Characters / The Shining

aka: Doctor Sleep

This is the character page for The Shining, encompassing its adaptations, and its sequel Doctor Sleep.

The Torrance Family

Danny

Daniel Anthony "Danny" Torrance

Played by: Danny Lloyd (1980 film); Courtland Mead (child) and Wil Horneff (adult) (1997 miniseries); Roger Dale Floyd (child) and Ewan McGregor (adult) (Doctor Sleep)

Dubbed by: Jackie Berger (European French, 1980 film)

"Do you really want to go and live in that hotel for the winter?"

A five-year old boy and the only child of Jack and Wendy Torrance. Danny is a "Shiner", a person with psychic abilities, and one of the strongest born in recent memory, with access to telepathic and clairvoyant powers that have only begun to grow. However, because of his youth, Danny has difficulties controlling his abilities, and though he doesn't know it yet, he comes with some very dangerous drawbacks...

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• Adorably Precocious Child: In the beginning of the novel, he is described as extraordinary and quite self reliant for a five-year-old.
• Adaptational Attractiveness: A relatively minor case. As an adult, Dan is described in Doctor Sleep as being attractive, but rough and hard-worn. In the film adaptation, he's played by the supremely gentlemanly Ewan McGregor.
• Affectionate Nickname: Danny's parents call him "Doc" sometimes.
• The Alcoholic: Like father, like son. Dan spirals headlong into alcoholism in the years following his time at the Overlook, with Doctor Sleep following his efforts to stay sober.
• Almighty Janitor: Dan becomes an Almighty Orderly, specifically, in his older years, using his telepathic powers to soothe dying hospice patients in their final moments and help them die peacefully.
• And Your Reward Is Infancy: He turns back into a child when he dies in the second movie and has a Ghost Reunion Ending with his mother. He's later seen as an adult talking to Abra.
• The Atoner: Dan spends Doctor Sleep trying to atone for his "bottom" as an alcoholic: stealing all of a single mother's money and knowingly leaving her and her toddler to fend for themselves in an abusive household.
• Author Avatar: Word of God is that he was a stand-in for King's own attitude towards his father as a child. It's also evident in Doctor Sleep, where Danny is a recovering alcoholic much like King himself.
• Badass Adorable: In The Shining, where he is an innocent little boy who is gifted in what is referred to as the Shine.
• Beard of Sorrow: Wears one of these in the sequel before the eight-year Time Skip in which he regains his sobriety.
• Blessed with Suck: Is gifted with the Shining but while he can do neat tricks with it in the sequel, the experience at the Overlook and the fact that he could perceive his mother's impending death as a swarm of flies covering her face means that he's mostly has had bad experiences because of it.
• Break the Cutie: Undergoes immense trauma because of the Overlook, and eventually slides into alcoholism and drug abuse as an adult as a way to forget. The movie version actually has it even worse, as not only does he suffer through the Overlooks horror, he's also forced to psychically witness Halloran's death at Jack's hands, and thus, also doesn't have Halloran's support in the aftermath, which let the novel version regain some semblance of a normal life. As a result, movie Danny is so traumatized by his experiences that he regresses mentally and stops talking. It's not until he's visited by Hallorans spirit, who shows him how to seal away the ghosts of the Overlook when they begin haunting him, that he begins to heal a little. On the plus side, his experiences inspired him to mute his Shining enough that he was undetected by the True Knot and spared a potentially gruesome death in his youth; this allowed him to work with Abra and help slay members of the True Knot without them knowing positively of his existence, until the end when he confronts Rose.
• Character Development: He goes through quite a bit over the duology. He goes from an innocent and sweet if mature child to a bitter alcoholic like his father, and Doctor Sleep chronicles him gradually regaining his compassion and controlling his addiction.
• Character Tics: In the films, he's prone to sucking his thumb as a child. He later does this as an adult when he's in the Overlook again.
• Children Are Innocent: Despite his great powers, Danny is too young to make sense of most of what he sees, such as adults lusting after each other.
• Compelling Voice: The title Doctor Sleep shows Dan being called "Doc", and working in hospice care. He helps patients pass on, by telling them to go to sleep. "Doctor Sleep."
• Constantly Curious: He's always asking questions about the world around him as a child and invested in learning.
• Contrasting Sequel Main Character: He serves as one to Jack in the films. Jack is a cruel, bitter man who very quickly begins slipping into madness, and he embraces his role as the Overlook's henchman. Danny has a violent temper, but he's gentle and soft-spoken. Where Jack fell off the wagon and refused to take responsibility for his actions, Danny accepts his mistakes as his own and stays on the wagon his whole life.
• Cool Uncle: To Abra, when it is revealed Jack is her real grandfather. He's not in the movie, but Abra calls him 'Uncle Dan' so they can keep meeting each other in order to protect each other and fight the True Knot.
• Daddy's Girl: Gender-inverted. Danny's much closer to Jack than Wendy as a child, something Wendy is envious of, much to her own horror.
• Death by Adaptation: Is killed in a boiler explosion in the second movie when he survives the book.
• Decomposite Character: He takes on the sympathetic traits of the literary Jack in the film adaptation of Doctor Sleep that were excised in the prior film. He's a recovering alcoholic struggling not to become like his abusive father, and he winds up possessed by the Overlook, only to ultimately die in a Heroic Sacrifice destroying it.
• Delusions of Parental Love: Downplayed. Jack does love Danny, but he's also a deeply flawed parent and violent towards his son in the right circumstances even before he steps foot in the Overlook. Danny has a much rosier view of his father than the reality thanks to his close relationship to him, and thinks the world of him.
• Demonic Possession: In the film adaptation of Doctor Sleep, the Overlook itself possesses him and uses him to try to murder Abra. Danny thought ahead and turned on the Overlook's boiler to set it ablaze; he uses his last moments to stop the hotel from saving itself.
• The Determinator: Despite all he endures and being seriously tempted, he never breaks his sobriety.
• Dirty Mind-Reading: A Running Gag in The Shining is Danny reading people's thoughts about sex and being completely oblivious to - albeit confused by - it, being a mere five year-old. Halloran gets a kick out of it.
• Earn Your Happy Ending: In the Doctor Sleep novel, he's able to make peace with the demons of his past, and ends the book celebrating both his 15 years of sobriety and Abra's 15th birthday, having been accepted by the Stones as a member of the family.
• Easily Forgiven: He forgives Jack for breaking his arm, worrying more about the possibility of his parents divorcing than his own well-being.
• The Empath: He can read people's minds at will, and even when not trying can pick up the emotions or strong thoughts going on through their minds.
• Entendre Failure: Early on in the novel, he notices a female hotel guest watching a bellhop and thinking she'd "like to get into his pants." Danny, oblivious to the entendre or to what sex even is, can't understand why she doesn't just get some pants of her own to wear instead of taking his.
• Even Bad Men Love Their Mamas: He's not a villain but Dan is undeniably a seriously troubled man with Jack's same issues. However, he dearly loved his mother, especially after the two survived Jack's rampage, and her death is heavily implied to have played a major role in his decline.
• Excellent Judge of Character: As a child, he's quite good at judging people's character thanks to his shine. For example, he's repelled by Ullman, but instantly clicks with Halloran. He's able to sense that Jack is emotionally disturbed, but he loves his father too much to seriously question him until Jack starts going insane.
• Fainting Seer: His visions occasionally overwhelm him, much to the concern of his parents.
• Freudian Excuse: Given all he went through, it's hardly surprising he grew up to be a seriously troubled man.
• From the Mouths of Babes: Five-year-old Danny's precognitive and telepathic abilities sometimes lead him to learn about adult concepts he "overhears" but doesn't understand. In one early example, he overhears an older woman thinking about how she'd like to get into the bellboy's pants, but takes it literally, believing that the woman is cold and would rather be wearing a nice warm pair of trousers. Danny repeats this to Halloran, who laughs and says that Danny is going to know all about the human condition before he's ten.
• Hair-Trigger Temper: In his later years, Dan's temper is just as bad as his father's, if not worse. Unlike Jack, he's actually been in trouble with the law for it.
• Harmful to Minors: Thanks to his Shining, Danny is able to perceive his parents' growing desire to divorce each other. When he probes into Jack's consciousness, he's forced to experience his father's suicidal ideation, which he doesn't understand but deeply traumatizes him.
• He Cleans Up Nicely: Starts out with a very rough appearance due to his alcoholism and violent brawls and looks considerably better and more dashing after the eight year jump ahead.
• The Hero Dies: In the Doctor Sleep movie, the main protagonist of the Shining duology bites it at the end of the film.
• Heroic Sacrifice: In the Doctor Sleep movie, he blows up the Overlook with him inside it to destroy the spirits inhabiting it.
• I Am Not My Father: Dan takes pains in his later years to differentiate himself from Jack. This is perhaps best encapsulated by what he screams into Rose's head when she tries to telepathically force him to strangle Abra.
  Rose: Your father knew how to deal with stupid, disobedient women, and his father before him. Sometimes a woman just needs to take her medicine. She needs—
  Dan: MY FATHER KNEW NOTHING!
• I See Dead People: He has the power to see ghosts—both the incredibly malicious, lingering spirits kind and the kind that are echoes of past events.
• Innocent Inaccurate: Throughout the original novel, Danny mistakes very adult thoughts for something perfectly innocent or fails to comprehend what they mean. It's Played for Laughs at some points, such as when he accidentally hears an elderly female hotel guest thinking about how she'd like to 'get into [the] pants' of a young, attractive male bellhop, and he wonders why she'd want his pants rather than getting her own. It's Played for Drama much more, such as when he winds up terrified of divorce because he believes it's his own fault, not realizing his parents are considering it because Jack broke Danny's arm, which Danny assumed was justified.
• Innocent Swearing: Early on in the novel, Danny obliviously repeats what Jack said while cursing out the family's shitty car.
  Danny: Do you think the bug will break down?
  Wendy: No, I don't think so.
  Danny: Dad said it might. He said the fuel pump was all shot to shit.
  Wendy: Don't say that, Danny.
  Danny: [surprised] Fuel pump?
• Informed Attribute: In the Kubrick film, he actually almost never gets called "Doc" by his parents beyond the scene with Wendy and Halloran about the matter, unlike other versions where they actually do. It appears this bit is only present in the film to give something that would establish Danny and Halloran's Shining connection.
• It's All My Fault:
  • He blames himself for kickstarting Wendy and Jack's marital strife after Jack broke his arm. Being a child, he's unaware that his beloved father was abusing him - or that the issues between the two was building for a long time.
  • In stark contrast with his father, as an adult and sober Dan is far more willing to accept personal responsibility for his actions and their consequences.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: As an adult, Dan is rough around the edges, possessed of a vile temper, and haunted by some fairly foul things he did as an alcoholic, but is nevertheless just as empathetic and compassionate as he was in his childhood.
• Kid Hero: He's a five year-old in The Shining and finds himself battling against the Overlook itself and the spirits within its walls. It's also deconstructed, as being a child, Danny can't really do much to stop the ghosts and winds up horribly traumatized by the end. Doctor Sleep reveals he grew up to become a violent, PTSD-ridden alcoholic, much like Jack.
• Kid Hero All Grown-Up: Doctor Sleep centers around Danny as an adult, having grown up a deeply troubled man because of his experiences and struggling with his own alcoholism and propensity for violence.
• Like Father, Unlike Son: While he inherits some of Jack's flaws, Danny stands apart from him by genuinely taking responsibility and trying to get better and maintaining his sobriety as well as showing sincere kindness and selflessness that Jack never did.
• Mama's Boy: In the films, Danny is much closer to Wendy than Jack. However, Wendy's trauma at Jack's hands leads to her having trouble looking Danny in the eye without thinking of his abusive father. This forced Dan to use his power on Wendy to help her cope and watched helplessly as she died slowly to lung cancer. When he dies at the climax of Doctor Sleep, he sees a vision of Wendy lovingly embracing him.
• The Mentor: He serves as this to Abra, teaching her the ropes of the shining.
• Mentor Occupational Hazard: In the films, Danny dies when the Overlook explodes. However, like Halloran, he continues to mentor Abra from beyond the grave.
• A Mind Is A Terrible Place To Read: Danny's telepathy causes him a lot of trouble as a child. He's able to tell his parents are considering a divorce, and when he accidentally probes too far into Jack's mind he's left traumatized by Jack's suicidal ideation.
• Mr. Vice Guy: In Doctor Sleep. Danny struggles with anger issues and alcoholism, but he's still a deeply heroic and compassionate man.
• Never Got to Say Goodbye: He eventually lost contact with Halloran as he grew up and succumbed to alcoholism. By the time he looks him up in Doctor Sleep, hoping that Halloran might still be alive, he finds out that the old man died in 1999, invoking this trope.
• Nice Guy: As a child, Danny was a remarkably sweet and mature child, though he was unusually somber for a five year-old. The trauma he goes through results in him growing up to be significantly more maladjusted as an adult.
• Nice Mean And In Between: He's the in-between to Jack's mean and Wendy's nice. Danny is a generally nice kid who's a bit of a brat, but no more than any other five-year old. It's more evident in Doctor Sleep, where he struggles with a violent temper and alcoholism, but still has a much stronger moral compass than Jack ever did.
• Nighttime Bathroom Phobia: At the beginning of the book, Danny is still terrified of what he experienced at the Overlook, and refuses to use the bathroom at night because he sees Mrs. Massey in the bathtub and is scared she will hurt him.
• Only Friend: Becomes this for Abra in the film version of the sequel since kids her own age shun her because they think she's weird (she’s shown to have friends she spends time with in the book). Plus, he's the only other person she's met who has the same psychic abilities she does.
• Oracular Urchin: He's able to predict the future thanks to his shining. Halloran clarifies he can only see possible futures, and some visions he experiences won't come to pass. Danny's oracular visions also occasionally leave out details; his vision of the climax of the original novel leaves out that the monster pursuing him is his beloved father Jack.
• Psychic Powers: Danny has an Imaginary Friend named Tony (in the novel its eventually revealed that Tony is just a secondary personality Danny subconsciously created to help deal with his powers) who shows him visions of the future. He's also telepathic and can read minds, though mostly feelings and loud thoughts.
• Psychic Children: Danny has some very strong psychic abilities, at least by the standards of his universe. He has a limited ability to read the minds of those he is close to, an even-more-limited form of precognition, and a special vulnerability to haunted locales such as the Overlook.
• Recovered Addict: He achieves eight years of sobriety and unlike Jack, he doesn't fall off the wagon when tempted.
• Shrinking Violet: In the films, Danny is quite shy and withdrawn. Even as an adult, he's quite timid and soft-spoken when he's sober. However, he gradually becomes more outgoing as he builds up a support system and joins AA.
• Spanner in the Works: The True Knot is well aware of Abra and the sheer strength of her abilities, with Rose in particular considering her something of an Arch-Enemy due to the number of times Abra defeats and humiliates her. However, none of them know a damn thing about Danny Torrance, to the point that they aren't even aware he exists. This allows Danny to wipe out the entire clan in one fell swoop, and he unleashes the ghosts of the Overlook Hotel from his mind to finish off Rose once and for all. Rose even lampshades this trope near the end of the movie.
  Rose: How the hell did we miss you?!
• Spirit Advisor: At the end of the second movie, he advises Abra to use her abilities rather than hiding them.
• Split-Personality Takeover: One choice point in the movie where it seems like Tony has overtaken Danny, with him saying that Danny's gone away to Wendy, as well as Tony/Danny's chanting of "redrum" as he draws the word on the door.
• Still Sucks Thumb: We see him doing this in the sequel after getting scared by ghosts.
• The Stoic: In the film, Danny rarely expresses emotions and is utterly stone-faced for the most part. The only feeling he definitively displays is fear, mainly of the ghosts haunting the Overlook. He's quite stoic as an adult as well, but he becomes more emotive as he builds up a support system.
• Student–Master Team: With Abra.
• Summon Bigger Fish: In the Doctor Sleep film, his plan to defeat Rose the Hat is to lure her to the Overlook Hotel, wherein he unleashes all of the spirits he's sealed up over the years to devour her.
• Talking to Themself: "Tony" is an aspect of Danny's personality with whom he converses.
• Telepathy: His shining allows him to read other people's minds, often without even trying to.
• Wise Beyond Their Years: Is far more mature and solemn than you'd expect a 5-year old to be. Perhaps justified because of his Psychic Powers.

