Case in point: when the head chef arrives he’s pretty gruesomely butchered by Jack with an ax in the lobby. This was another notable divergence from King’s novel -– which sees Hallorann survive and help to raise Danny alongside a recovering Wendy. In an interview for Scraps from the Loft, actor and musician Crothers went into detail about his confusion over why Kubrick changed the ending.

“I like the film. I just wish that they had kept the original ending. The strange thing is that even Stanley’s screenplay has Hallorann saving them. In fact, when I first arrived in London … Jack Nicholson introduced me to his friends and said, ‘My man’s the hero of the movie.’ I just don’t understand what happened. Kubrick shot things all kinds of ways, but he never shot a version of the ending like in his script or the book. I still don’t know why Stanley changed the story. I never asked him why he did it. I just wanted to do my job.”

Unfortunately for Hallorann, Kubrick didn’t think the novel’s ending fit the movie he was making. For one, it ends with the hotel blowing up, which struck him as far too cliche. But he also thought someone needed to die besides Jack –- and at one point even considered Danny being that victim. “In the book, nobody gets killed except Jack,” explained screenwriter Diane Johnson to Entertainment Weekly. “And Kubrick really thought somebody should get killed — because it was a horror movie.” If someone needed to get literally axed, part of me feels morbidly glad it was someone other than Danny or Wendy, though it never gets easier seeing the kindly head chef get redrumed.