts 
about America and the American ideology.…Ghostly Indians present 
us with the possibility of vanishing ourselves, being swallowed up into 
another person, another ideology. When ghostly Indian figures haunt the 
white American imagination, they serve as constant reminders of the 
fragility of national identity. (Bergland 5)

By this, Bergland infers that the presence of Native American ghosts challenge our 
sense of national pride and the ideology upon which this nation was founded. In The	
Shining we see this enacted by the fact that the Native Americans don’t appear as ghosts. 
Rather, the ghosts in the film are trying actively to preserve their dominance over the 
Native Americans. Contrary to the initial set up of the film, these Native American ghosts 
are not present nor trying to exact revenge on the patrons of the hotel. Rather, every hall-
way is decorated with some sort of piece of art or pattern that evokes Native American 
culture. This is a choice Kubrick specifically makes to link the violence that takes place 
over the course of the film with the history of the hotel. As the story unfolds and we wit-
ness Jack slowly slip into madness, the audience is constantly reminded that he is haunted 
by the past of the hotel and everything that has happened there. Or, as film scholar Bill 
Blakemore says, “The Shining is also about America’s general inability to admit the grav-
ity of the genocide of the Native Americans—or, more exactly, its ability to ‘overlook’ 
that genocide” (Blakemore). As Blakemore suggests, the ghosts of the Overlook want to 
overlook the genocide and continue life as they best remember it. However, the Overlook 
Hotel’s past is a maze of violence and bloodshed that manifests itself into these ghosts 
that haunt Jack until he becomes one of them. Jack wants to repress his violent past while 

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Dealing With Our Bloody Past, McBride

the hotel has already been doing that since its construction. Thus, the film chronicles 
Jack’s slide towards acceptance within the mazes of the hotel.

Danny and his hope for the future

Jack’s son Danny also comes emotionally damaged to the Overlook Hotel, though in 
a very unique way. Danny learns from Dick Holloran, the kindly African American cook 
of the Overlook, that he has the ability to “shine.” This is a kind of telepathic power that 
enables him to see visions, either from the past or the future. Danny also has an imagi-
nary friend named Tony who he says is “a little boy that lives inside my mouth.” Danny 
uses Tony as a coping mechanism for these images he sees; his ability to create a reliable 
method to deal with these visions already places Danny ahead of his father in terms of 
how he chooses to confront the past.

A crucial scene illustrating how Danny understands the past occurs as Jack has been 
touring the hotel while Wendy and Danny take stock of the kitchen stores. Dick gets 
Danny ice cream and tells him about his ability to “shine,” and that he will see some 
horrifying images in the hotel. However, he comforts Danny with one piece of wisdom: 
“They’re like pictures in a book, Doc, they can’t hurt you.” This quote forms the crux that 
juxtaposes Danny and Jack as representations of different reactions and interpretations 
of American history. Danny is told to treat his visions of the hotel as harmless images. 
Danny acknowledges these specters in the hotel but never gives in to their influence. 
Jack, on the other hand, initially chooses to repress these images but eventually gives in 
to them because he simply can’t handle the haunting and instead gives himself over to the 
hotel. Roger Luckhurst, a scholar with The	British	Film	Institute, describes the film as “a 
pessimistic account of the human failure ever to escape the ineluctable forces that entrap 
men” (87). Jack represents this entrapment, while the “ineluctable forces” are represented 
by the ghosts and their steadfast desire to cling to the past.

Jack and Danny as two different paths

“Pictures in a book” becomes a metaphor that both literally and psychologically 
explains the film. Dick is, of course, referring to Danny’s ability to “shine” and see the 
horrific images of the hotel’s grisly past. However, we also get a literal interpretation of 
these pictures in a book. In Stephen King’s original novel upon which the film is based, 
Jack takes a trip to the basement of the hotel where he discovers a photo album contain-
ing a pictorial history of the hotel. While this scene doesn’t appear in the film version, we 
do see the picture book open on Jack’s desk as he tries to work on his “writing project,” 
perhaps a source of inspiration for whatever he is writing about. As we see later in the 
film, however, the picture book is no muse and instead drives Jack to construct his glee-
fully psychotic “All Work and No Play Makes Jack a Dull Boy” manuscript, a hopelessly 
winding maze of text that seems totally removed from rational thought. Jack and Dan-
ny are both given similar images of the history and violence of the hotel’s past, and yet  
“Danny, Jack, and Wendy each make of Overlook and its past what he or she is equipped 
and inclined to make of it” (Rasmussen 234). What Rasmussen illustrates is that the main 
characters of The Shining each see the past of the Overlook through a different lens. 
However, it is how each character reacts to these ghosts that separate how they interpret 
the Overlook’s past.