Jack

John Daniel "Jack" Torrance

"All work and no play make Jack a dull boy."

"So tell me, pup... Are you gonna take your medicine?"

Played by: Jack Nicholson (1980 film), Steven Weber (1997 miniseries), and Henry Thomas (Doctor Sleep)

Dubbed by: Jean-Louis Trintignant (European French, The Shining)

"Here's Johnny!"

An aspiring writer who's career has stalled because of his anger issues and his alcoholism, Jack Torrance is torn between the love of his family, and the resentment he feels against them, which he's been trying to bury rather than deal with. One fall, he accepts the job as caretaker at the legendary Overlook Hotel in Colorado, hoping to use the winter isolation to focus on his writing...

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• Abuse Mistake: After Danny is strangled by Mrs. Massey, Wendy initially believes Jack did it. Although she quickly realizes her mistake, this winds up driving Jack further under the Overlook's influence and cements its hold on him.
• Abusive Parents:
  • Jack broke Danny's arm in a drunken rage before the action of the story starts. Though the narrative makes it clear that Jack feels tremendous remorse for injuring Danny, it's also slowly and subtly implied over the course of The Shining that breaking his son's arm was exactly what Jack intended to do.
  • Jack's own father was a drunken, abusive monster who beat his family mercilessly, often for no reason.
• Adaptational Angst Downgrade: In the novels, Jack was raised by an abusive father who regulary beat his wife and children. He also struggles against the Overlook's influence and repeatedly tries to fight it. In the film, his backstory is excised and most of his inner turmoil is downplayed so he comes off as a willing accomplice to the Overlook rather than a tragic victim.
• Adaptation Personality Change: In the films, Jack is cruel and abrasive from the start, whereas in the novel he only starts behaving this way under the Overlook's influence. He also lacks the authority issues that were one of his literary counterpart's biggest flaws, and his Never My Fault tendencies are exaggerated.
• Adaptation Relationship Overhaul: In the novel, Jack is for all his flaws a loving family man, and he's consistently warm to both Wendy and Danny. Danny is also much closer to him than Wendy, much to her jealousy. In the film, he can barely stand Wendy and is much frostier with Danny, who prefers his mother's company.
• Adaptational Dumbass: In the novel, Jack is a legitimately competent writer and his short stories were good enough to get him a teaching job. He goes into the Overlook intending to write a play he already has outlined, which he abandons as he undergoes Sanity Slippage. In the film, the implication is he's a terrible writer. Jack comes in with no set idea and admits he can't come up with a single good one. His manuscript - which he spends days on end working on - is just endless repetitions of "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy", indicating he never managed to come up with a workable idea.
• Adaptational Heroism: The final time we see Jack break free of the Overlook in the novel is him telling Danny to get out as fast as he can, and the boiler explodes (along with the hotel) not long after. In the miniseries, Jack is able to maintain control long enough to deliberately cause the boiler to explode, destroying the Overlook and himself in a Heroic Sacrifice. Something similar happens in the operatic adaptation where after the hotel reproaches Jack for not killing Danny and warning him that the boiler would explode, Jack maintains control long enough to enable his wife and son to escape and allows the boiler to explode, thus redeeming himself by dying in a Heroic Sacrifice.
• Adaptational Nice Guy: Downplayed. The film as a whole makes Jack a more unsympathetic character, but it leaves out his brutal assault of George Hatfield. As a result, the film leaves out the implications Jack's violent streak is ingrained in him, and instead depicts it as a result of his alcoholism. His attempt to ruin the Overlook's reputation with a smear piece to spite Ullman and his lack of regard for its effect on the ever-loyal Al is also cut out, and he seems genuinely grateful to the hotel for getting him a job.
• Adaptational Sympathy: Inverted. In the novel, Jack is a Tragic Villain who is corrupted by the Overlook, and his flaws stem from an abusive childhood where he was horrifically mistreated by his father. The movie cuts out his backstory and while there are moments where Jack expresses vulnerability, he's generally a more straightforward villain.
• Adaptational Villainy:
  • The movie, compared to the book. While he loses himself and goes after his family in both, the movie downplays his sympathetic qualities (such as his intense guilt over hurting his family and struggle to do right by them) to the point that he seems more concerned about his own self-image than actually becoming a better man, while playing out some things he does unintentionally in the book as malicious (e.g. in the book Jack destroys the radio in a blind panic when hearing it tell him to kill Wendy and Danny, whereas in the movie he does it deliberately to keep them stranded). He also outright kills Dick in the movie whereas he only injured him in the book. Furthermore, unlike in the book where he redeems himself, the film has him remain murderous and insane to the end.
  • This extends to his appearance in the movie version of Doctor Sleep, where Jack’s ghost more or less admits that he always hated his family and the alcohol was his way of escaping from them. Then, when Dan refuses to fall off the wagon like he did, Jack responds in anger to his son being a better man than he ever was.
• Addled Addict: In the book. While he started off as a functional alcoholic, he eventually started disappearing on drinking binges and engaging in self-destructive behavior. He eventually broke Danny's arm in a drunken rage, and quit after he and Al nearly got into a car accident.
• Age Lift: Jack is 31 in the novel, but is played by Jack Nicholson, who was 43 years old at the time of the film.
• Agent Scully: Zig-Zagged in the book. While he does somewhat accept Danny's psychic abilities once he reveals them to his parents, he doubts the existence of ghosts in the Overlook and tries to persuade Wendy they're alone in the hotel. It's implied to be an effect of the Overlook's brainwashing, keeping him oblivious so it can better corrupt him.
• Alas, Poor Villain: In the novel, Jack's death is treated tragically. He finally snaps out of the Overlook's brainwashing and begs Danny to run, only for the Overlook to murder him and puppet his body to continue trying to kill his family. Both Danny and Wendy mourn him afterwards, recognizing his rampage wasn't of his own volition.
• The Alcoholic: Very pronounced in the book, where his addiction, recovery, and struggle to stay sober are detailed in great length. Hinted at more obliquely in the movie, although at one point he says out loud that "I'd give my goddamned soul for just a glass of beer." And so appears Lloyd...
• Alcoholic Parent: He is an alcoholic and once broke his son's arm in a drunken rage.
• Ambition Is Evil: Jack has ambitious plans of becoming a critically acclaimed and famous writer in both versions. The Overlook's brainwashing causes him to shift his ordinary ambitions to a desire to join the Overlook's "management", a position that requires him to kill his own family.
• Anti-Hero: He starts off as one in the novel. Jack is short-tempered and violent from the get-go, but he's genuinely trying to get better and he sincerely cares about his family. He gradually devolves into an outright villain as the Overlook slowly drives him mad.
• Anti-Villain:
  • How much of one he is depends on how much the audience sees him as a bad person to begin with or a good man who was broken by the hotel's influence. Still, Jack had a horrifically abusive childhood that caused him to turn to alcohol to cope, and he's genuinely horrified at how much he's becoming like his father. He also proves unwilling to murder Danny in the end, which the Overlook responds to by murdering him.
  • Downplayed in the films, where his inner turmoil is downplayed and his Freudian Excuse is excised, and he's depicted as a Jerkass from the get-go. He still has moments of humanity and shows some reluctance to go through with the Overlook's plan. Halloran even comments in the second film that Jack wasn't inherently evil, but was led astray by the hotel.
• Archnemesis Dad: Not at first, because for as flawed as Jack is, he loves Danny with all his heart. However, the Overlook's corruption drives him to try and murder his own son. It's played straighter in the film, where Jack only seems to tolerate Danny at first and tries to murder him and his mother with glee and a total lack of remorse.
• Aside Glance: Jack repeatedly makes offhanded glances at the camera throughout the film's runtime, a habit that Stanley Kubrick specifically instructed Jack Nicholson on throughout filming. Some of these passes are so quick and casual that they're only visible for a single frame each, while others are more drawn-out, such as during Jack's conversation with Grady and his attempt to convince Wendy to free him from the freezer. The exact meaning of the practice is never explained, but it adds onto the film's persistent sense of dread by implicitly muddying the boundaries between the viewer and the story.
• The Atoner: Deconstructed. In the novel, Jack truly wants to atone for everything he's done and is haunted by guilt over his worst actions. However, he refuses to take responsibility for his actions, and shirks off the many outbursts of his rage as either accidental (such as breaking Danny's arm) or provoked (such as beating George Hatfield to a pulp). This makes it all the easier for the Overlook to slowly corrupt him into becoming a violent brute.
• Author Avatar:
  • A darker version than many of Stephen King's other writer protagonists like Bill Denbrough - while writers like Bill mirror a lot of King's career and seemingly even write similar novels, the novel version of Jack embodies all of King's worst impulses and vices, such as drug addiction and - at least once - a surge of resentment while King was holding his own child, which horrified him. King didn't realize until years afterward that he was writing about himself in Jack.
  • It also happens In-Universe with the play Jack's writing. He gradually and subconsciously sees the student protagonist and the Sadist Teacher Big Bad as representing George Hatfield and himself respectively, and he begins viewing the teacher as a blameless victim endlessly persecuted by a vindictive student.
• Ax-Crazy: At the climax of his mental breakdown, he goes on a murderous rampage. In the Kubrick film, he does so with an actual axe, no less.
• Backup from Otherworld: In the climax of the Doctor Sleep book, he appears to help Danny and co. finish off Rose.
• The Bartender: In the Doctor Sleep movie, he appears as the Overlook's bartender to Dan.
• Beard of Evil: In the film, he goes from clean shaven to sporting a five-o' clock shadow as he becomes more insane.
• Being Good Sucks: The crux of his Face–Heel Turn in the novel. Jack is genuinely trying to be a better person, but the difficulties of staying On The Wagon make it hell for him and he resents having to admit fault. The Overlook preys on these resentments to drive him into madness.
• Beneath the Mask: Jack is quite charming and friendly on the surface, but underneath that he's deeply volatile, resentful, and short-tempered. He's aware of his flaws and tries to work on them, but the Overlook is able to use them to corrupt him.
• Berserk Button: Jack is volatile at the best of times but he gets especially angry at any perceived condescension or what he sees as people lording their authority or better fortune over him.
• Big Bad Slippage: In the film, where he serves as The Heavy, he undergoes this. He starts off as an abusive Jerkass, but Jack shows moments of affection for his family and is horrified when he has a nightmare about murdering them. By preying on his worst desires, the Overlook convinces him to murder his family and satisfy his ambitions.
• Bitch in Sheep's Clothing: In the film, Jack acts quite friendly and agreeable at first, but it's quickly evident that it's a mask for his real personality, and he's quite cruel to Wendy even before the Overlook gets its claws in him. It's downplayed in the book, where he's sincerely repentant and amiable, but still has quite the violent streak and has a vicious temper.
• Brainwashed and Crazy: In the novel, the Overlook gradually takes control of Jack by preying on his very real flaws, gaslighting him, and through its supernatural influence. By the end of the novel, he's left a mindless Empty Shell for the Hotel to control. It's averted in the film, where Jack is certainly manipulated by the Overlook, but gleefully throws in with it of his own free will.
• Breaking the Cycle of Bad Parenting: Jack really, really wants to make sure Danny has a better childhood than his own, where he was abused relentlessly by his own father. Unfortunately, due to his own failings and the Overlook's influence, he fails and becomes just as much of a monster.
• Broken Ace: Jack is handsome, intelligent, educated, athletic, and it's implied he was a rising star in the literary world before his alcoholism got the best of him. However, Jack also struggles deeply with alcoholism and trauma from an abusive childhood, and he has a truly violent temper to boot.
• Byronic Hero: Jack is a handsome and charming but brooding and bitter man prone to self-pity, who frequently bucks at authority and has something of a martyr complex. He's able to keep his flaws in rein at first and is fairly psychologically well-balanced, but the Overlook's gaslighting and brainwashing leads to his flaws consuming him until he becomes its puppet.
• Can't Get Away with Nuthin': Astonishingly, this is how Jack feels after being allowed to keep his job by Al Shockley, in spite of his behavior absolutely justifying his termination as caretaker. Instead of being grateful for avoiding a devastating and self-inflicted disaster, he stews in resentment of Al for requiring, as a condition of his continued employment, that Jack not write a potentially damaging exposè on the Overlook Hotel. It's implied that Jack's behavior is partially caused by the hotel already beginning to influence him, drawing on his simmering resentment of (what he feels is) Shockley lording his position over Jack like a wealthy benefactor would over an artist on retainer.
• Character Catchphrase: "Shut up and take your medicine." He says the phrase whenever he's particularly angry and about to have a violent outburst, which becomes increasingly common as the Overlook drives him mad.
• Character Exaggeration: The film exaggerates his flaws, making him more sinister from the get-go and implying he willingly sided with the Overlook, rather than being brainwashed into it. His sympathetic traits and inner torment are still present, but much more downplayed.
• Character Tics: In the novel and in the mini-series, Jack has the habit of wiping his mouth when he wants a drink.
• Cool Teacher: He worked as a teacher prior to being fired for his beating of George Hatfield, and Jack remembers himself as having been respected by the faculty and his students. Given Jack has a Self-Serving Memory even about his worst moments, it's unclear if this was true, but at least Al Shockley was charmed enough by him to be totally oblivious to how emotionally disturbed Jack is.
• The Corruptible: Particularly in the original novel. He starts off as a well-meaning if flawed figure, but is ultimately corrupted by the Overlook's malevolent influence and has to be put down. Danny and Wendy realize the Overlook has started subsuming his personality with its own malevolent one, and Danny points out the Overlook has fundamentally altered him to the point that he's no longer his father.
• Dark Secret: Jack's is first hinted at when Halloran probes him, along with Wendy, to see if he shines. Along with discovering that Jack "wasn't like meeting someone who had the shine, or someone who definitely did not", Halloran finds his psyche strange, as though he is holding him some — well, dark secret so deeply within himself that it is impossible to get to even for a psychic. As the novel progresses, Jack's secret fears and shames come to the fore as the hotel uses them along with the undeveloped shining he has to make him its agent of murder.
• Death Equals Redemption: An unusually literal version, as a ghostly, supernatural Jack atones for his rampage in The Shining by helping Dan and Abra when he throws Rose to her death in the following book, saving their lives.
• Death of Personality: In the novel, once he's fully possessed by the Overlook, Jack starts fighting back against its influence. The Overlook responds by bashing Jack's face in with a croquet mallet, destroying what's left of him and leaving him an Empty Shell for it to control. It's subverted in Doctor Sleep, where his redeemed ghost appears free of the Overlook's influence.
• Death Seeker: Danny's shining leads to him discovering Jack seriously considered killing himself after breaking Danny's arm.
• Decoy Protagonist: In the film, Danny is the true main character. Despite Jack getting quite a bit of focus at first, he eventually devolves into the antagonist.
• Demonic Possession: At the climax of the novel, he's possessed by the Overlook itself. Danny calls it out for using Jack as a mask just to torment his family, and the Overlook gleefully admits to it after brutally destroying the last remnants of Jack's true personality.
• Distinction Without a Difference: Happens in the film, once he loses it and begins menacing Wendy.
  Jack: I'm not gonna hurt ya. You didn't let me finish my sentence. I said I'm not gonna hurt ya. I'm just gonna bash your brains in. I'm gonna bash them right the fuck in!
• Dreaming of Things to Come: Jack has a nightmare where he murders Wendy and Danny and laments that he thinks he's losing his mind. He does indeed lose his mind and tries to murder Wendy and Danny, but only manages to kill Halloran.
• Empty Shell: His ultimate fate in the novel is to be reduced to a soulless vessel for the Overlook to control, with no remnants of his personality left. His spirit appears in Doctor Sleep, revealing he was freed from the Overlook's influence when it was destroyed.
• Entitled Bastard: Downplayed at first, as Jack has a tendency to feel like the world owes him for all the suffering he's gone through. His feelings of entitlement are gradually exaggerated by the Overlook as it's influence over him grows, so it can drive him to madness.
• Even Evil Can Be Loved:
  • In the novel, Danny continues to love Jack even as the Overlook's influence makes him become increasingly abusive and violent. Even when Jack tries to kill him, Danny has faith that his father still loves him - and is proven right when Jack starts Fighting from the Inside.
  • In the film, Wendy sincerely loves him despite Jack being quite verbally abusive towards her even before the Overlook gets its hooks in him. She's quite shocked and horrified when he turns actively murderous.
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones: In the film, Jack starts off as a Jerkass, but he genuinely loves Danny at first even if they have a strained relationship. Jack is also horrified when he dreams about killing Wendy and Danny. However, this quickly fades as he gradually loses it and he shows no hesitation about trying to murder them. In Doctor Sleep, Jack's rant implies he always viewed the two as annoyances leeching off of him, which made it easy for the Overlook to convince him to kill them.
• Evil Eyebrows: Jack Nicholson's portrayal. One of the reasons why King objected to him being cast in the role is those distinctive eyebrows.
• Evil Gloating: In the film, he gleefully reveals he's sabotaged the radio and snowcat to Wendy just to mock her. He also taunts her while he tries to murder her, even quoting "The Three Little Pigs" before attacking the door she's hiding behind with an axe.
• Face of an Angel, Mind of a Demon: In the books, Jack is described as handsome by the narration. However, he's a deeply volatile and violent man even before he steps in the Overlook, and the hotel just amplifies it until he becomes outright murderous.
• Face–Heel Turn: Both book and movie have Jack going from swearing he would never hurt Danny to out-and-out attempting to murder him. The Overlook is the cause, but only really takes Jack's underlying resentment and magnifies it a hundredfold while suppressing his love for his family.
• Facial Horror: Happens to him in the climax of the novel. When Jack begins resisting the Overlook after it fully takes over, the Overlook forces him to bash his face in with a roque mallet until it's unrecognizable to "kill" what's left of Jack.
• Fatal Flaw: His alcoholism and his violent temper, as well as his general sense that the world is out to get him and his resentment at his circumstances and what he sees as the good fortune of others, all of which make him easy prey for the Overlook.
• Faux Affably Evil: After he finally snaps in the film, he's still quite polite and jokey all the while threatening to brutally murder his family. It's averted in the book, where he's borderline feral and screaming profanity once the Overlook takes over.
• Fighting from the Inside: In the novel, he does his best to resist the Overlook's gradual brainwashing. Even when it fully takes him over, he's able to resist just enough to tell Danny to run, before being permanently subsumed.
• Forced into Evil: In the novel. Jack doesn't want to become the homicidal lunatic the Overlook wants him to be, and desperately fights against it. Ultimately, he's unable to fight it off and winds up being turned into its mindless pawn.
• Freudian Excuse: His own father was violently abusive and left Jack with some serious anger issues and difficulty with authority and resentment, which the Overlook mercilessly exploits.
• Grand Theft Me: Wendy and Danny both realize Jack's Face–Heel Turn is because the Overlook has begun overwriting his personality with its own malevolent one.
• Green-Eyed Monster: Going hand in hand with his resentment, Jack has a serious issue with envy, feeling bitter anger at what he sees as others achieving what he feels owed.
• Hair of the Dog: While at the Overlook's bar, Jack asks Lloyd for the "hair of the dog that bit me;" the bartender complies by pouring him a glass of whiskey. This and Jack's acceptance of the drink is what finalizes the Overlook's hold over him, breaking his promise to Wendy that he wouldn't touch another drop of booze and thus burning the last of his already dilapidated bridges.
• Hair-Trigger Temper: In spite of all of his virtues, Jack is a violent man who angers easily. Booze makes it worse, of course, but Jack has hurt people — once brutally, in the case of George Hatfield — even while stone-cold sober.
• Hannibal Lecture: Jack's (or the hotel's, depending on your interpretation) speech to Danny in the film version of Doctor Sleep, trying to convince him to fall off the wagon:
  Jack: Medicine. Medicine is what [alcohol] is. A bona fide cure-all. Depression, stress, remorse, failure — wipes it all away. The mind is a blackboard, and this is the eraser. A man tries. He provides. And he's surrounded by mouths that eat and scream and cry and nag. So he asks for one thing, just one thing, for him. To warm him up, to take the sting out of those days of the mouths eating and eating and eating everything he makes, everything he has. And that family — a wife, a kid — those mouths eat time. They eat your days on Earth. Just gobble them up. It's enough to make a man sick. And this, this is the medicine. So tell me, pup... are you gonna take your medicine?
