The mysterious photo at the end of The Shining was real and now we know where it came from

Even after decades of critique and acclaim, the Stanley Kubrick horror masterpiece movie, The Shining, is still creating mystery, intrigue, and surprises. But New York Times reporter Aric Toler wanted to know the answer to one specific question: Where did the photo from the final scene originally come from?

At the end of the film, Jack Torrence (Jack Nicholson) is seen in a group photo at a fancy party taken in the Overlook Hotel, proving that he never “left.” While fans have tried to recreate the photo and have visited the Stanley Hotel, the shooting location of the fictional Overlook Hotel, the picture in the film wasn’t from their photo archive. However, it was confirmed that it was a real original photo that had Jack Nicholson edited and pasted in. With the help of retired British academic researcher, Alasdair Spark, Aric finally found the original photo after a year of investigation.

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Upon seeing the original photo, Spark noted that the person that was in Jack Nicholson’s position in the picture was Santos Casani, a famous jazz dance instructor in the United Kingdom in the 1920s. That narrowed it down slightly, with Toler and Spark looking through various newspaper archives from London during the early 1920s. After looking through thousands of pictures and pages of material, they stumbled upon the BBC Hulton Archive, which was purchased by Getty's Images. They found the picture.

After consulting with Murray Close, a photographer that worked during filming of The Shining, Toler and Spark confirmed that this was the original photograph that was used in the film and were able to track down the source. The picture was indeed taken in 1921 at the Empress Ballroom in the Royal Palace Hotel in London. The event was a Valentine’s Day dance on February 15, 1921 that was filled to the brim with partiers. Forty-five years after the movie debuted, the mystery had been solved.

This isn’t the first time a film fan has tackled a mystery involving The Shining. Hardcore fans of the film go way past general fandoms analyzing the film and sometimes into conspiracy theories. There are even documentaries made about the movie, its creation, and possible hidden messages within it. Some of these are fun little Easter eggs and others are theories such as the Overlook Hotel actually being Hell or a CIA experiment.

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However, some of these theories get way out there, such as the fan theory that The Shining was director Stanley Kubrick’s way of confessing that he helped fake the moon landing. That theory got so far out of hand that Stanley Kubrick’s daughter, Vivian Kubrick, went to social media to thoroughly deny and debunk the claim that her father would be able to pull off such an elaborate hoax. For the record, the moon landing did indeed happen.

It will be interesting to see if this 45-year-old film continues to inspire and cause commotion in the next generation and beyond. Perhaps there will be new theories, new revelations, and new debunkings by the time the film reaches a century old. In any case, it’s considered a must-watch for any fan of movies and film criticism, so it might be worth a rewatch at home, in a revival theater, or on streaming services.