It kind of does leave it ambiguous mostly.
Just because I'm not on THEIR side, doesn't mean I'm on YOURS.

That would defeat the purpose of the movie:
HALLORAN
places are like people, some shine and some don't. I guess you could say the Overlook Hotel here has something about it that's like shining.
DANNY
Is there something bad here?
HALLORAN
Well, you know Doc, when something happens it can leave a trace of itself behind say like if someone burns toast. Well, maybe things that happened leave other kinds of traces behind. Not things that anyone can notice, but things that people who shine can see. Just like they can see things that haven't happened yet. Well, sometimes they can see things that happened a long time ago I think a lot of things happened right here in this particular hotel - over the years, and not all of them was good.

that would not have fixed things, story just doesnt make sense

No. We have enough of those types of movies. It would also kill the entire idea of the Shining, because we'd assume Danny's psychic abilities were also coincidence. Whole movie then means nothing.
Sometimes ambiguity works great, but it can't be in every ending. Otherwise the effect is minimized and becomes expected.

arahman

Yeah, you can use Lacan to try and make pretty much every horror movie sound great.

The problem is that such an alternative (Are the spectres 'real' or is Jack making it all up?) is a fake choice, a false dichotomy, for it is neither of these, but something else entirely. Such pseudo-interpretations are ultimately a form of denial, are escapist, avoid actually addressing what is going on They just reduce the film to either another simple, cartoon-like Hollywood supernaturalist story that retreats into mere superstition or into an equally superstitious psychological solipsism that posits the individual and his mind as the source of everything.
It isn't that the ghosts, the spectres are 'real', but that they are
spectral apparitions
, are fantasmatic. They
cover over
the Real, the abyss or void of the real, conceal it, making them fantasies of what the real is: the fantasmatic-real. This is what makes them frightening, horrific, dangerous, and traumatic It is Jack Torrance who now equates these spectres with reality itself, who can no longer distinguish between fantasies and ordinary empirical reality. Jack has paranoically short-circuited his fantasies, the Overlook's revenants, into reality, and such a pathological condition has driven him psychotic, leading him to directly act out his murderous fantasies in reality itself, with tragic consequences.
The spectres are not 'real' (whether empirical or 'supernatural'), but fantasmatic-real, and arguing along these lines is to be as confused as the Torrances themselves are, driven into an emotive hysteria and paranoid delirium, as always happens when fantasies collapse into reality, are equated with them: reality itself disintegrates.
If the spectres were empirical/real there would be nothing to interpret in the film; it would simply collapse into its potential meaning, its fantasmatic meaning: Jack - and others - are having these unhinged fantasies of communing with spectral revenants in the spaces of the mysterious Overlook Hotel and subsequently we desire to conclude that he isn't fantasizing, that it's 'really' true, it's really happening, it's factual, actual. This is the collapse of all interpretation, something that the film comprehensively resists doing.
Neither can the spectres be reduced or simplified down to mere 'mental projections' originating in Jack's increasingly disturbed and supposed 'mind'. Such interpretations are pseudo-psychology, folk psychology, for they completely ignore and deny all reality, ignore the external world, present and past, falsely imagining that all mental constructions (ideas, concepts, fictions and fantasies) originate from some precious interiority, from some inner essence, and regress into an infantile solipsism (equating mind with world). Such ego-centric empiricism, such a reduction to ego psychology, fails to address the question: how did the spectres
get into Jack's mind
in the first place? Where did 'they' (favourite word of all conspiracy theorists and fantasists) come from? And what do 'they' really want? And why do humans fantasize in the first place? What role - libidinal, existential, ontological - do fantasies - including the conjuring or emerging of spectral apparitions - serve?
To address these questions requires looking elsewhere, including examining both history and the external world (not just physical/environmental, but also cultural, social, political, economic, sexual, etc), including, in the context of the film's (and/or novel) reality, of its diegesis, its fictional world, both the Torrances' past and present AND the Overlook's past and present (and what it represents), and above all how the two inter-relate, inter-connect, and influence each other.

"When in fact the Hotel has been shifting and swapping and time warping the whole time"
Agreed. I am surprised more people do not spot this.