  Danny: I'm not.
• The Heavy: In both the film and the book, the Overlook is genuinely dangerous on its own, but it leaves Jack to do its dirty work and he's the main threat of the climax. In the novel, the Overlook eventually fully possesses him once Jack inconveniences it by Fighting from the Inside and takes over as the Final Boss.
• His Own Worst Enemy: Jack is ultimately his own saboteur in most situations, especially in the book. He's constantly shooting himself in the foot with impulsive and poorly thought-out decisions, which jeopardizes his employment at the Overlook even before he starts undergoing Sanity Slippage.
• Hope Spot: At the start of the book, Jack has started to overcome his inner demons, he's been sober for a long time, and he's managed to repair his relationship with Wendy. The first months of their stay in the Overlook actually seems good for the family, until it begins causing Jack to undergo Sanity Slippage.
• Hypocritical Humor: In the film, after Jack finishes a long and possibly hallucinatory conversation with Lloyd in the midst of his Sanity Slippage, Wendy warns him about Mrs. Massey strangling Danny and that there's someone else in the hotel. Jack's response?
  Jack: Are you out of your fuckin' mind?
• I Need a Freaking Drink: Deconstructed. Jack's coping mechanism for negative stimuli is always using alcohol, even after he quits. It's part of how the Overlook is able to corrupt him by driving him Off the Wagon.
• In the Blood: Heavily implied, both Jack's temper and alcoholism comes from his father, and is inherited by Danny.
• It's All About Me: While not as bad as most examples, especially before the Overlook began working on him, Jack had an inclination for self-pity and thinking that the world was out to get him. The Overlook uses his inner resentment and feelings of entitlement to slowly unravel his mind and make him believe that if he killed his family he would become important in the hotel’s hierarchy.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold:
  • In the book. Like Movie!Jack, he's a bitter, violent, spiteful alcoholic with a Hair-Trigger Temper and Never My Fault tendencies, but he also loves his family and is genuinely trying to change himself for the better.
  • It's heavily downplayed in the film where he's mostly depicted in an unsympathetic light, but Jack does have a few humanizing moments. He's genuinely horrified when he has a nightmare about murdering his family and is legitimately horrified when Wendy accuses him of strangling Danny. Unfortunately, the Overlook's toxic influence quickly drowns out his reluctance.
• Jerkass: In the film, thanks to his redeeming qualities being excised, Jack is just a hateful, selfish, abusive, possibly unstable jackass unable to take responsibility for his actions, and that's before the Overlook starts corrupting him.
• Kubrick Stare: Jack Nicholson's portrayal is a classic example, as he's quite prone to making these. He gives an especially unsettling one as he stares out the window.
• Legacy Character: In the second movie, his ghost appears to have become the new Lloyd, though it's left ambiguous if it is him or if the hotel has taken his form to taunt Danny.
• Large Ham: In the movie. Jack Nicholson's eyebrows deserve an Oscar category all their own.
• Laughably Evil: In the film. For as terrifying as Jack is, there's quite a bit of humor to be found in both his snide behavior prior to going mad and once he goes fully Ax-Crazy.
  Jack: HERE'S JOHNNY!
• Lazy Bum: In the film only. Despite Jack officially being the caretaker, he spends most of the winter either writing or lounging around, with Wendy doing the actual upkeep. It's eventually revealed that all Jack wrote was endless repetitions of "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.", revealing both that he was going mad from the start and that his endless hours writing were nowhere near as much of a workload as he described.
• Like Father, Like Son: Jack's father was an abusive alcoholic with a violent temper, who beat his wife and children for the smallest infraction, and wound up killing his own wife when he accidentally beat her to death. Jack despises his father, but he's inherited his violent temper, alcoholism, and he has similar resentments towards his family. Jack tries to be a better person, but the Overlook sabotages him at every opportunity and drives him to madness.
• Loss of Identity:
  • In the novel, after Jack fights back against the Overlook to tell Danny to escape, the Overlook destroys what's left of Jack by bashing his face in with a roque mallet. He's left merely an Empty Shell for the hotel to control.
  • One interpretation of his ghost’s appearance in the second movie is that the Overlook has stripped him of everything except his violence and alcoholism.
• Madness Mantra: An iconic example, although it appears in the film only. Wendy discovers Jack's much vaunted manuscript consists entirely of endless repetitions of "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy." The discovery is followed immediately by a now fully unhinged Jack trying to murder her.
  Jack: Do you like it?
• Meaningful Name: His first and middle name is Jack Daniel and he's an alcoholic. The first drink he has in both the movie and miniseries is Jack Daniels.
• The Millstone: Jack Torrance is one of literature's most tragic examples. He is the architect of every single disaster he and his family suffers, because he can't control his temper and he can't (easily) control his drinking. Over the course of events, Jack manages to destroy his marriage, his career, his friendships, his literary ambitions, and ultimately, his family. If given second or third chances, he will just screw up again. At one point, he almost gets himself fired from his caretaker job because he calls the hotel manager and viciously taunts him about the secret history of the Overlook Hotel (history which mostly predates the manager and doesn't directly involve him). Why? He has no self-control. He literally can't stop himself from doing shit like that. Although the dumb move of taunting Ullman is implied to be at least partially a result of the hotel working on his mind.
  • It's implied that his taunting of Ullman might have been Jack's subconscious trying to get him fired so they would be forced to leave the Overlook.
• Moment of Lucidity: When Jack has been completely taken over and is about to kill Danny, Danny manages to stagger it by telling it outright that it's not his father and claims it's just wearing a "mask" of his father. This manages to shake Jack out of its control long enough to let Danny go and tell him how much he loves him, before the hotel "kills" Jack by making him smash his own face in with the roque mallet, destroying the "mask" and leaving nothing but an entity of the hotel. It also leads into a fitting Karmic Death for it and the hotel as, like Danny points out to it, Jack was the one who remembered to dump the boiler each day to keep it from exploding, while it didn't, and the ensuing explosion puts an end to it and the accursed hotel once and for all.
• Morality Pet: For all Jack's faults, he deeply loves Danny and thinks the world of him. He deeply regrets breaking his arm and worries about becoming an abusive father just like his own dad because he wants him to have a good life. He's deeply nurturing of Danny and encourages his curiosity constantly before the Overlook fully brainwashes him.
• Most Writers Are Writers: Jack ostensibly takes the job because it will give him time to work on his writing; although the real reason is that his alcoholism and violent temper have cost him his previous job as a teacher.
• My God, What Have I Done?: Two events in Jacks past had this reaction, him breaking Danny's arm, and him mocking George Hatfield's stutter and later beating him for slashing his tires in revenge.
• Mr. Vice Guy: In the novel. Jack struggles with Envy and Wrath, which causes him to be deeply resentful beneath the surface and prone to angry outbursts. However, he's a well-meaning man and a loving father who genuinely wants the best for his family, and deeply regrets breaking Danny's arm. The Overlook changes that as it drives him insane.
• Nailed to the Wagon: While he was already sober by the time of the novel, he's forced to remain so by the fact all the liquor has been removed from the Overlook.
• Never My Fault: Constantly refuses to take responsibility for his bad decisions, which is an absolute must for a recovering alcoholic.
• Nice Mean And In Between: He's the mean to Wendy's nice and Danny's in-between. Jack is a violent alcoholic who does genuinely love his family, but is also filled with resentment for everyone around him and he's a Troubled Abuser even before the Overlook gets its hooks in him.
• Not Himself: In the novel, Danny and Wendy recognize Jack is acting strangely as the Overlook makes him increasingly violent and abrasive. Once it fully brainwashes him, both of them recognize that he's little more than a vessel for the Overlook, and Danny says to his face that he's not the real Jack Torrance anymore.
• Obviously Evil: In the film, as part of his Adaptational Villainy, Jack is clearly bad news from the get-go. He's an open Jerkass to his family from the start, comes off as unhinged even during his job interview, and shows a total lack of remorse for breaking Danny's arm. It was one of the critiques levied against the film, particularly by Stephen King, was that the film made it too obvious that Jack would eventually go crazy and try to kill his family.
• Off the Wagon: When Wendy believes he's strangled Danny (which was actually the work of Mrs. Massey), Jack snaps and goes on a hallucinatory drinking binge enabled by Lloyd, ranting all the while about how much he hated it.
• Papa Wolf: He's deeply protective of Danny at first. Unfortunately, the Overlook destroys this quality as it drives him to madness, though Jack's love for Danny is still buried under the surface.
• Parental Favoritism: Jack was his father's favorite, though he still beat him regularly. Jack still loved him as best he could, even when the rest of the family began to hate him.
• Parents as People: In the novel, miniseries and operatic adaptation. Jack is a violent alcoholic, but he does love his son and feels intense regret for his behaviour. He sincerely wants to be a good father but his alcoholism, violent temper and trauma from his own abusive childhood undermine his good intentions and that's even before the Overlook gets its hooks into him.
• Peaceful in Death: In both the novel and the miniseries. In the latter, he appears as a ghost congratulating a young adult graduate Danny and says that he loves him.
• Playing the Victim Card: Jack has a tendency to view himself as the victim to deflect responsibility for his actions. It's more of a mild issue at the beginning of the novel, but the Overlook gradually worsens it over time.
• Polar Madness: Jack slowly begins to drift into insanity due to a combination of alcoholism and being trapped in the Overlook Hotel over the winter with only his wife and son for company - until the Genius Loci itself is eventually able to pressure him into trying to murder his family. For good measure, the hotel has a history of driving previous winter caretakers insane for similar reasons.
• Politically Incorrect Villain: In the film only, it's implied that Jack is a racist; he doesn't hesitate in parroting Grady's use of the n-word and is possibly even convinced to attack his family specifically because Danny called upon the black Halloran for aid. He uses the word in his inner monologue in the book too, but it happens well after the hotel has done its work on him. He is also heavily implied in both versions to be incredibly sexist, derisively referring to Wendy as "the old sperm bank" with the book attributing his attitude to his troubled relationship with his own mother, who he resented for staying with Jack's abusive father and being too weak to stand up to him, a trait he now sees (inaccurately) in Wendy.
• Protagonist Journey to Villain: Moreso in the book—he's not the sole viewpoint character but he is the main one, starting out a guilt-ridden man trying to straighten up his life and ending it a psychopath hell-bent on hurting the people he loves.
• Psychic Powers: Has a bit of "shining", albeit much weaker than Danny's, which the Overlook is able to use against him.
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech: In the film, Jack loses his temper and gives a vicious one to Wendy when she wants them to leave the Overlook hotel and take Danny to a hospital.
  Jack: Get him out of here? You mean just…leave the hotel? It is so fucking typical of you to create a problem like this when I finally have a chance to accomplish something...When I'm really into my work...I could really write my own ticket if I went back to Boulder now, couldn't I? Shoveling out driveways? Workin' in a carwash? Does that appeal to you...Wendy, I have let you fuck up my life so far, but I am not going to let you fuck this up!
• Recovered Addict: He suffered severe alcoholism in the past, but by the time of the story he's quit drinking. The Overlook drives him off the wagon as part of its corruption.
• Redemption Equals Death:
  • In the novel, Jack breaks free of the Overlook's influence and warns Danny to run. The Overlook responds by possessing him in full and bashing his face in, allowing it to puppeteer his corpse.
  • In the miniseries, Jack manages to break free of the Overlook's control and blows the hotel up with himself still inside.
  • In the operatic version, Jack breaks free and urges Danny to run, then collapses as the Overlook tries to regain control and warns him that the boiler is about to explode. But Jack snaps his father’s cane while in the basement, allows his family to escape and allows the boiler to explode once they’re safely away, dying with the hotel.
• Reformed, but Rejected: In the book, Jack is truly repentant for his past crimes and wants to be a better person, but most people still view him as a violent drunk. He reaches his breaking point when Wendy believes he assaulted Danny again, which drives him further under the Overlook's spell.
• Reluctant Psycho: In the book, Jack struggles with his violent tendencies from the start, and fights every step of the way as the Overlook starts driving him insane. It's downplayed in the film, where Jack is deeply shaken by a nightmare where he kills Wendy and Danny, but doesn't display much resistance to the idea of killing them when Delbert suggests it.
• The Resenter: What the hotel preys on to corrupt Jack, his resentment streak against what he perceives to be slights made against him (mostly imaginary or exaggerated). For example, in the novel, he resents his friend Al Shockley for what he feels is Al lording his wealth over him, despite the fact that all he's ever done is help Jack. This is likely delusions from his damaged mind struggling with alcoholism.
• Resist the Beast: In the novel, Jack repeatedly questions the Overlook's agenda and tries to fight off its influence, but it eventually grows strong enough to start suppressing these thoughts to make him more easy to control. Even when it turns him into little more than a mindless puppet, Jack still fights against it one last time when it tries to kill Danny. The Overlook responds by bashing Jack's face in, symbolically killing him, so it can pilot his body uninterrupted.
• Sadist Teacher: He was one to George Hatfield only. He sabotaged George's timer at the debate club so he'd have an excuse to cut him from it simply out of jealousy, and Jack mocked George's stutter to his face when he called him out on it. When George retaliated by cutting Jack's tires, Jack beat him to a pulp.
• Sanity Slippage: In the movie, he starts going from throwing a tennis ball around the hotel in boredom to just staring creepily out the window and losing his temper over the smallest things. In the book, it's represented by his drinking symptoms starting to resurface without the alcohol. In both cases, he begins to see more and more of the supernatural elements of the hotel as he falls under its thrall.
• Scare 'Em Straight: He quit drinking after he and Al Shockley ran over a bike in the middle of the road. Fortunately, they didn't hit a kid, but it scared the two into quitting. Sadly, the Overlook pushes him Off the Wagon.
• Self-Serving Memory: Part of what makes Jack an Unreliable Narrator is that he always remembers his actions in the rosiest possible light. Even his worst mistakes are revised in his head to make himself look like a victim, or at least partially justified.
• Sir Swears-a-Lot: In the novel, once the Overlook finishes corrupting him, he constantly swears and screams misogynistic slurs at Wendy. It's another sign of how the Overlook has started overwriting his personality with its own.
• Skewed Priorities: In the film, Jack is more concerned with the upkeep of the hotel than his family's well-being implicitly as the result of the Overlook's corruption. He lies about seeing Mrs. Massey so Wendy won't leave despite the danger now being obvious, and later throws a tantrum when Wendy suggests leaving. It culminates in him trying to murder them just because Danny called Halloran to rescue them.
• Slasher Smile: He's very prone to making these in the film, to utterly terrifying effect.
• Snobs Vs Slobs: Jack lives in poverty and comes from a working-class background, and he views people better off than him as looking down on him for his lower class. It's accurate in the case of Ullman, but he also views Al Shockley as doing so despite Al being nothing but supportive of Jack.
• Split-Personality Takeover: Again, depending on interpretation of whether the hotel infects Jack with his madness or just amplifies what's already there.
• Suspiciously Specific Denial: His narration insists over and over again he didn't sabotage George Hatfield's timer and that he actually liked him, all the while Jack reflects over his envy over George's wealth and his virulent hatred for the boy.
• Sympathetic Villain, Despicable Villain: He's the Sympathetic Villain to the Overlook's Despicable. Jack is a flawed but decent man trying to change himself for the better and who wants to avoid becoming like his own abusive father. The Overlook uses both his own fragile mental state and its own powers to break him down into The Heavy. The Overlook, by contrast, is a vile Eldritch Abomination motivated by sheer sadism.
• Tempting Fate: Jack tells Ullman that solitude and isolation will not become problems for him while looking after the hotel and that his family will love it. It doesn't take long for the Torrances' stay at the Overlook to turn absolutely hellish, and for Jack to start undergoing Sanity Slippage.
• Took a Level in Jerkass:
  • He starts out as rather friendly and amiable in the book, but the Overlook's influence causes him to become increasingly abrasive and cruel.
  • It's downplayed in the film, where he's a Jerkass from the start but legitimately horrified at the idea of hurting his family before the Overlook drives him to madness.
• Tragic Hero: Jack is genuinely trying to become a better person and stay on the wagon, but the Overlook uses his resentments, anger, and fragile mental state to slowly drive him and and destroy him.
• Tragic Villain: In the book. Jack is already a violent alcoholic from the start, but he's genuinely trying to get better and his cruelty stems from his own abusive childhood. The Overlook gradually drives him mad and transforms him into a monster.
• Troubled Abuser: Jack's father was a violent Domestic Abuser, who also beat up his kids regularly. Jack himself also accidentally broke Danny's arm — while trying to spank him for misbehaving. Unlike his father, Jack loathes himself for what he did.
• Unreliable Narrator: See Never My Fault above. Jack sometimes straight-up lies, as when he spends about a page and a half insisting he did not set George Hatfield's timer incorrectly in order to create a reason to cut the kid from the debate team, and then later admits that he actually did. It is fairly clear from this, from the way he mocks George's stutter, and the later change in plot of his play (from "cruel headmaster persecutes bright student" to "unfairly maligned headmaster persecuted by monstrous teen"), that despite his insistence to the contrary, he did have a personal vendetta towards George.
• Ungrateful Bastard: He never appreciates any of Al Shockley's support even when he stops Jack from being fired after Jack decided to write a book about the Overlook's dark past, which would destroy the hotel's reputation. It's implied this stems from Jack's jealousy of Al's wealth and his belief Al looks down on him.
• Villain Protagonist: It isn't clear immediately, but the book gradually slots Jack into this role. Even though he makes an effort to be a good family man, Jack at his core is a bitter, hateful, resentful alcoholic with abusive tendencies even before the Overlook starts destroying his sanity, and the hotel only brings those things out in force.
• Villainous Breakdown: In the Kubrick film, when he gets lost in the maze and is unable to find Danny, he has gone completely deranged and is reduced to moaning, panting, and shouting his wife and kid's names in a way that gets more slurred and unintelligible the more fatigue sets in. These are his final moments before he freezes to death.
• Wicked Cultured: He's well-educated and a fan of classic literature. He's particularly familiar with the works of Edgar Allan Poe despite despising the man's work. "The Masque of the Red Death" becomes a particular fixation for him as he descends into madness.
• Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds: He's portrayed sympathetically in the novel: his turn to crazed (attempted) homicide is tragic AND terrifying. In the movie, however, he's already a selfish, hateful man, and it's only a matter of time before he'll violently lash out at his family; Overlook merely accelerates the process.
• Working-Class Hero: He starts off as an anti-heroic version of this. He's barely making ends meet when the novel starts and the Overlook is his last chance to turn his family's fortunes around. Where he clashes with the officious and stuck-up Ullman, he gels quickly with the working-class, blue-collar Watson. It's also deconstructed, as Jack's class resentment helps fuel the Overlook's manipulation of him and causes him to view Al Shockley as an enemy, despite Al doing nothing but try to help Jack.
• Would Hurt a Child: Aside from his attempt to murder Danny in the finale, he is also mentioned as having lost his teaching job for brutally beating up a student he found trying to slash his tires in retaliation for Jack cutting him from the debate team.
• Wounded Gazelle Gambit: In the film. After Wendy locks him in the pantry, Jack pretends to be severely injured and tries to guilt-trip her into letting him out. Fortunately, she sees through it and doesn't.
  Jack: Wendy? Baby? I think you hurt my head real bad.
• Writer's Block: He struggles with this in the film, being unable to come up with a single good idea to make a story out of. He does seem to start getting work done, typing away for hours and being enraged by any interruption. However, it's revealed his entire manuscript consists entirely of endless repetitions of "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy."
• You Have Failed Me: At the climax of the original novel, Jack snaps out of the Overlook's control and begs Danny to run. The Overlook responds by forcing Jack to bash his face in with a roque mallet, destroying what's left of his soul, and fully possesses his corpse so it can murder Danny, Wendy, and Halloran itself.