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Dealing With Our Bloody Past, McBride

Danny and Jack also navigate the space of the hotel in very different ways. Three times 
in the film we get the famous shots of Danny riding around the hotel in his big wheel, 
exploring his surroundings and understanding the mazelike corridors of the hotel. By con-
trast, Jack sits in the middle of the hotel, unwilling or unable to explore the hotel. These 
scenes set up the hotel as a dizzying labyrinth where the interior begins to look similar 
to the famous hedge maze in the back of the hotel, as film scholar and professor Mario 
Falsetto notes in his stylistic analysis of Kubrick’s films:

One of The	Shining’s most impressive features is the way it carefully sets 
up comparisons between the interior spaces of the hotel and the exterior 
maze space….Perhaps the most intriguing interpretation of the film’s 
spatial strategies involves reading the space as a metaphorical landscape 
for Jack’s (Jack Nicholson) deteriorating mind. The final nine-minute 
sequence of Jack chasing Danny through the maze could be viewed as a 
metaphor for Jack’s frenzied mental condition. (70) 

Here Falsetto connects the hotel’s mazelike structure with Jack’s deteriorating mental 
state. This idea can actually be pushed farther to connect the idea that Jack becomes more 
ghostly as the spaces of the hotel begin to trap him. Jack’s deteriorating mind is actually 
just adjusting to the attitudes of the ghosts of the Overlook, willingly becoming trapped 
within maze. As Danny wanders and probes, navigating the space, Jack remains still, 
squatting over his typewriter in eerie concentration. Danny goes out and explores the 
hotel’s hedge maze with his mother while Jack is content to stay inside and watch them 
from a window. As author Juli Kearns points out in the documentary Room 237, Jack lit-
erally becomes the Minotaur at the center of the maze, trapped in his own space, unwill-
ing and unable to move and express himself as an individual.

Significantly, Jack wants to stay inside the hotel’s maze rather than 
explore its surroundings…Symbolically, he wants to “forget” himself 
(Jack Torrance in the present time) and to “remember” not how to escape 
from the center of the maze but how to command its static and enclosed 
timelessness. (Nelson 207)

As Nelson points out, Jack is becoming more and more a part of the maze and, by exten-
sion, the Overlook Hotel. Jack is becoming similar to the ghosts of the hotel, complacent 
and happy with the time he’s being trapped in.

Jack’s subverted feelings surfacing

The first time Jack physically interacts with a ghost is after Danny encounters the 
ghostly woman in Room 237. Upon seeing mysterious injuries on Danny’s neck, Wendy 
accuses Jack of injuring their son, causing Jack to storm off into the “Gold Ballroom,” 
the main party room of the hotel, and stare into the mirror across the dry bar, begging for 
some alcohol. Before long, Jack is greeted by Lloyd, the calm yet sinister-looking bar-
keep that begins to liquor Jack up and lets him rant about his dissatisfaction with Wendy. 
The interesting part of their conversation is when Jack references “White Man’s Burden,” 
without any provocation, a poem by Rudyard Kipling that is commonly interpreted as a 

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Dealing With Our Bloody Past, McBride

poem endorsing imperialist rule of other countries: 

The implication, of course, was that the Empire existed not for the ben-
efit—economic or strategic or otherwise—of Britain itself, but in order 
that primitive peoples, incapable of self-government, could, with British 
guidance, eventually become civilized (and Christianized). (Cody)

Jack’s reference to this poem that justifies imperialism in the middle of casual conversa-
tion suggests that he is giving in to the influence of the hotel. As Cody notes, Kipling may 
be suggesting through his poem that it is up to white “Empires” to colonize “primitive peo-
ple.” The fact that Jack is beginning to think in these terms represents his assimilation into 
the ghosts of the hotel. As film scholar Thomas Nelson points out: “…the fact  [is] that soon 
he will forget himself and only remember a once latent urge to dominate and rule” (Nelson 
223). As Cody notes, the poem is commonly inferring that it is up to white “Empires” to 
colonize “primitive people.” Jack beginning to think in these terms represents his assimi-
lation into the ghosts of the hotel. Film scholar Thomas Nelson points out: “…the fact that 
soon he will forget himself and only remember a once latent urge to dominate and rule” 
(Nelson 223). What Nelson suggests is that Jack is now remembering this desire to rule and 
his psychological makeup is becoming more akin to the ghosts of the hotel. 