But it's ironic that most viewers' perspective change with this sceneas though it is definitive proof that a ghost physically lets Jack out.
When in fact the Hotel has been shifting and swapping and time warping the whole time.
Buy The Ticket, Take The Ride

For the first half of the film. It is up to Interpretation if the ghosts are real or if it is all in Jack's head. It is only When Grady opens the door and lets jack out. When there is no other explanation and the Ghosts are really there.
Yes, when Jack appears with the axe at the door, then the question becomes "how did he get out of the locked room".

I completely disagree with this.
Because in 2016 we've all seen SO MANY films that resort to the events "were all in the character's head" that people can't even believe what a film shows them. Everything is "imaginary."
It's really irritating and I would surmise that Kubrick would have agreed, had he witnessed how some people today understand his horror film. He didn't go to all of this effort and detail just to show an alcoholic's withdrawal hallucinations.
They were all there living at the hotel.
Jack would have killed Danny and Wendy, then probably himself.
We see The Overlook's new frightening power once Dick has been "welcomed."
The idea of being trapped inside of this film with the characters and the actual ghosts is what makes it such a great film.
And watching Jack getting reprogrammed by the hotel when he's staring blankly out of the window explains it all. This is where King is frankly, nuts. Kubrick even showed us the hotel's influence right there on Jack's crumbling sanity!
100% agree with everything you mention and that's they way I feel and experience the movie when I see it.
I can't believe I didn't watch this film for over 10yrs and now upon rediscovering it, I am in awe of the many creepy layers Kubrick embedded in the movie.
Horror Masterpiece! I also watched The Exorcist and I have to say in my opinion The Shinning is a more gratifying horror and scary experience. I do love the opening sequence in Iraq in the exorcist and kind of wished that part of the story expanded.

I completely disagree with this.
Because in 2016 we've all seen SO MANY films that resort to the events "were all in the character's head" that people can't even believe what a film shows them. Everything is "imaginary."
It's really irritating and I would surmise that Kubrick would have agreed, had he witnessed how some people today understand his horror film. He didn't go to all of this effort and detail just to show an alcoholic's withdrawal hallucinations.
They were all there living at the hotel.
Jack would have killed Danny and Wendy, then probably himself.
We see The Overlook's new frightening power once Dick has been "welcomed."
The idea of being trapped inside of this film with the characters and the actual ghosts is what makes it such a great film.
And watching Jack getting reprogrammed by the hotel when he's staring blankly out of the window explains it all. This is where King is frankly, nuts. Kubrick even showed us the hotel's influence right there on Jack's crumbling sanity!
"Jack was too crazy from the beginning."
No. That was King. He wrote Jack's chracter as having a violent physical past, so blame the author for creating a VERY confusing character. Most people feel sympathy for the victims. King invented a father who deserves no sympathy and deserved to die. Not a misunderstood, tragic "hero."
Go beat-up one of your own students/employees out of rage and see how many people then believe YOUR story, over the victim's that you attacked. The premise of the novel is actually rather ludicrous, and totally steered by King's alcoholic "unfairness" drivel.
Why do so many sympathize with Jack from the novel? Look at Alex DeLarge from Kubrick's film A CLOCKWORK ORANGE. Alex is a reprehensible serial rapist and murderer that we feel empathy for, because he's telling us his story.
But we really should not feel bad for a violent character. Also, Kubrick wanted to tell a much more realistic tale of a dysfunctional family. And Stanley had already made a film about a "tragic main character who is misunderstood for his actions" with ACO, so why make another film with the same perspective?
Just to please those silly King fanboys who will never give this film a fair shot?
_
Kubrick's film -
will always be the definitive version of
The Shining.

For the first half of the film. It is up to Interpretation if the ghosts are real or if it is all in Jack's head. It is only When Grady opens the door and lets jack out. When there is no other explanation and the Ghosts are really there.
Agree here, once that door is open, is clear that the ghost are real and once Halloran gets killed and the violence begins, they start manifesting themselves stronger.

For the first half of the film. It is up to Interpretation if the ghosts are real or if it is all in Jack's head. It is only When Grady opens the door and lets jack out. When there is no other explanation and the Ghosts are really there.

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