Wendy

Winifred "Wendy" Torrance

Played by: Shelley Duvall (1980 film), Rebecca De Mornay (1997 miniseries), and Alex Essoe (Doctor Sleep)

Dubbed by: Maryana Spivak (The Shining, 2014 Russian dub)

'"Well, let's just wait and see. We're all going to have a real good time."

The wife of Jack and mother of Danny, Wendy Torrance has struggled for years with her failing marriage, and her own emotional issues. As the family seems to have begun mending itself, she agrees to stay with Jack at the Overlook for the winter, hoping that it will give them time to heal and rebuild their lives.

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• Abusive Parents: Not Wendy herself, but her own verbally and emotionally abusive mother. The thought of being forced to stay with her is what kept Wendy from divorcing Jack on the grounds of his alcoholism, as well as what eventually convinces her to stay at the Overlook in spite of her reservations.
• Action Survivor: She manages to survive everything the Overlook throws at her, including escaping with Danny in tow, though in the novel she's badly injured by Jack attacking her with a roque mallet.
• Adaptation Dye-Job: She's a blonde in the original novel but Shelly Duvall and Alex Essoe both have black hair. Averted by Rebecca De Mornay in the miniseries, who matches the book description.
• Adaptation Relationship Overhaul: In the novel, Jack and Wendy have a strained but warm marriage and clearly love and respect each other. Wendy is aware of Jack's flaws, but hopes he can overcome them, and has enough confidence to leave him if need be. In the film, Wendy is much more insecure and timid, and the emotionally abusive Jack is clearly the dominant party.
• Adaptational Ugliness: Wendy is described as being conventionally attractive in the book, whereas in the film she's portrayed by Shelley Duvall, who is more waif-like and fragile-looking than her novel counterpart. This was a deliberate choice on Stanley Kubrick's part, as Wendy was supposed to be progressively beaten down over the course of the story, and he felt that casting a more plain-looking actress in the role made it easier to sell that part of the character as the story went on. The Doctor Sleep movie takes this full circle by casting Wendy with Alex Essoe, who is closer to the book in terms of attractiveness.
• Antics-Enabling Wife: Played for Drama. She tolerates Jack's excessive drinking even as it has a detrimental affect on their family, only reaching her breaking point when Jack accidentally breaks Danny's arm. Even then, she stays with him both out of financial necessity and because the only option would be to move in with her abusive mother.
• Break the Cutie: Poor Wendy.
• Breaking the Cycle of Bad Parenting: Wendy wants to provide Danny a better childhood than she had, and to make sure he grows up in a stable, loving environment, unlike she and Jack did. She's a generally good parent, but the machinations of the Overlook leave Danny deeply traumatized anyway.
• Broken Bird: Wendy shows the beginnings of this early on in the film, likely due to Jack's alcoholism. By the end, she's been to hell and back, appearing on the verge of a mental breakdown.
• Cigarette of Anxiety: She has trouble lighting her cigarette while talking to the doctor after Danny's first vision.
• Daddy's Girl: In the book. She had a very close relationship with her father—her mother told her that this drove a wedge into their marriage as part of her emotional abuse.
• Dark and Troubled Past: Her little sister died in a car accident while they were still children, and Wendy's mother was extremely emotionally abusive.
• Exiled to the Couch: Wendy sleeps on the couch on the nights Jack stays out late drinking.
• Foil: To Jack. Both of them struggled with an abusive parent, and are still deeply traumatized by the suffering they experienced. However, Wendy constantly doubts her own parenting and worries about abusing Danny the same way, yet proves to be the more stable parent. Jack meanwhile doesn't really view himself as a bad father despite his efforts to atone, and ultimately is corrupted by the Overlook into becoming just like his own father.
• Green-Eyed Monster: She's jealous of Danny's close relationship with Jack and worries about him growing older and relying on other friends more than her. Wendy never acts on these feelings and recognizes them as unfair to her son, but it unfortunately leads to her dismissing several red flags with Jack as being products of this jealousy.
• Hates Their Parent: She despises her emotionally abusive mother, who constantly mistreated her out of jealousy of Wendy's close relationship with her father.
• Heroic Self-Deprecation: Wendy's narration paints herself as a horrible mother and just inches away from becoming just as bad as her own mother. A more objective point of view reveals her to be the more stable of the Torrances and a much better parental figure than Jack - not that that's a high bar.
• Jealous Parent: Wendy is pretty jealous of her husband Jack whom their beloved son Danny can’t help but love several degrees more than her (he does love his mother, but utterly idolises his father). Wendy herself loved her father more than her mother and vice-versa, which is why her mother is so cold and emotionally abusive towards her.
• Just Eat Gilligan: Justified. Wendy would likely be better off if she divorced Jack, whose alcoholism and bad temper causes numerous financial and personal issues of the family, but that would mean staying with her emotionally abusive mother who both Wendy hates and Danny is terrified of.
• Mama Bear: She's very protective of Danny and steps up to defend him when the Overlook goes all-out.
• My Beloved Smother: She worries about becoming one like her own abusive mother. She does demonstrate some overprotectiveness of Danny, but she's mostly an ordinary and loving mother.
• Nervous Wreck: In both the film and the novel. In the book, Wendy is hyper-vigilant around Jack and terrified that he'll hurt Danny again at all times. She's also deeply paranoid she'll become an abusive parent like her own mother, and constantly considers worst-case scenarios. The film has her as much less confident and more insecure, and almost perpetually anxious.
• Nice Girl: She's a very friendly and personable woman, and a loving mother to Danny.
• Nice Mean And In Between: She's the nice to Jack's mean and Danny's in-between. She's a friendly, well-adjusted woman who has much more of a moral background than either of the two, and is the Only Sane Man of the family.
• Only Sane Man: Wendy has her own issues, but she's by far the most stable and well-adjusted of the Torrance family. Jack is a violent alcoholic even before the Overlook gets its hooks in him, and Danny is a naive child - and, as an adult, a deeply troubled man.
• Parents as People: Wendy loves Danny, but that doesn't stop her from being deeply insecure about whether she deserves to be his mother. Because of her own abusive childhood, she finds it difficult to handle the idea that Danny will someday grow up, believing that they will become unable to understand each other the way they do now.
• Rage Breaking Point: She tolerated Jack's alcoholism for years, but she lost her patience with it after he broke Danny's arm in a drunken rage. She only stays with him after that because she can't afford a divorce, and her only other option would be to return to her emotionally abusive mother.
• The Resenter: Downplayed, but there (novel only). She resents Jack and Danny's close relationship, often feeling left out, and feels enormously guilty over it because that's what her own mother felt about her and her father.
• Stepford Smiler: She tries to pretend her and Jack's marriage is rosier than it is for Danny's sake and keeps up a strong front. Beneath that, she's traumatized by her mother's emotional abuse and very much on her last nerve with Jack.
• Sudden Sequel Death Syndrome: Wendy dies in the 35-year gap between The Shining and Doctor Sleep, contracting and subsequently succumbing to lung cancer at some point in the Nineties. Without her, Dan ends up spiraling into alcoholism just like Jack.
• Together in Death: With her son in the Doctor Sleep movie, appearing to him in his final moments.
• Took a Level in Badass: In Kubrick's film, Wendy covers for Jack's abuse of Danny to the doctor and meekly accepts his tirades. After finally uncovering definitive proof of Jack's madness, and the Hotel itself, she in short succession knocks him unconscious, locks him in the pantry, resists his guilt trips to let him out, and slashes his hand with a knife when he tries to break into to her hiding place.
• Unreliable Narrator: She's nowhere near as unreliable as Jack, but Wendy's insecurities color her narration and tend to paint herself in a more negative light. A notable example is when Danny asks if she's going to divorce Jack after he broke Danny's arm; the reader knows Danny blames himself for their marital tensions, but Wendy assumes it's because she's being unreasonable and hurting Danny.
• Useless Bystander Parent: Subverted in the novel, where Wendy only tolerates Jack's alcoholism until he breaks Danny's arm, at which point she seriously considers divorcing him. It's played straighter in the film, where she does nothing to combat Jack's abuse until it becomes obvious he's gone insane.
• Wide-Eyed Idealist: She genuinely believes that the Torrances' stay at the Overlook will help them heal as a family and reignite their bond. Unfortunately, it does the exact opposite.
• Wide Eyes and Shrunken Irises: Her reaction to the wave of blood and the man in a bear suit performing oral sex on another man.
• Women Are Wiser: She's the only female character in the novel and much more emotionally stable and rational than Jack. Wendy isn't without her own flaws or resentments, but she's one of the few people unable to be influenced by the Overlook.

