Is The Shining Scary? The Verdict and the Whole Plot

A job offer with a footnote

Jack Torrance takes a job minding the Overlook Hotel, a remote building in the Colorado Rocky Mountains that closes for the winter. When he arrives, the manager, Stuart Ullman, mentions that an earlier caretaker, Charles Grady, killed his wife, his two small daughters and himself there ten years before. Back in Boulder, Danny has a premonition and a seizure, and his mother, Wendy, tells the doctor that Jack once dislocated Danny's shoulder while drunk and angry, and hasn't had a drink since. Before the hotel closes for the season, the head chef, Dick Hallorann, tells Danny they share a telepathic gift that his grandmother called 'shining'. He adds that the hotel shines too, because of its unpleasant past, and tells Danny to stay out of Room 237.

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Room 237 and the ballroom bar

A month in, Danny starts seeing the murdered Grady sisters, while Jack stalls on his writing, loses his temper and dreams about killing his family. Unseen forces lure Danny into Room 237, and Wendy finds him hurt and blames Jack. This is the scene people ask about: Jack goes to look, meets a hideous female ghost in the bathroom, and tells Wendy he saw nothing. It comes before the ghostly party in the ballroom and long before the axe. Meanwhile a ghostly bartender named Lloyd gets Jack drinking again in the empty ballroom. When Jack comes back, the ballroom is full of ghostly guests, including a waiter, Delbert Grady, who tells him to 'correct' his wife and child. Danny, in a trance, reaches Hallorann by telepathy.

All work and a baseball bat

Wendy finds Jack's manuscript and discovers it contains a single proverb about work, play and a dull boy named Jack, typed over and over. When Jack threatens her, she hits him with a baseball bat until he is out cold and shuts him in the kitchen pantry. They can't leave, because Jack had already wrecked the radio and the snowcat, and the snow has trapped them. Danny starts murmuring 'red rum', getting louder each time, and then writes it on the bathroom door using lipstick. In the mirror, Wendy sees it reversed, realizes it spells murder backward, and panics.

A hedge maze in the snow

Grady lets Jack out of the pantry, and Jack takes an axe and hunts for Wendy and Danny. Wendy shelters in the bathroom and jabs a knife at Jack as he breaks at the door, and Danny climbs out through the window. Hallorann flies back from Florida and reaches the hotel in a snowcat, and Jack ambushes him and kills him with the axe. Jack then chases Danny into the big hedge maze behind the hotel. Wendy searches the hotel for Danny and meets ghosts, Hallorann's bloody body, and a flood of blood pouring out of an elevator, much like Danny's premonition. Danny, meanwhile, is working out how to lose his father in the snow.