In the following scene we see Jack give himself over to direct physical contact with 
these ghosts in a way Danny never does. Up to this point in the film, Danny is invited 
several times by the ghostly sisters that haunt the hallways to “come play with us…forev-
er and ever,” and yet he resists. Jack, on the other hand, is enticed sexually by an attrac-
tive young woman ghost in Room 237, the same ghost who terrorized Danny moments 
earlier. Danny is recognizing and acknowledging these ghosts, but still resisting their 
influence. As Jack begins to engage with her, however, he pulls back to realize she is a 
decaying corpse, which becomes very representative of the enticing, yet rotten foundation 
of the hotel: “The rotting corpse of a now much older woman that Jack embraces is only 
revealed—as ever—in the revealing mirror, the logic of dreams making desire turn to re-
vulsion” (Luckhurst 64). In other words, Jack actually sees through the hotel’s invitation 
to become trapped in a moment of glory but accepts it anyway. After this encounter, Jack 
goes back to the room with Wendy and claims that he didn’t see anything in the room. 
In this scene we see that Jack is now perfectly content to be in the middle of the maze. 
Despite being confronted with such a horrifying experience that clearly points to the dark 
nature of the hotel, Jack represses the incident and decides to stay.

By this point in the film, astute viewers will note the clothing choices of the film begin 
to slowly change as the story nears its end. Towards the beginning of the film Wendy and 
Danny are clad in clothes with a red, white, and blue color scheme, while Jack wears 
clothes befitting a schoolteacher. As the film goes on, however, and he becomes more 
aware of the ghosts in the hotel, Jack begins to look sloppier and disheveled while he 
only wears clothes with red, white, and blue. Danny and Wendy, however, slowly begin 
to shed the patriotic scheme in favor of different colors. In fact, Wendy actually dons a 
yellow cardigan covered in teepees towards the end of the film. This acts as another visu-
al clue that Jack is becoming more and more rooted in the frontier-American perspective 
of the ghosts and sees Wendy and Danny as enemies that need to be eliminated, which is 
literally represented by their clothing. 

A scene that shows Jack’s full acceptance of the hotel’s influence is a discussion he has 

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Dealing With Our Bloody Past, McBride

with the ghost of the prior caretaker, Grady. This is during Jack’s second trip to the Gold 
Room, but this time more than just Lloyd are present. In fact, an entire party is going on 
with hundreds of partygoers dressed in dazzling 1920s attire. The discussion between 
Grady and Jack begins after Grady spills a drink on Jack, causing them to retreat into the 
bathroom to clean up. What follows is an interaction ripe with misidentification of both 
the two characters and the time which they live in. “Grady” at this point in the story 
resonates with audiences as the name of the previous caretaker who, according to Ullman, 
murdered his entire family with an axe. However, this Grady claims his name is Delbert, 
while the Grady mentioned earlier in the film is named Charles. Jack attempts to confront 
Grady, accusing him of being the previous caretaker; however, Grady denies this and then 
suggests that Jack has always been the caretaker, claiming, “I should know; I have always 
been here.” Sight	and	Sound film critic Paul Meyersberg notes, “Events that seem to take 
place in the present may be re-enactments or simply memories of the past. To take The	
Shining at its face value is a mistake” (253). What this means is that The	Shining is con-
stantly placing its characters in re-enactments of events of the past, forcing them to re-enact 
moments over and over again. This is because the Overlook Hotel is a maze trapping the 
ghosts and the Torrance family inside, forcing them to retread the same path over and over.

Grady goes on to further confuse identities by claiming that he had a wife and two 
daughters (the same as the murderous caretaker Ullman describes at the beginning of the 
film) and describes how he had to “correct” his wife and children, while suggesting that 
Jack do the same. Jack accepts this and does indeed try to “correct” Danny and Wendy. 
However, before he leaves, Grady adds one last statement: “Your son is trying to bring 
an outside party into this situation…a nigger cook.” Jack is slow to respond to Grady; 
however, he also accepts the idea to eliminate Dick. Professor James Naremore suggests 
that “the reaction suggests that Jack’s repressed racism, already revealed in the earlier 
conversation with Lloyd, has been given a new outlet” (203). Naremore makes the claim 
that Jake’s repressed racism is given new life by Grady; however, this can be further 
extended to the idea that Jack is taking the next step towards becoming a ghost. Bit by bit 
he is accepting a past version of himself and disappearing into attitudes associated with 
the hotel’s glory days.

