Jack (Jack Nicholson)’s Timeline and Summary
- Jack heads up to the Overlook Hotel for his first job interview with Stuart Ullman. The interview goes pretty well… except Jack finds out that one of the last guys to hold his job at the hotel went nuts and murdered his family.
- The next time we see Jack, he's returning to the hotel with his family in the car. He already seems like he's getting short with his wife and son.
- Now at the hotel, Jack gets showed around the grounds by Stuart Ullman while his wife and son hang out with Dick Hallorann, the hotel's cook.
- Now that he's settled, Jack gets down to writing. The problem is that he doesn't have any good ideas. So he spends a lot of time throwing a ball against the wall. Whenever his wife Wendy asks him about it, he snaps at her. But he also says he loves living at the hotel.
- As time goes by, Jack starts making some strange faces whenever his wife and son aren't around. We catch him several times staring out a window with a glazed look on his face.
- One day, Wendy rushes into Jack's writing room to hear him screaming in his sleep. He wakes up and says he had a horrible nightmare that he killed Wendy and his son Danny.
- As time goes by, Jack feels more distant from his wife and son. One day, Wendy finds bruises on Danny's neck and blames Jack for abusing him. She runs off with Danny and Jack heads down to the hotel bar.
- A ghostly bartender shows up and Jack tells him that he'd never do anything to hurt his son. Then he asks for a few drinks that may or may not be just in his mind.
- Wendy comes running and tells Jack that there's some crazy woman running around the hotel. Apparently, this same woman is the one who hurt Danny in room 237.
- Jack goes to check out room 237 and has a crazy experience with the same old woman. But he lies and tells Wendy that there's nothing in the room.
- Jack heads back to the hotel bar and finds a huge 1920's-style party going on. He acts like he fits right in and runs into a waiter named Grady.
- In fact, the waiter turns out to be Delbert Grady, the former caretaker of the Overlook Hotel who killed his family.
- Grady tells Jack that his family is disobeying him and that he'll have to correct them the way Grady corrected his family (psssst, he's talking about murder). So yeah, now Jack thinks he should kill his family.
- Later on, Wendy goes into Jack's writing room and checks out his typewriter to find that he has written "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy" hundreds of thousands of times.
- Jack walks in and menaces her. But she knocks him out with a bat and locks him in the food storage closet.
- Jack has a chat with the ghost of Delbert Grady through the door of the food closet. Delbert lets him out somehow and Jack grabs an axe to bust into his family's apartment. Just as he's about to get to his wife Wendy though, he hears someone approaching the hotel in a snowcat machine. He runs off for the hotel lobby and kills Mr. Hallorann with his axe.
- When he kills Hallorann, Jack hears his son Danny screaming from nearby. He finds Danny and chases him out into a snowstorm.
- He follows Danny's tracks into the hedge maze, but Danny erases his tracks and tricks Jack into getting lost.
- While Wendy and Danny escape in the snowcat, Jack sits down and freezes to death.
- In the movie's final shot, we see Jack appearing in one of the hotel's photos from 1921. It's super creepy and it makes it seem as if Jack's been a ghost all along.