After nearly half a century, investigators and archivists have finally found the original photo used for the haunting final shot of The Shining. The 1980 movie ends with an old black-and-white photo of a dance hall full of people, with the main character Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) among them, implying that he has joined the spirits trapped within the Overlook Hotel. This picture wasn’t taken on set, but was licensed from a photo library and edited to add Nicholson. Incredibly, the original photo has never been found or identified — until this weekend, as Getty Images proudly announced. This lays to rest several popular fan theories that the picture was edited with subtle subliminal messaging.
The effort to finally find this photo was spearheaded by Aric Toler, a reporter for The New York Times. He tracked down old licensing agreements from the film and traced them back to the pre-digital photo archive where this photo came from. His full description of the process is fascinating on its own, giving a sense of enormous work archivists and librarians carry out, and everything that can go wrong in the process.
The end result is the definitive original photo from the end of The Shining, re-developed from the negative to ensure that it is unaltered. It confirms that Nicholson was composited into the photo in the place of famous jazz dance instructor Santos Casani. No other changes were made, so the long-standing fan theories that the group shot was carefully curated have now been disproven. For years, there have been rumors that celebrities, politicians, and other public figures were subtlely added to this picture. Some even suggested that there were obscure murderers and even suspected witches and devil-worshippers pasted in for dramatic effect.
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Instead, the photo was taken in the Royal Palace Hotel’s Empress Ballroom in London, England on February 14th, 1921. That night, Casani was among those organizing and leading a Valentie’s Day dance. Casani was a big part of the reason this photo was so hard to track down — the dancer had just recently changed his name before it was taken, and the photographer had not cross-referenced it with his previous name, John Golman.
In a way, this discovery may be disappointing to some fans, who love the idea of hidden messages within The Shining. The movie is infamous for the conspiracy theories that surround it. Many of these were explored in a 2012 documentary called Room 237, which is currently streaming on Shudder, AMC+, Pluto TV, and Philo for those interested. At the time of this writing, The Shining itself is not on any subscription-based streamers, but it is available to rent or purchase digitally on PVOD stores.
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