Race through the maze 

Danny indeed has used his ability to “shine” in order to communicate with Dick in a 
desperate attempt to summon help to the hotel. However, Danny’s efforts prove futile as 
Jack buries his axe deep into Dick’s chest, leaving his body to bleed over a Navajo-in-
spired rug. This act seemingly completes Jack’s transition into one of the Overlook’s 
ghosts by spilling the blood—of the minority hotel member no less—that the hotel de-
mands. Drunk on his kill, Jack then chases Danny out of the hotel, howling as they both 
enter the maze in a frenzied and frantic game of cat and mouse. Jack attempts to track 
Danny through his footprints while Danny races through the maze he and his mother had 
playfully navigated only months earlier. This climactic moment also represents the choice 
Danny makes that ultimately separates him from his father: he retraces his footsteps. 
While Jack charges ahead, eagerly following the tracks in front of him, Danny retraces a 
few of his steps to end the trail then races out of the maze while his father is stuck inside. 
Jack then continues to limp around, his screaming becoming more and more nonsensical 
until he finally collapses. A cut away reveals a horrifying image of Jack completely fro-

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zen, his face permanently stuck in a grotesque grimace as he dies of exposure.
This moment represents the final choice for both characters, the final moment where 

they decide how they choose to interpret the history of the hotel. Danny chooses to face 
what has happened and, in a literal act, retraces his steps, accepts the past and then strides 
forward towards his mother and (we presume) a future. Danny is able to look at the past 
in such a way that enables forward movement. Jack, on the other hand, traps himself 
within the maze and chooses to forever reside within the Overlook Hotel. As we see in 
the final frames of the film, Jack’s body not only will be trapped in the hotel forever but 
his spirit will (and always has been) as well. 

The final shot of The	Shining is the final clue to unlocking the idea of America’s past 
in conjunction with the Overlook Hotel. The photograph depicts a well-dressed Jack 
attending a party in the Gold Room, with the date on the photo reading: “July 4th, 1921.” 
The simplicity in this lies in the fact that Jack has now officially conceded to the history 
and culture of the hotel. We just saw him literally captured in the middle of the maze, but 
now we see Jack entrapped on a more spiritual level. The date “July 4th” has obvious ties 
to the United States, but the year is every bit as important for this reading. As Luckhurst 
argues, the 1920s represent perhaps a “return to the last confident moment of class and 
race hierarchy in America in the 1920s, a response to the economic and social instabilities 
of the ’70s that arguably helped foster the horror boom in the first place. The Overlook is 
America’s past glory, frontier-triumphant, however bathed in blood” (Luckhurst 91). This 
means that Kubrick’s decision to place these ghosts in the 1920s makes sense, because it 
evokes a time of extravagance and white dominance in America.

Events like the Tulsa Race Riot illustrate that America was struggling with racial 
acceptance, while at the same time the “roaring ’20s” show an America that was drunk on 
luxury and spending. Thus, the ’20s make sense as the apex of Overlook Hotel’s history, 
a time when the hotel was at its absolute peak. The hotel and the ghosts essentially repre-
sent a time capsule where the past is always present and they never have to move on from 
the early ’20s. This photograph represents Jack fully accepting this idea and becoming a 
ghost himself: “Jack has retreated to a distinctly American past, at a moment of national 
celebration just a few years after a victorious World War and nearly a decade before the 
Great Depression. The	Shining, in its characters’ perceptions and attitudes is a distinctly 
American nightmare” (Rasmussen 284). Rasmussen’s point is well taken: Jack and the 
ghosts are in a moment that is perfect for them. At the center of the hotel’s maze is a pre-
served past where these ghosts can stay in the same time forever and ever.  

As mentioned before, Jack always existed in the Overlook due to his attitudes and how 
he chooses to interpret the past. He always existed there because of the haunted nature of 
the Overlook Hotel, which fosters a never-ending cycle that began during the construc-
tion and that will seemingly never end. Nelson again explores how the hotel is a maze 
constructed specifically to entrap Jack and the ghosts in this time: “Rather than exploring 
and discovering, making choices and risking both failure and success, he prefers to sit 
inertly in the center of an enclosed world and shine from above in god-like contemplation 
of the beauty of his creation” (Nelson 229).