Tony

Tony

Played by: Wil Horneff (1997 miniseries)

"Danny isn't here, Mrs. Torrance."

A mysterious entity who only Danny can see or interact with. While his parents believe Tony to simply be an imaginary friend, Danny knows subconsciously that Tony is something far more, though he can not put it into words.

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• Ambiguously Evil: At first it seems like half the time Tony is trying to get Danny is trouble by making him pass out and freak out Danny's parents, and doesn't explain Danny's visions properly. In the end, he helps Danny out, showing him to be good.
• The Faceless: Tony always appears shadowed, and Danny can never get close enough to see his face.
• For Your Own Good: In the movie Tony is reluctant to tell Danny just why he doesn't want to move into the Overlook. When Danny badgers him into telling, he ends up blacking out from terror.
• Future Badass: Tony turns out to be Danny when he's fifteen years old, or at least looks like him.
• Imaginary Friend: Danny's imaginary friend, who only shows up during his precognitive visions. 35 years later, he serves this very same role to Dan's niece, Abra.

Mark

Mark Torrance

Played By: Miguel Ferrer (miniseries)

Jack's violently abusive father.

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• Abusive Parents: He was violently abusive to his children, frequently beating them at the slightest provocation and sometimes no provocation at all.
• Dr. Jerk: He worked as a doctor at a hospital, and he was an abusive monster at home.
• Small Role, Big Impact: He's a minor character in the story, but the trauma he inflicted on Jack affects him deeply and the Overlook exploits it to manipulate him.

Overlook Hotel

The Overlook Hotel

The Overlook Hotel

"Masks off, then. No more interruptions. Anything else to say? Are you sure you wouldn't like to run? A game of tag, perhaps? All we have is time, you know. An eternity of time. Or shall we end it? Might as well. We're missing the party."

Played by: Timberline Lodge (exterior, 1980 film and Doctor Sleep), Stanley Hotel (1997 miniseries)

"Good. I want you to like it here. I wish we could stay here forever... and ever... and ever."

—Jack Torrance

An old and luxurious resort found high up in the Rocky Mountains, which houses a monstrous, otherworldly intelligence living inside its walls. No one knows what it really is, but it's implied to have been a part of the building since the day it was built (if not older). Whatever it is, all the Overlook Hotel desires to accomplish is to corrupt and drive innocent people into madness and suffering for its own amusement.

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• Abandoned Area: What it becomes after Jack's rampage in the film and remains as such for decades afterwards.
• Achilles' Heel: The film version of Doctor Sleep implies that when left to its lonesome, the Genius Loci in the hotel is almost harmless, and it requires people with a sufficient level of Shining to inhabit its premises long enough for it to be able to actually warp both reality and people's minds to its will.
• Adaptational Badass: In the novels, the Overlook is only able to possess people with a weakened mental state or who were already evil to begin with, and it needs months to corrupt Jack to the point it can possess him. In the films, it's able to possess Danny in a matter of minutes, implying it let Jack do its dirty work because of its sadism rather than necessity.
• Allegorical Character: The Overlook represents addiction, and alcoholism in particular, and how it corrupts people. Jack falling under the Overlook's sway is tied to him falling Off the Wagon and regaining his drunken mannerisms. On a subtler level, the Overlook corrupts people first through positive stimuli and then gradually influencing their behavior until they are consumed by their worst aspects, much like how addiction can bring out the worst in people despite the initial positive response.
• Alien Geometries: It's rather subtle and easy to miss on one's first viewing, but the floorplan of the Overlook Hotel in the film makes absolutely no sense. Room doors are stuck closely together while their interiors are spacious apartments, the freezer flips sides of a hall between shots (hidden by clever camera work), Ullman's office has a window with sunlight in the middle of the building, the inside doesn't correspond to the outside, the Colorado Lounge has floor-to-ceiling windows with an interior hallway behind them, the hotel's establishing shot conspicuously lacks the hedge maze (which itself has an inconsistent layout), there's no indication of how the Gold Room connects to the rest of the hotel, and so on. Knowing Stanley Kubrick, this was probably an intentional attempt to unsettle the viewer.
• Ambiguous Situation: In both the books and films, it's established that the Overlook feeds off of Steam, but its origins and what it even is are left a mystery. The excised and dubiously canonical prologue, Before the Play, implies the Overlook was always evil as soon as it was built.
• Animal Motif: In the novel, wasps. The Overlook Hotel starts attacking Danny by resurrecting dead wasps, Jack's first time at being influenced by the hotel seems to be when he daydreams about an old wasp's nest he found under the hotel's roof, when Danny tries to read into the ghosts' minds he compares the experience to placing his hand in a mass of stinging wasps, and during the climax one of the ghosts sent by the Overlook to scare away Danny has wasps crawling over her face. In fact, the way the hotel works, by assimilating the spirits of all those that died or lived in it in a gigantic ghostly Hive Mind, evokes a wasp's community, of which the Overlook's malevolent Eldritch Being mind would be the queen. This is subtly alluded to in the films through the hexagonal floor pattern seen in the hallway carpeting, evoking the image of a wasp or bee hive.
• Asshole Victim: In all adaptations, the hotel is eventually burned down and variably purified, implicitly killing the Genius Loci. Considering all the havoc the place has caused to people and families and how depraved the intelligence is, the destruction is unlikely to be mourned.
• The Assimilator: In the novel, it's implied the Overlook incorporates its victims into itself, or at least corrupts them into its servants.
• Ax-Crazy: Once it starts talking in both the film and literary continuities, the Overlook proves to be extremely sadistic and arrogant, with a love of taunting its victims.
• Beneath the Mask: Once it fully corrupts Jack, Danny calls it out for using him as a "mask" and points out that the Overlook is the one calling the shots; it's simply taken his form to torment his family. The Overlook acknowledges this after Jack starts Fighting from the Inside and drops the act. A similar exchange occurs between it and Abra in the film adaptation of Doctor Sleep once it possesses Danny.
  Overlook: Mask's off, then.
• Big Bad: It's the one causing all the problems in the first book and film, using Jack as The Heavy. It also serves as the Final Boss of the film adaptation of Doctor Sleep, upstaging Rose The Hat (and by extension, the rest of the True Knot) in the process.
• Clipped-Wing Angel: When it fully possesses Jack, Danny recognizes it's no longer his father and stops being afraid of it. It also gets a lot more theatrical in its dialogue.
• The Corrupter: The Overlook can drive people into becoming murderers by amplifying their negative emotions. It drives Jack to homicidal madness, and did the same to Delbert Grady before him. It only seems to be able to corrupt people with weakened mental states or who were already bad people, as Wendy is immune to its influence and Halloran is able to fight off its brainwashing.
• Eldritch Abomination: It's unclear what exactly the Overlook is, but it has inexplicably become a Lovecraftian entity that hunts people with Shine and can brainwash people into becoming deranged murderers.
• Eldritch Location: The Overlook isn't merely a vessel for evil, but a sinister, sentient, borderline-Lovecraftian entity all to its own. In Doctor Sleep, it's revealed that the location itself is saturated with supernatural energy, which makes it a prime location for ghosts to manifest, but the explicit cause is never revealed.
• Embodiment of Vice: The Overlook Hotel isn't just Made of Evil, it is specifically made of all the worst the United States have to offer. Its backstory contains all sorts of tragedies and horrors reflecting historical problems in American society (the tyrannical abuse of the rich and wealthy, prostitution, financial corruption, criminal organizations) and the hotel picked on some of the most negative traits of its famous and infamous guests (for example its blatant racism and its use of outdated racist terms when talking about Afro-Americans). The hotel is a Deconstruction of 20th century America, as it presents itself as a rich, luxurious and glamorous place for the wealthy and the elite that welcomed the greatest American dignitaries - only to be revealed as a wretched, soiled and corrupt place animated by a murderous, racist and manipulative mind, and whose history is filled with tragedies, abuses and crimes. The parallel becomes clearer when one notices that the hotel's Animal Motif is evil, harmful wasps, and that all of the clients and owners of the Overlook were precisely WASPs - White Anglo-Saxon Protestants.
  • Kubrick's movie highlighted and expanded this subtext of the Overlook Hotel representing the dark side of America, by adding the backstory that the hotel was built on stolen Native American ground, by desecrating a burial ground - all the while the modern-day decoration reuses heavily Native motif and ornaments. This makes a clear metaphor for the white Americans invading and then appropriating what belonged to those that originally lived on the land.
• Evil Gloating: In the novel, once it fully possesses Jack and brutally stamps out his attempt at Fighting from the Inside by bashing his face in with a mallet, it drops any pretense of being Danny's father and starts gleefully taunting him.
  The Overlook: Masks off, then. No more interruptions. Anything else to say? Are you sure you wouldn't like to run? A game of tag, perhaps? All we have is time, you know. An eternity of time. Or shall we end it? Might as well. We're missing the party.
• Evil Is Petty:
  • It encourages racism and other petty forms of bigotry in those it possesses/influences out of nothing more than it simply seems to enjoy doing so.
  • The Overlook also enjoys harassing people with the Shine even during the regular season with its ghosts, knowing they won't be believed. It once scared Halloran with Mrs. Massey, and drove a maid to quitting her job by scaring her in the same manner.
  • When it corners Danny at the climax of the original novel while possessing Jack, it takes the time to indulge in Evil Gloating and deliberately takes its time before killing him out of sadism.
• Evil Plan: It wants to consume people with the Shine (such as Danny and Abra) so it can spread its corrupting influence beyond its grounds. The events of Doctor Sleep also heavily imply that it naturally hunts after those with the Shine for sustenance, and it's particularly interested in Danny since his Shine is so vast in power that it could basically torture the entire state of Colorado without going hungry.
• Faux Affably Evil: It initially is mostly static, and politely manipulates Jack at several points, but it is a purely malevolent and heartless intelligence. Heck, it's even noted that it's only "actively" evil when there's few people around it, meaning that for the rest of the time it's assuming a façade of civility through not attacking its staff and guests.
• Flat Character: Played for Horror, especially in the books. The Overlook has no Hidden Depths or moments of humanity. It is purely a malevolent being, dedicated to causing torment for its own sake. It's implied it doesn't even need Danny's Shine, and it simply views claiming his soul as a bonus to corrupting Jack. The Overlook's sheer, inexplicable evil and how mysterious its origins are make it a quite terrifying figure.
• For the Evulz: There doesn't seem to be any reason why it drives people insane and murders them, it just does. In the Kubrick film continuity, the Overlook is explicitly interested in harvesting Steam just like the True Knot are, presumably making people attack one another to this end, but even then this is implied to be only part of its ultimate plan to ensure further suffering and misery. In the novels, it doesn't even have that; Danny and Halloran both point out it doesn't need Danny's Shine, and that it simply views feeding off it as a bonus to corrupting Jack.
• Genius Loci: The hotel isn't haunted by evil ghosts, the hotel is evil and keeps the ghosts around. Or it might be both. It's pretty vague, especially in the movies, but said films show the hotel is also interested in harvesting Steam.
• Greed: In the book, Danny and Halloran imply it doesn't actually need to feed on Danny's Shine to survive. It just craves his power out of sheer appetite and likes hurting people.
• Hate Sink: A rare case of a building falling into this trope, but the Overlook Hotel is shown in all of the franchise's associated media to be a monstrous and despicable Genius Loci. It drives its inhabitants to murderous insanity ending with the deaths of the caretakers and their families, and also psychologically tortures anyone who stays too close to it for too long. As well, the Overlook has an utterly vile and vulgar personality; it takes great joy in tormenting the five year-old Danny and it's gleefully racist and misogynistic, taking particular pleasure in tormenting Halloran by screaming racial slurs at him at deafening volumes with its telepathy.
• The Heartless: While what exactly the Overlook is is left ambiguous, it appears to be an amalgamation of the worst aspects of its victims, or at least assimilates them. In turn, the Overlook can amplify negative emotions itself in other people until it can take them over.
• Hell Hotel: The Overlook Hotel is easily one of the most iconic examples of this trope in the history of fiction (right alongside the Bates Motel and the titular room featured in 1408), and one of the primary Trope Codifiers for the entirety of film. Interestingly, though, the Overlook seems to only show its true horrific nature in the off-season, especially if any of them has the "Shine". When the hotel is regularly populated by guests during its on-season, it seems to function normally with virtually no supernatural activity ever occurring and almost no one the wiser.
• Hive Mind: It's compared to a wasp hive by Halloran, and the ghosts form a collective intelligence that's dedicated to the Overlook's will. The Overlook is implied to be their leader and they ominously refer to it as "the management", but when it appears in the climax it's face is a coalition of all the ghosts inhabiting it.
• Hoist by His Own Petard:
  • In the film continuity, its corruption of Jack Torrance means it ends up closed down and condemned, abandoned for decades.
  • In the book, it becomes too distracted with chasing Danny to relieve the boiler pressure, ultimately resulting in its destruction.
• Humanoid Abomination: Once it fully takes over Jack's body in the book. It still looks like Jack's body, but can walk around with a knife in its back and its face doesn't clearly resemble anyone. That's when the story stops referring to Jack as Jack and starts referring to him as "It". Similarly, when it possesses Dan in the film adaptation of Doctor Sleep, poor Dan looks awful, only able to hobble around thanks to the axe wound he got in his leg from Rose The Hat, one of his eyes being blinded and his skin turning pale; it gets to the point where he looks more like a walking corpse than anything else.
• Indian Burial Ground: What the Overlook Hotel is built on top of (in the films at least). It's implied the bad mojo from this act is how the hotel became supernaturally active. Some also view this as a layer of the film's allegory to the genocide of the Native American peoples.
• It Can Think: In the novel, it initially appears the Overlook is merely haunted, but it becomes apparent the hotel itself is sentient and has total control over the spirits inside it.
• Karma Houdini Warranty: After escaping its fate in Kubrick's take on the novel, the Overlook meets its demise in Doctor Sleep when Danny overloads the boiler causing it to explode.
• Karmic Death: In the novel, the Overlook's corruption of Jack leads directly to its death. It so thoroughly destroys his personality that it forgets that Jack needs to attend to the hotel's malfunctioning boiler, which explodes and burns the Overlook to the ground.
• Laser-Guided Karma: The film adaptation of Doctor Sleep reveals that its corruption of Jack Torrance (and resultant murder of Hallorann) drove the Overlook out of business through the resulting controversy, leaving it with nothing to feed on. Additionally, it's quite fitting that it's ultimately burned to the ground by the child (now grown up) who it had previously tried to first brutally murder and later possess into a murder-suicide.
• Logical Weakness: As a building, it can't affect people beyond its grounds. Unless it consumes Danny and/or Abra and gains their power.... It can also be destroyed like any other building or simply abandoned as it was after Jack's rampage, starving it of people to feed on.
• Loss of Identity: In the books, the Overlook inflicts this on its victims and the people it corrupts, overwriting the original personality with its own malicious one. Danny points out that the fully corrupted Jack is simply an extension of the Overlook's own will and that he's not the one in control, and it overwrote Roger and Grady's personalities with new ones to better suit its purposes.
• Magic Is a Monster Magnet: The Overlook can't do much to people with little to no Psychic Powers (the titular "Shining"). When someone as gifted as Danny shows up, very bad things happen. The sequel Doctor Sleep reveals that some of the Overlook's spirits continued to haunt Danny well into adulthood although by then he has become strong enough to seal them in his own mind.
• Manipulative Bastard: It viciously plays on Jack's anger, alcoholism and feelings of victimhood. It attempts to do the same with Dan's alcoholism and self-hatred when he comes back in Doctor Sleep, but thanks to his Heroic Willpower, it's not nearly as successful; it's only able to succeed at possessing him through brute force.
• Meaningful Name: The name itself, in-universe, may refer to the hotel overlooking the beautiful scenery of the Rocky Mountains. However, it mainly refers to how the hotel overlooks the horrific, unthinkable tragedies that have occurred throughout its history and how both its human staff and resident spirits are trying to sweep these nightmarish events under the rug.
• More than Mind Control: The Overlook can corrupt people, but only by drawing on their pre-existing resentment and amplifying it by a thousand fold. It's able to get such a strong hold on Jack because he already was prone to violence, and it's able to use Dick's own resentment over his own suffering to nearly brainwash him into another one of its puppets.
• Mouth of Sauron: What the job of "caretaker" seems to entail in the end is besoming the Overlook's mouthpiece and primary way of interacting with the outside world.
• Nothing Is Scarier: The Overlook remains in the background throughout both the books and films, relying on Grady to do the talking for it, and it only appears personally in the climax of the original novel and the second film. Nothing about what the Overlook is or its origins is ever explained in any medium either; it simply is.
• Orcus on His Throne: The Overlook primarily interacts with people through the ghosts it controls, letting them explain what "the management" wants while it waits in the background. It only starts interacting with the Torrances and Halloran itself when it possesses Jack, allowing it to take center stage.
• Politically Incorrect Villain: Not only is it a malevolent murderous building, but also uses a lot of racist and sexist insults in its psychic assaults, which serves to add to the Eldritch Location's depravity. Considering how the place is mentioned as having been built on an Indian Burial Ground in the films, From a Certain Point of View this makes the Overlook a dark reflection of white entitlement during the westward expansion of the United States.
• Pragmatic Villainy: It seemingly went years without turning any other winter caretakers mad like it did Grady and Jack (most likely because none of them had the Shine and/or had family members who had the Shine and so weren’t worth the effort to try and "eat"), and it never carries out supernatural activities during the regular season so as to avoid suspicion.
• Ragnarök Proofing: In the Doctor Sleep movie, despite being closed down for forty years, the Overlook's generators and boilers are still in working order when Dan starts them back up (although the boiler bursts and explodes in a matter of hours or less), and there isn't a single inactive light-bulb when the building starts back up. Whilst the majority of the Overlook's facilities are visibly decayed and rotting from decades of misuse, the Gold Room and its attached washroom in particular are in absolutely pristine condition as if they never closed at all. All of this is justified by the Hotel's supernatural nature, with the Gold Room being one of the building's main hotspots.
• Sadist: Its only motive for what it does seems to be causing carnage and death for its own enjoyment. Doctor Sleep brings up the possibility of it feeding on people with the Shine for its continued survival like with the True Knot, but even then it's suggested to be more for the opportunity of getting to spread its depravity beyond its grounds.
• Satanic Archetype: The Overlook is an Eldritch Abomination that corrupts otherwise decent people through manipulation and false promises of promoting them to "management". It's also associated primarily with red in the films, and cultivates its own army of damned souls - both of the people it corrupted or people who were already evil to begin with. It prominently corrupts and attempts to corrupt Jack and Dan respectively via tempting them with free alcohol ("the devil's nectar"), which is their shared worst impulse; and when that fails to work on Dan, it instead tries to persuade him to abandon Abra via playing on other self-centered base impulse. It's capable of outright demonic possession once it gets a tight enough hold on someone and decides to "take the masks off".
• Spared by the Adaptation: In the book version of The Shining, the Hotel is burned down and neutralized when the boiler explodes, whereas the Kubrick film completely adapts this out and ends with the Hotel still standing. It becomes the "dies later than in the source material" version in the movie adaptation of Doctor Sleep, where the Kubrick version of the Overlook meets the novel counterpart's fate at the story's climax.
• Start of Darkness: Averted in the novel. Unlike in the movie, where the Overlook's curse date back to its Indian Burial Ground situation, in the novel there is no actual explanation or reason given for the Overlook's evilness or supernatural powers. All we know is that somehow the place attracted vicious people and bad events, and that things grew worse and worse with time as the place fed off dark energy - but it is never explicitely stated how or when the Overlook became haunted, supernatural or even conscious. The deleted prologue, Before the Play only furthers the mystery, as it presents the story of the man who built the Overlook Hotel - and how it was haunted already back then. In fact, the very first "victim" of the Overlook seems to have been its creator's own son, who died as the Overlook was just starting its construction, in a horse accident on the exact location where the topiary now stands.
• Taking You with Me: Even as it's burning to the ground in the original novel, it's able to very quickly gaslight Dick into homicidal rage towards the Torrances. He thankfully snaps out of it before they realize what's going on and discards the roque mallet he would have attacked them with.
• Villainous Breakdown:
  • In the novel, the Overlook has a screaming breakdown when it realizes the boiler is going to explode, insisting that it can't die and shrieking profanity.
  • In the movie adaptation of Doctor Sleep, it, after possessing Dan, is visibly freaking out when Dan starts Fighting from the Inside and eventually succeeds in burning it to the ground.
• Villain with Good Publicity: In a sense. It's smart enough not to have any supernatural activity happen when it has many guests, and only seems to prey on caretakers during the winter period where it's all but vacant. As far as the world is concerned, it's nothing more than a fancy hotel in a beautiful, scenic location. This apparently went away in the movie continuity after Jack's rampage got the hotel closed down for good.
• Voice of the Legion: In the film version of Doctor Sleep, when it possesses Dan and tries to kill Abra, the Overlook speaks through Dan with all of the voices of its ghosts.
  • A variation happened already in the original Shining novel, as "Face of the Legion". When Jack starts hitting himself with the mallet when fighting off the Hotel's possession, Danny sees with each hit, in place of his father's face, the one of each of the numerous ghosts haunting the building. When the Overlook completely takes over Jack, the face appearing is described as being a perfect mix of the traits of all the ghostly faces that came before it.
• Wicked Cultured: In the novel, the Overlook is a fan of Edgar Allan Poe and frequently quotes The Masque of the Red Death. The people under its control frequently quote it, and it manifests as intrusive thoughts even in people not under the hotel's control.

Dick Hallorann

Richard "Dick" Hallorann

Played by: Scatman Crothers (1980 film), Melvin Van Peebles (1997 miniseries), and Carl Lumbly (Doctor Sleep)

"Some places are like people: some shine and some don't."

A former army cook, and currently the head chef of The Overlook, Dick Halloran is the first person Danny meets who possesses mental abilities like his own, and introduces him to the concept of "Shining", something Halloran himself was taught by his grandmother.

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• Abusive Parents: Was molested and abused by his monstrous grandfather Andy. His parents knew about it, but were too afraid to stop it, not to mention they hoped to inherit the old man's money. This isn't mentioned in the films but in Doctor Sleep, he references his grandfather being a violently abusive man who Dick hated so much he celebrated when he died, and had no problem sealing away his ghost forever.
• Age Lift: He's fifty-seven in the book and played by a seventy-year old actor in the film.
• Aloof Leader, Affable Subordinate: Where Ullman is cruel and condescending towards Jack, Halloran is nothing but friendly and welcoming.
• Big Damn Heroes: In the book. In the movie, this is subverted, as he gets killed by Jack almost the minute he arrives, but in either scenario his arrival is what allows Wendy and Danny to escape.
• Black Dude Dies First: Dies the first death of the film with an axe to the chest courtesy of Jack.
• Canon Immigrant: While most of Stephen King's novels are connected in some way, he shows up in a flashback of It, as a soldier that serves as a cook in a black nightclub. His shining, though not specifically mentioned, saves several people when the Legion of White Decency burns the place down.
• Cool Car: His prized Mercedes, a classic muscle car from the 1950s. He still has it in the prologue of Doctor Sleep, at which point it's nearly an antique.
• Cool Old Guy: Is already well into his 60's by the time the story starts and a friendly, charming man who gets along great with Danny and Wendy. He's still this even in death.
• Cowardly Lion: Halloran is justifiably terrified of the Overlook and reluctant to save Danny, but he still goes to do it and bravely squares off against the Overlook's spirits and the corrupted Jack.
• Deadpan Snarker: He's quite witty and prone to cracking jokes.
• Death by Adaptation: Is killed by Jack in the film. In the book, he survives and lives to a ripe old age.
• Dirty Old Man: In the movie, he's about seventy, and has a couple of naked lady posters in his room.
• Foil: To Jack. Both grew up in horrifically abusive households and both have resentment issues due to bad experiences, Jack with bad authority figures and Dick due to having dealt with abuse and racism his whole life. Both are aware of the supernatural aspects of the hotel but Dick has managed to resist the sway while Jack is completely overtaken by it. To put it simply, both men have good reasons to hate the world but while Dick has been able to keep his anger and resentment in check and made an effort to be a good person, Jack has let his bitterness and rage completely overtake him, making him easy prey for the hotel.
• Hero of Another Story: Dick's led a long and storied life before meeting the Torrances. It features him in a cameo as one of the men who help set up a bar for black soldiers, and later helping rescue several patrons after predicting the local KKK chapter would burn it down with his shine.
• Impaled with Extreme Prejudice: Takes an ax in the chest in the movie.
• Like Father, Unlike Son: Dick is a kind, sincere man who goes out of his way to help others while his grandfather was a truly rotten bastard who horrifically abused him and his grandmother.
• Magical Negro: Subverted. Danny's powers are his own, but befriending Dick helps him feel a little more confident about it.
• The Mentor: To Danny, first explaining the Shining to him and later helping him seal away the remaining malevolent spirits of the Overlook. Hallorann himself acknowledges this during the prologue of Doctor Sleep:
  "When the pupil is ready, the teacher will appear."
• Mentor Occupational Hazard: In the film, he's murdered by Jack while trying to rescue Wendy and Danny. It's played straight in the novels as well; Halloran passes away in 1999 of natural causes, much to Danny's sadness. He still returns in both mediums as a Spirit Advisor to Danny.
• Mentor in Sour Armor: Downplayed. Halloran is quite cynical thanks to the trauma he's gone through throughout his life, but he keeps it mostly hidden from Danny and does his best not to let his pessimism influence him.
• Mr. Exposition: He provides Danny with most of the knowledge about what the shining is and how it works.
• Mundane Utility: Mentions to Danny that he's sometimes used his Shine to win at horse race betting, but because he can't control when or how his psychic visions happen, and the visions don't always come true, his win-fail rate is about 50-50.
• Nice Guy: He's very friendly towards the Overlook's employees and the Torrance family. He even comes all the way back to the Overlook in order to make sure they're alright.
• Nice Mean And In Between: He's the Nice to Watson's In-Between and Ullman's Mean. Dick is kind, friendly, and he's nothing but hospitable to the Torrances. He even risks his life to save them despite barely knowing them, simply because it's the right thing to do.
• Parental Substitute: After Jack's breakdown and death, Dick steps in as Danny's main father figure. He even acts as a guide after his death in both the novel and film continuities.
• Passed in Their Sleep: Doctor Sleep reveals that Halloran died in his sleep from a heart attack in 1999.
• Posthumous Character: Manages to help out even after his death, briefly commandeering the body of one of Dan's patients to advise him on dealing with the True Knot.
• Psychic Powers: Same as Danny. They can communicate even without talking simply by thoughts.
• The Resenter: Like Wendy and Jack, Hallorann has a subtle resentful streak that the Overlook tries to exploit in a last-ditch effort to kill Wendy and Danny; in Halloran's case, it's his lingering resentment toward having spent his whole life being bossed around by white people.
• So Proud of You: When he reunites with adult Dan eight years on, he is clearly proud at how he has managed to keep his sobriety and worked to overcome his demons. His last words are even telling Dan that he "grew up fine".
• Spirit Advisor: Since Hallorann is already dead in this version, he teaches Danny how to seal the ghosts of the Overlook inside his mind this way.
• Sudden Sequel Death Syndrome: Dies of old age in the three-and-a-half-decade gap between novels. But unlike Wendy, he gets to make a brief return as a spirit.
• Supreme Chef: Implied, despite his humble beginnings as an army cook, Dick has his pick of jobs at upscale resorts and restaurants in his old age, and switches between working in Florida and New England depending on the season.
• Weak, but Skilled: A Downplayed example. Halloran's "shining" is described as actually being fairly "bright" by world standards, yet compared to Danny's untapped potential it's equated to a flashlight. That being said, Halloran is able to wield his with much more efficiency (using the metaphor of a focused, powerful flashlight) from experience, and because of his skill, he's able to resist the overwhelming psychological influence of the Hotel at the end like nobody else.
• What the Hell, Hero?: In the films, Danny calls out Halloran for claiming the Overlook's spirits couldn't hurt him. Halloran explains that his Shining wasn't powerful enough to catch the hotel's eye, but Danny was and the Overlook wanted to feed off of him.

Stuart Ullman

Stuart Ullman

Played by: Barry Nelson (1980 film) and Elliott Gould (1997 miniseries)

" I don't suppose they told you anything in Denver about the tragedy we had in the Winter of 1970."

The manager of the Overlook, a somewhat tyrannical little man who nontheless is the first manager in the Overlook's 70-year history to run the hotel profitably.