In other words, Kubrick sets up the Overlook Hotel as a haunting rooted in compla-
cency and conservatism. The specters of the hotel fight maliciously against anything that 
may bring about change within the hotel and are excessively good at eliminating any-
thing that could bring this about. The hotel was built on blood, and now it sustains itself 
through the same blood and the same ghosts, occasionally adding some to their number. 

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Dealing With Our Bloody Past, McBride

The photograph we see at the end of the film is merely the final visual proof that Jack has 
accepted this fate and will be a ghost haunting those mazelike corridors for all time.

Conclusion

In an interview concerning why he wanted to tackle the challenge of directing a horror 
film, Kubrick offered up the following answer: “There’s something inherently wrong with 
the human personality. There’s an evil side to it. One of the things that horror stories can 
do is to show us…the dark side without having to confront it directly” (Howard 157). 
This, perhaps better than anything else, explains the true purpose of Kubrick’s film and 
explains what the haunted ghosts of the Overlook Hotel should really mean to audiences. 
Kubrick wanted to offer up a method for audiences to confront the bloody past of Amer-
ica, and any other nation for that matter, without having to become absorbed in the same 
way as Jack. Instead, audiences are treated to the horror in the same fashion as Danny; 
the information is laid out in front of us like “pictures in a book.” They are images on the 
screen that can haunt us but can’t harm us. What is important is that we, the audience, 
understand the importance of being able to face our faults, to confront our horrible his-
tory and be able to understand it, rather than constantly attempting to ignore it. Kubrick 
himself explained how humans tend to repress this history, rather than face it head on:

I think we tend to be a bit hypocritical about ourselves. We find it very 
easy not to see our own faults, and I don’t just mean minor faults. I sus-
pect there have been very few people who have done serious wrong who 
have not rationalized away what they’re done, shifting the blame to those 
they have injured. We are capable of the greatest good and the greatest 
evil, and the problem is that we often can’t distinguish between them 
when it suits our purpose. (qtd. in Ciment 193)

Through these scenes and the mazes with which Kubrick litters his film, the audience 
gets a clear sense of the very unique haunting that is affecting both Jack and Danny. 
On the surface the Overlook Hotel is haunted due to being built on an ancient Native 
American burial ground. However, what we ultimately see in the film is that the hotel is 
haunted by repression. The ghosts in the hotel represent the ways in which America has 
denied its bloody past and instead chosen to remain blissfully unaware and live in a time 
of supposed glory. The	Shining presents its viewers with two options: either repress this 
history, like Jack, and do not face the horrors at hand until their influence you; or behave 
like Danny and respect the horror without letting it fully overtake you. In this sense there 
is at least the hope of escaping from the vicious cycle that the Overlook represents. Of 
course Kubrick doesn’t definitively end his film but instead chooses to leave the ending 
ambiguous, open to all kinds of interpretations. For Jack, Kubrick suggests that the entire 
story has been repeated throughout history and will continue to be repeated in the future. 
As Luckhurst points out: “Circularity, by definition, refuses to force an ending. Instead, 
the last shot is a recursive revelation that demands an instant reviewing of the film to 
hunt for clues. And so we watch it again. And again” (91). Luckhurst’s idea unlocks the 
narrative maze that Kubrick sets forth for the audience. Ghosts by definition are trapped 
in the past; there is no future as much as there is always a present. By finishing the film 
with the photograph, Kubrick breaks down the idea of a traditional narrative. Instead 

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of offering an ending, he offers a cycle. The only hope the film offers is that Danny and 
Wendy escape at the end. They are alone in a blizzard with only a Snow Cat as a means 
of transportation, but they at least represent the hope of moving forward, unlike Jack and 
the ghosts of the Overlook.

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Works Cited 

Bergland, Renée L. “Indian Ghosts and American Subjects.” Introduction. The	National	
Uncanny:	Indian	Ghosts	and	American	Subjects. Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College, 
2000. 1-22. Print.

Blakemore, Bill. “Kubrick’s ‘Shining’ Secret: Film’s Hidden Horror Is The Murder Of 
The Indian.” Washington	Post 12 July 1987, Entertainment sec.: F1+. Print.

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