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• Adaptational Attractiveness: In the novel, Ullman is described as being short and pudgy. In both adaptations, he is portrayed by actors who are tall and trim.
• Adaptational Dumbass: In the book, Ullman recognizes the warning signs Jack could turn out similarly to Delbert Grady and is understandably reluctant to hire him. In the film, he doesn't see any red flags with Jack's behavior and has no hesitation about bringing him onboard.
• Adaptational Nice Guy: Ullman in the film was more polite and less dickish than Ullman in the book. In the film, he states he wholeheartedly agrees with his bosses' recommendation to hire Jack, while in the book he makes it clear he wouldn't have hired Jack if the decision was left to him owing to Jack's past alcoholism.
• Adaptational Villainy: However, in the deleted ending, Ullman handing Jack's tennis ball to Danny implied that he was somehow involved with the supernatural forces in the hotel.
• Aloof Leader, Affable Subordinate: Ullman is harsh, confrontational, and quite condescending towards Jack and his other employees. Halloran and Watson are much friendlier to Jack, and he gels quite well with them.
• Bad Boss: Played with, working under him sure as hell isn't fun, but it's not out of ego or sadism like this trope usually is, but because Ullman is dedicated to running the Overlook smoothly at the cost of everything else. Still, he's a nightmare to work with; he's a demanding perfectionist who ignores any opinion he doesn't like from his employees, and he's unnecessarily condescending to Jack.
• Believing Their Own Lies: Ullman actively ignores any sign something is wrong with the Overlook, and is totally convinced it's a perfect operation. He actively ignores both his own corner-cutting, the Overlook's sordid past, and any reports that suggest supernatural phenomena.
• Brutally Honest: He's quite blunt with Jack, admitting he doesn't like him, that he doesn't care if Jack returns the favor, and points out he only got the job out of nepotism.
• Bunny-Ears Lawyer: A darker variant than normal. He's a Bad Boss and unrelentingly cruel to the people who work for him, but Ullman's methods work. Throughout the Overlook's decades-long history, he's the only manager who has kept the hotel in the black and prevented any scandals whatsoever.
• Card-Carrying Jerkass: He's well aware he's a jerk and that his employees don't like him, he just doesn't care. As Ullman puts it, he feels being a Mean Boss is what it takes to run a hotel properly.
  Ullman: During the season that runs from May fifteenth to September thirtieth, the Overlook employs one hundred and ten people full-time; one for every room, you might say. I don't think many of them like me and I suspect some of them think I'm a bit of a bastard. They would be correct in their judgement of my character. I have to be a bit of a bastard to run this hotel in the manner it deserves.
• Corrupt Corporate Executive: Ullman cuts plenty of corners in running the Overlook to stay cost-effective. Watson tells Jack that he knows the boiler is a fire hazard that could very likely destroy the hotel, but he won't have it replaced just to penny pinch.
• Cutting Corners: Ullman cuts quite a bit of corners to save money on running the Overlook. He tried to leave rat poison in the kitchen because it was cheaper than mouse traps until Halloran persuaded him otherwise, and he keeps the Overlook's dangerous boiler installed despite the very real danger it could explode.
• Dislikes the New Guy: Justified. He immediately shows his disdain for his new employee Jack, but he has legitimate reasons for it. Jack is an alcoholic with a history of violence, he's gained the position entirely from nepotism, and the last alcoholic Ullman hired for the job killed his entire family and then himself. Ullman understandably doesn't want a repeat of the situation, and the novel's events demonstrate he was right to be worried.
• Everyone Has Standards: He's genuinely horrified by Delbert Grady's killing of his own family, and the reason he's so skeptical of Jack is because he's worried about the incident repeating itself. It turns out he had good cause to worry.
• Excellent Judge of Character: Unlike most people, Ullman is immediately able to sense Jack is bad news and likely going to be terrible at being a winter caretaker, but he can't fight Al Shockley's influence.
• Fat Bastard: He's described as being overweight in the novel, and he's quite a Jerkass.
• Friend to All Children: For as much of a jerk as he is, he's quite kind to Danny and treats him well. Wendy notes internally that Danny tends to bring out the best in people.
• Greed: Oddly enough, it's downplayed despite Ullman being The Scrooge. It's implied he's not so much greedy as he is obsessed with making sure the Overlook runs properly, and he doesn't want to waste money they can't afford to spend.
• Hated by All: He's despised by all of his employees for being a massive Jerkass who is terrible to work for. He's well-aware of this and doesn't care at all as long as the Overlook stays running.
• Hypocrite: For all his perfectionism and coming down hard on anyone who doesn't meet his standards, all supposedly for the greater good of the Overlook, he doesn't have a problem cutting costs across the hotel out of sheer cheapness, even refusing to fix the boiler despite it being a serious hazard.
• I Did What I Had to Do: Ullman is a nightmare to work with and he treats his employees horribly, but he doesn't care. He feels that being a Jerkass is key to running a good hotel, and he doesn't care if he has to run roughshod over his employees to do it.
• I Reject Your Reality: Ullman denies that there's any problem with the Overlook, no matter how small. His employees tell a different story; both Watson and Halloran describe that Ullman frequently cuts corners, and Watson points out that the Overlook's malfunctioning boiler is a massive fire hazard. It's even hinted he's unaware of the Overlook's supernatural nature out of sheer denial of the hotel's faults.
• Invisible to Normals: Like Watson, Ullman either has no Shining at all, or it's so minuscule the Hotel can't affect him. It's ambiguous whether or not his attachment to the hotel is influenced by its supernatural nature, but it's entirely possible it's just a psychological attachment considering how much work he's put into running it, rather than the hotel itself making him obsessed like it does with Jack. At any rate, he can leave at the end of the season, even if he's not really happy to do so, as he hates the hotel he manages during the winter.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: For all his dickishness, he does care deeply about the hotel and wants to make it as successful as he can and he's perfectly capable of being nice outside of his role, making an effort to be very welcoming to Wendy and Danny.
• Jerkass Has a Point:
  • Mr. Ullman, the hotel manager, may be an "officious little prick," but he is quite right that hiring Jack Torrance, an abusive alcoholic, as the winter caretaker is a bad idea.
  • For all Jack's loathing of him, Ullman is very good at his job, including cleaning up the messes and keeping the hotel in the black. Even Watson, who despises Ullman admits this.
  • When Jack calls him out for not telling him about the Overlook's darker history, Ullman bluntly replies it doesn't matter. As far as Ullman knows, the Overlook is a perfectly normal hotel, and its sordid past has no relevance outside of sullying its reputation, so he had no reason to tell him.
• Laser-Guided Karma: Ullman chooses to leave the Overlook's highly dangerous boiler installed to cut costs, despite numerous warnings from his employees. It eventually destroys his beloved hotel.
• A Lighter Shade of Black: Ullman is a corner-cutting Jerkass to be sure, but he's much better than the previous owner, Horace Derwent. Where Ullman is a Villainy-Free Villain for the most part, where Derwent was implied to be using the Overlook as a front for mob activities. Not to mention that he's nowhere near as evil as the hotel itself.
• Mean Boss: While it's implied he's a Bad Boss to most of his employees, Ullman doesn't do anything unreasonable to Jack. He quite rudely points out he got the job out of nepotism and he behaves like a Jerkass, but he has genuinely reasonable concerns. He does try to fire Jack, but only after he threatens to write a smear piece against the Overlook.
• Mood Dissonance: In the film, when he reveals Delbert Grady's murder suicide to Jack, he's smiling and chuckling the entire time despite the gruesome nature of it.
• Mr. Exposition: He exposits most of the history of the Overlook and the history of its management failing to make a profit of it. It's played with, as he leaves out most of the Overlook's darker history, something Jack calls him out on.
• My Greatest Failure: He views hiring Grady as his biggest mistake, as he knew the man was likely unreliable and that having a family over could result in tragedy, but did so anyway. The resulting murder-suicide weighs heavily on him, and causes most of his misgivings with Jack.
• The Napoleon: Very much subverted. Ullman is a short man who acts like a smarmy bully with Jack and lords over his employees with an iron fist. He is actually a decent enough man who deeply loves the hotel and wants to do what is best for it. He knows that his employees don't like him, and doesn't care, because he feels that "one has to be a bit of a bastard" in order to effectively manage a world-class resort hotel. Considering that he is the only manager in the 70-year history of the hotel to run it profitably, he's probably right.
• Nice Mean And In Between: He's the Mean to Halloran's Nice and Watson's In-Between. Ullman is a condescending, snide perfectionist and while he does have legitimate concerns about Jack's performance, he's a nightmare to work for and an abusive employer.
• Nice to the Waiter: He treats his staff abominably and only fakes being nice to his employees, but he genuinely treats Wendy and Danny well.
• Nothing Personal: He doesn't like Jack, but he admits he doesn't hate him personally. He just views him as unfit for the position, and states that all his condescending treatment of Jack wasn't persona. He just wants what's best for the Overlook.
• Not So Above It All: He's scrupulously dedicated to the Overlook's success, but Halloran notes Ullman frequently cuts corners. Rather than hire an exterminator for a rat infestation, he tried to place rat poison in the kitchen. He admittedly relented when Halloran pointed out it could poison the food, but he still placed rat traps there rather than call pest control.
• Obliviously Evil: Downplayed. Ullman knows he's a Jerkass and a Bad Boss, but as far as he knows the Overlook is an ordinary hotel. He's unaware his efforts to keep it afloat are letting an Eldritch Abomination assimilate more people into itself and drive people to madness.
• Obstructive Bureaucrat: He's ignored any warnings from his employees about the danger the boiler poses to the hotel to save on costs, and insists on waiting years to replace it just to save a few dollars.
• The Perfectionist: He demands that the Overlook be run with the utmost competence, and it makes him a nightmare to work with because of his unreasonable standards. He's successfully able to run the Overlook, which is no small feat, but he's downright delusional at times about its capabilities, such as claiming the Overlook doesn't have any rats, which Jack notes is highly unlikely.
• Pet the Dog: He treats Jack like crap, and isn't any nicer to his other employees, but he's perfectly cordial to Wendy and even nicer to Danny.
• Pointy-Haired Boss: Downplayed. Ullman is competent for the most part, and is simply mean, but he has elements of this. He's refused to replace the Overlook's boiler despite the danger it poses to save on costs, and he once nearly poisoned the Overlook's food supply by putting rat poison in the kitchen. Although in his defense, he quickly made up for his mistake after Halloran pointed out the danger.
• The Scrooge: He's determined not to spend any money if he can help it, no matter what. It's most notable with the Overlook's boiler. It could and very likely will explode, but Ullman refuses to replace it just to save on costs and intends to wait years to do so, despite multiple warnings from his subordinates.
• Slave to PR: He's dedicated to making the Overlook profitable, and he thus covers up most of its darker history to avoid ruining its reputation. He panics when Jack threatens to write a sear piece because it stands a very real chance of running the hotel out of business.
• Slobs vs. Snobs: Part of the reason why Jack despises him is because Ullman is fastidious, wealthy, and runs an establishment catering to upper-class clientele. Jack' own envy and resentments color his impression of Ullman, which isn't helped by the fact that Ullman treats his underlings horribly and views them as disposable, and demonstrates signs of classism himself.
• Small Role, Big Impact: He's a minor character in the grand scheme of things. However, his refusal to replace the Overlook's malfunctioning boiler eventually leads to the hotel's destruction.
• Smug Snake: He's quite smug and condescending while onboarding Jack. He insults him to his face and blatantly patronizes him, secure in the fact Jack can't retaliate.
• Superior Successor: Most of the Overlook's past managers have consistently failed to make it profitable, and at least under Derwent it was actively corrupt and involved in criminal activity. Ullman by contrast has made a legitimate profit from the hotel and keeps things running smoothly. He does cut corners, but never to a dangerous extent and he doesn't want anything seedy going on at the Overlook.
• Unwitting Instigator of Doom: Inverted, as Ullman's dangerous corner-cutting winds up saving the protagonists. Ullman chose to leave the Overlook's unstable and volatile boiler in place to save on costs despite warnings, which eventually destroys the Overlook.
• Villainy-Free Villain: Ullman is a Jerkass and antagonistic towards Jack, but he doesn't do anything legally wrong outside of occasionally cutting corners - and even then, never to a dangerous extent.
• Well-Intentioned Extremist: Downplayed. Calling him an "extremist" is an exaggeration, but Ullman genuinely wants the Overlook to be successful and to give its guests a good experience. He believes that being a Mean Boss is key to it, and he's a brutal taskmaster to his employees in service of it.
• Workaholic: It's implied he dedicates his every waking hour into maintaining the Overlook and he puts a lot of effort into keeping it running.

Al Shockley

Al Shockley

Played By: Jan Van Sickle (miniseries)

A member of the Board of Directors of the Overlook and Jack's best friend.

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• The Alcoholic: He bonded with Jack because both of them were invariably the drunkest people in the room. The two also quit drinking at the same time, after Al accidentally ran over a bicycle while Jack rode shotgun and the two - thankfully wrongfully - believed they had struck a child.
• Cloudcuckoolander: Implied and downplayed. Al refers to beer as "martians" for whatever reason, but never demonstrates any other sing of eccentricity.
• The Ghost: He never appears in person aside from flashbacks in the novel and is only mentioned in the film.
• Horrible Judge of Character: Al is ignorant to Jack's violent temper and genuinely believes Jack's beating of George Hatfield was blown out of proportion.
• Mr. Vice Guy: Al was a massive alcoholic back in the day, but he's a genuinely good friend to Jack and does his best to help him.
• Nepotism: A sympathetic version. He gets Jack his job as caretaker using his influence over the Overlook, but only because Jack is struggling financially and unemployed.
• Nice Guy: He goes to extraordinary lengths to help Jack and looks out for him even when Jack threatens his livelihood. He even loans Wendy money to help her stay afloat after Jack dies.
• Non-Idle Rich: He has enough money to justify staying lazy for the rest of his life, but he still works as a tennis coach out of what seems to be genuine passion.
• Recovered Addict: He was just as much of an alcoholic as Jack and the two frequently went out on drinking binges, but they both kicked the habit. Al stays On The Wagon, while Jack doesn't.
• Scare 'Em Straight: He and Jack quit drinking after they ran over a bicycle while driving drunk. Fortunately, they didn't hit anyone, but the incident drove them to quit out of fear of the damage they could cause. Unlike Jack, Al remains On The Wagon.
• Toxic Friend Influence: Wendy viewed him as such, since he did nothing but encourage Jack's alcoholism. Ironically, Al winds up being the driving force for getting Jack to quit drinking altogether and genuinely tries to help him back on his feet.
• Undying Loyalty: Al is loyal to Jack no matter what. Even when Jack threatens to write a smear piece against the Overlook, spitting in Al's face, he still makes sure Jack keeps his job as caretaker.
• Unwitting Instigator of Doom: By all accounts, Al gave Jack his job at the Overlook because his friend was on hard times and he wanted to help. It results in the Overlook driving Jack to murderous insanity and leads to his death.
• Upper-Class Twit: Downplayed. He and Jack got up to a lot of drunken shenanigans together, but Al quit drinking and seems more responsible on the whole than Jack. Ullman also points that Shockley knows nothing about running a hotel, though to his credit he admits to this, and that Shockley forced his hand in hiring Jack.

Delbert Grady

Delbert Grady

Played by: Phillip Stone (1980 film) and Stanley Anderson (1997 miniseries)

"Perhaps they need a good talking to, if you don't mind my saying so. Perhaps a bit more. My girls, sir, they didn't care for the Overlook at first. One of them actually stole a pack of matches and tried to burn it down. But I "corrected" them sir. And when my wife tried to prevent me from doing my duty, I "corrected" her."

A former caretaker of the Overlook, an abusive drunkard whose horrific actions are the reason Ullman is reluctant to hire Jack for the position.

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• Adaptational Attractiveness: Philip Stone is considerably neater and more pleasant-looking than the thuggish, almost troll-like Grady described in the novel.
• Adaptational Nice Guy: He's described in the novel as having been a jerk from the start while the film has Ullman claim he was, by all accounts, a perfectly normal man who had good references and a good employment record. If he was evil before he came to the hotel, he did a much better job of hiding it.
• The Alcoholic: Like Jack, Grady was a heavy drinker. Ullman reveals that he'd brought a large supply of cheap whiskey with him to the hotel, and was apparently drunk off his ass when he killed his family.
• Composite Character: In both the movie and the 1997 miniseries.
  • Due to Horace Derwent, with whom Grady works together in the book, being reduced to a short scene in the movie, most of his dialogue and influence are given to Grady.
  • Due to Lloyd being Adapted Out of the miniseries, Grady inherits his role as the "Bartender Ghost".
• Creepy Monotone: "My girls, sir, they didn't care for the Overlook at first. One of them actually stole a pack of matches and tried to burn it down. But I corrected them, sir. And when my wife tried to prevent me from doing my duty, I corrected her."
• Deadly Euphemism: He never states that he murdered his wife and daughters, merely that he "corrected" them. He still manages to make it utterly terrifying.
• Death of Personality: It's implied in the novel that the Overlook overwrote Grady's original personality. Ullman and Watson describe him as having been a loutish drunk and he was a high school dropout, yet when Jack meets his ghost Grady is a sophisticated Evil Brit. Grady claims the Overlook has "improved" him.
• Driven to Suicide: After killing his family he put a shotgun in his mouth.
• Evil Brit: He speaks with a sophisticated, upper-class British accent, and he's a murderous Family Annihilator.
• Face–Heel Turn: By all accounts in the film, he was a perfectly normal man before coming to the Overlook, after which he gradually became homicidal. It's downplayed in the book, where he was always a Jerkass, but he wasn't a killer until the Overlook corrupted him.
• Family Annihilator: He killed his wife and children. Not content just with that, Grady follows up by attempting, from beyond the grave, to talk Jack into murdering his own family.
• Faux Affably Evil: Incredibly polite, charming, and personable. All in spite of brutally murdering his entire family and then killing himself. He drops the act when he convinces Jack to kill his family.
• The Heavy: The Overlook might be the actual Big Bad of the story, with Derwent serving as its central form, but Grady is the spirit that influences Jack directly.
• It's All About Me: From his creepy dialogue, he killed his family because they didn't understand the importance of his job as caretaker.
• The Jeeves: He starts off as this, being a polite and obsequious butler to Jack and quite professional. In the movie Jack even calls him "Jeeves".
• Jerkass: He's a casual racist and misogynist on top of being a Family Annihilator. The novel implies he was always a jerk; even the mostly friendly Watson tells Jack that Grady was bad news from the start and a shiftless drunk. The Overlook made him even worse.
• More than Mind Control: It's implied to be the case, as the Overlook corrupts people by amplifying their bad qualities rather than straight up possessing them. Ullman and Watson note that Grady was a Jerkass from the start and clearly untrustworthy. The Overlook simply made him even worse.
• Mouth of Sauron: After his death, he's become an extension of the Overlook's will and communicates its desires with Jack. He also helps tempt Jack into giving into its corruption by showing off how the Overlook has "improved" him from a high school dropout to a smooth, sophisticated member of the wealthy elite.
• Offing the Offspring: He "corrected" his two daughters when they tried to burn down the hotel.
• Politically Incorrect Villain: He is a vile racist and misogynist because being a murderer apparently wasn't evil enough. Whether he was already that way when he was alive or due to the influence of the hotel is anyone's guess.
• They Look Just Like Everyone Else!: By all accounts in the film, he was a perfectly normal man with a good employment record and references before he came to the Overlook. No one ever expected that he could be capable of such shockingly brutal crimes.
• Would Hurt a Child: He "corrected" his daughters and encourages Jack to do the same to Danny.

The Grady Twins

The Grady Twins

"...and ever."

Played by: Lisa/Louise Burns (1980 film) and Sadie/KK Heim (Doctor Sleep)

"Come play with us, Danny. Forever and ever and ever..."

The (possible) twin daughters of Delbert Grady, who now haunt the hallways of the Overlook along with their father.

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• Art Imitates Art: The twins are based on the Identical Twins, Roselle, New Jersey, 1967 by Diane Arbus.
• Ambiguously Related: the Hotel manager describes Grady's daughters as being eight and ten, but these characters appear to be identical twins due to the actresses who played them being such. So they may not have been intended to be Grady's daughters at all, but just other girls who died in the hotel. Then again, the movie is full of Mind Screw so this may just be another example of that. It could also be simply a result of the aforementioned casting of twins.
• Ascended Extras: Grady's daughters are only mentioned in passing in the novel, and the only child ghost that appears there is the unseen presence Danny encounters in the playground pipe, which he may just have imagined. In the film, they're one of the most recognizable ghosts. They also appear in the sequel front and centre in the finale and were included in the film's second trailer.
• Breakout Character: In the novel, Grady's daughters are minor characters that are barely mentioned in passing, and are definitely not twins. This contrasts with the films, where they are by far the most famous and iconic ghosts that haunt the Overlook Hotel. They even appear in the sequel, front and center among the other Overlook ghosts and saying their iconic line again which was also included in the film's second trailer.
• Creepy Children: It's unknown what they were like in life, but they're certainly this trope now.
• Creepy Monotone: Their style of speaking. It's seriously unnerving.
• Creepy Twins: Possibly one of the most iconic examples in all of horror cinema, or maybe even cinema as a whole. Funnily enough, they are explicitly mentioned as not being twins, being two years apart according to Ullman, but the two actresses who played them were so they are often deemed as such.
• Deadly Euphemism: They invite Danny to "come and play with them" with their true intent very clear underneath.
• Evil Brit: They are British like their father and seriously creepy.
• Faux Affably Evil: Their polite greeting and invitation to Danny to play with them is this trope incarnate.
• "Join Us" Drones: A variation with their signature line.
• Kill It with Fire: One of them tried to burn the Overlook down.
• No Name Given: Their first names are never revealed, only that they are Delbert Grady's daughters.
• Speak in Unison: How they try to invite Danny to play with them. It's haunting, to say the least.
• Strong Family Resemblance: As a side effect of being played by identical twins despite being mentioned as being two years apart. This has led many to believe they are also twins despite the explicitly mentioned age gap.
• Undead Children: A pair of ghostly children that haunt the Overlook.

Horace Derwent

Horace Derwent

Played by: Brian V. Towns (1980 film), John Durbin (1997 miniseries), and Hugh Maguire (Doctor Sleep)

An eccentric millionaire who made his fortune in aviation during the interwar period and World War II, designing planes for the U.S. government, Derwent is one of many who have attempted to use the Overlook as an investment, but his tenure as owner was controversial and fraught with rumors about connections to organized crime.

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• Adaptational Curves: A strange case. In the novel, Derwent is an average-sized man, but in the unpublished prologue Before the Play, the narration insists on him being a very large person. It is even said that, if he gained just ten more pounds, he'd weigh exactly twice as much as his lover Lewis (and given Lewis is 135 pounds, this would put Derwent at around 260 pounds). Stephen King seems however to have dropped this physical trait by the time of the novel's release. Especially since, for his adaptation of the novel into a mini-series, he chose the skinny John Durbin to play him.
• Always a Bigger Fish: The True Knot might be powerful psychics, but they are still of this world. Derwent... is not.
• Composite Character: In Stanley Kubrick's movie, the only ghost that could be confirmed as Horace Derwent was the blond man fooling around in a bedroom with a man in animal costume (the movie's version of Roger). However, the movie Doctor Sleep presents the ghost Derwent as the one only called in Kubrick's movie "The injured guest". This was based on a writing decision of Stephen King himself who, when writing Doctor Sleep had the ghost of Derwent speak the line "Great party, isn't it?" that most people associated with Kubrick's "Injured guest" ghost. However, in the continuity of the book, this line, while indeed spoken by a ghost of the Overlook, wasn't spoken by any elderly man with a bloody head wound - in the original novel, it was rather said by the ghost of a man wearing a vampire mask.
  • With Roger in the mini-series. In the mini-series, Derwent actually wears himself the dog-mask of Roger, and when Danny is threatened by the ghost-masked dog in the hallway, it isn't Roger but Derwent. Derwent also technically fulfills the role of the Overlook itself in the series, since he is the one who is seen giving orders to the other ghosts and to Jack in the final climax, instead of the Overlook's disembodied voice.
• Corrupt Corporate Executive: In life, Derwent had ties to the mob and it's implied he used the Overlook as a front for gangland activity. In death, he's one of the Overlook's most malicious and powerful ghosts.
• Demoted to Extra:
  • He and Roger appear for one scene in the movie with no explanation of who they are. Because of this, the majority of his role is given to Delbert Grady, who works with Derwent in the book.
  • The same thing happens to him in the film adaptation of Doctor Sleep, where he's demoted to another cameo near the end, though Danny reveals that Derwent was the final ghost from the Overlook to be imprisoned in his mind.
• Depraved Bisexual: Shown in his relationship with the besotted, dog-costumed Roger, to whom he's verbally and emotionally abusive.
• Enemy Mine: In Doctor Sleep. He's just as evil and cruel as he's always been, but Danny has no problem with using him against a much worse foe.
• The Ghost: While the Overlook has many ghosts, Jack is obsessed with Derwent and considering writing a book. Part of his way of taunting Ullmann is to ask if Derwent is somehow still involved with the Overlook.
• Greater-Scope Villain: Thanks to his almost ubiquitous involvement with, and influence in, the Overlook's history – as well as the fact that he's the only spirit still alive in Dan's memory by the end of Doctor Sleep – Derwent is the closest thing the Overlook has to a central, antagonistic form.
• Howard Hughes Homage: Like Hughes, Derwent is an eccentric millionaire who is interested in aviation and produced films that pushed the limits of the The Hays Code. However, he’s far more evil than the real Hughes probably was.
• Posthumous Character: Is dead by the time the story takes place, leaving his ghost an inhabitant of the Hotel, despite having died nowhere near it. Strangely, the exact circumstances of his death are never mentioned and no one seems to know exactly what happened to him. Jack even viciously asks Ullman if Derwent is still somehow involved in the hotel.
• Screw the Rules, I Have Money!: Reportedly had ties to the mob, and one of the Overlook's iterations included his ex-wife (possibly) running a brothel out of the place.
• Sealed Evil in a Can: "Survived" the destruction of the Overlook, only to be imprisoned in the mind of a now 12-year-old Danny. He remains there for decades, only to be released by Danny during the final battle against the True Knot.
• Shout-Out: His Pre-Mortem One-Liner to Sarey:
  Derwent: Great party, isn't it?
• Villainous Rescue: In the Novel. When Rose gives the signal to Silent Sarey to launch her surpise attack from the shed while Dan is distracted and unaware of her during the final battle, the recently released Derwent grabs her by the wrist, shuts the door and strangles her to death.

Lorraine Massey

Lorraine Massey, the Woman in 217

Played by: Lia Beldam (young) & Billie Gibson (old) (1980 film); Cynthia Garris (1997 miniseries), and Sallye Hooks (Doctor Sleep)

A horrific, malevolent ghost that haunts Room 217, the room where she once died in.

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• Adaptational Attractiveness: In the novel, she's old and described as both fat and ugly even before she killed herself. In the movie and miniseries, she's quite attractive before switching to her "rotten ghoul" form. Although given that her "rotten ghoul" form also looks considerably older than the attractive appearance she initially appears in, it is possible the attractive form was just a disguise to lure Jack closer.
  • Downplayed post-death in the miniseries, where she's much younger than she was in the book and film, but is still dead and rotting.
• Adaptation Name Change: Not to her, but rather her room number, in the novel it's 217 while in the film makes it 237. Supposedly, this was because the Timberline Lodge which provided the Overlook's exterior, didn't want to frighten guests away from room 217 or the hotel at all and instead set it with a non-existent room 237. Funny enough though, because of the movie's popularity, "room 237" actually became the most requested room at the Lodge.
• Body Horror: Jack looking into the bathroom mirror reveals her true form: a zombie-like elderly woman with greenish, sagging, rotting skin.
• Bolivian Army Ending: The second movie ends with her appearing in Abra's bath and Abra confidently walking in and closing the door. Implying she's going to trap her in a mental box like Danny did.
• Chekhov's Gunman: In the Kubrick film continuity, she began as a minor character in The Shining and returns in Doctor Sleep as one of the haunts that follow Danny around until she's locked away. In the final act, Massey is the ghost that restrains Rose the Hat and allows her cronies to help drain Rose of steam with fatal results. Massey is still at large near the end until Abra locks her away for another time.
• Dirty Old Woman: In the novel, she was roughly 60 years old, yet had an affair with a 17-year old boy.
• Driven to Suicide: Killed herself after her underage lover finally gets sick of her and abandons her.
• Dual Age Modes: Lures Jack by appearing as a young, attractive woman before turning into an old, laughing crone.
• Evil Laugh: The first thing she does when Jack discovers her true form is to cackle cruelly at his expense.
• Fan Disservice: She starts out as a nude, attractive young woman when Jack finds her, but everything goes downhill when Jack looks into the mirror behind her and discovers that she's really a disgusting old hag.
• Gonk: Even before she died, she was described as pretty ugly.
• Horrifying the Horror: After Dick teaches Danny to trap the Overlook's ghosts in mental lockboxes, she actually screams when Danny manages to trap her.
• Ms. Fanservice: Subverted in an infamous scene of the film (pictured). When Jack investigates room 237 after hearing Danny was attacked by the occupant, he finds a beautiful, nude woman in the bathroom. After making out with her, he's shown her true form as an old, decrepit, cackling, corpse.
• Nightmare Fuel Station Attendant: She's the center of one of the most disturbing parts of the movie.
• Laughing Mad: After tricking Jack into kissing her, she cracks up into demented, uncontrollable laughter.
• No Name Given: In the film, her name is never revealed and she's only ever referred to as "The Woman in room 237". In the book and miniseries, her name is given as Lorraine Massey.
• Pædo Hunt: In the book, she went to The Overlook to cheat on her husband with a 17 year old boy when she was alive, and is implied to have done this to younger men several other times. It's also implied that she's done much worse to Danny other than strangling him, which is evident in the miniseries when Danny leaves Room 237 with a lipstick mark on his face.
• Peek-a-Boo Corpse: Subverted. In the book and the miniseries, Danny finds her this way when he pulls back the shower curtain in the bathroom of Room 217. She's not a corpse, though. She's an evil spirit that took on the appearance of her body by the time it was discovered.
• Really Gets Around. Implied.
• Rule of Symbolism: Her switch from a beautiful, seductive young woman to a rotting, cackling, old corpse reflects the Overlook revealing it's true colors once it has Jack in it's clutches and no longer has to hide it's evil nature.
• Sudden Sequel Death Syndrome: Like Derwent, she reappears in Doctor Sleep. Unlike Derwent, Danny permanently seals her away, effectively killing her. Averted in the film continuity, where she's a key player in the final battle against Rose the Hat, and Abra locks her away with an ambiguious fate at the end.
• The Voiceless: She never utters a single word in both films, but only laughs and screams in horror when Danny traps her in a mental lockbox in the sequel.
  • Averted in the miniseries.
• Would Hurt a Child: She attacks Danny and tries to strangle him.
• Zombie Gait: She staggers this way when chasing Jack out of her room, fitting her deathly appearance.

Roger

Roger The Dog Man

Played by: Eddie O'Dea (1980 film) and Roger Barker (1997 miniseries)

"Roll over, doggie! Let's go, boy!

—Horace Derwent

A ghost dressed in a dog costume, who haunts the hotel alongside his former lover Horace Derwent.

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• Adaptation Name Change: In King's unpublished prologue, his name was "Lewis Toner", while in the actual novel, it's Roger.
  • The miniseries credits him as "Rover the Dog Man".
• Adaptation Species Change: Well, his costume got one. He wears a dog costume in the book and miniseries, but in the Kubrick movie, it's a bear suit, and a rather cheaply made one at that.
• All There in the Manual: Before The Play fleshes out his character a lot more and gives context to his relationship with Derwent. It explains how they met (Roger was an accountant at Derwent's company), how Derwent manipulated Roger into humiliating himself with the dog costume, and how Roger actually died (an accidental suicide, as he took in a depression episode what he thought were regular sleeping pills left by a previous guest in his hotel room - not knowing that mysterious objects that appear out of nowhere in the Overlook are never to be trusted...).
• Demoted to Extra: Didn't have a very big role to start with, but in the movie, he's reduced entirerly to the one-shot scene with Derwent in the hotel room.
  • Roger was originally supposed to have a bigger role in the novel, as he was one of the POV characters in the original prologue, Before the Play. However said prologue being cut led to Roger's only appearance being after his death, as one of the ghosts of the hotel.
• Depraved Homosexual: Was gay in life, and is now just as evil as the other ghosts of the Overlook.
  • Played with. The unpublished prologue Before the Play gave us a glimpse of Roger's life and personality, and it was clear that he was a decent person before his death - and that the Overlook itself twisted his ghost into an insane, predator spirit.
• Driven to Suicide: Before The Play reveals that he killed himself after Derwent abused and humiliated him during the costume ball. Subverted however because it is clear that the suicide was accidental (Roger only wanting to take sleeping pills to sleep off the humiliation) and manipulated by the dark forces of the Overlook (the sleeping pills seem to magically appear in his hotel room's previously empty medecine cabinet).
• Would Hurt a Child: Threatens Danny and makes several creepy sexual remarks when the boy sees him in the hallway.

Lloyd

Lloyd, the Bartender

Played by: Joe Turkel (1980 film) and Henry Thomas (Doctor Sleep)

"I like you, Lloyd. I always liked you. You were always the best of them. Best goddamned bartender from Timbuktu to Portland, Maine. Or Portland, Oregon, for that matter."

—Jack Torrance

A mysterious bartender who mans the bar in the Overlook's grand ballroom, even though the only current customer in the hotel is Jack...

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• Adapted Out: Lloyd is absent in the 1997 miniseries, with some of his aspects given to Delbert Grady.
• Affably Evil: Courteous to Jack upon meeting him though he's still part of the hotel's malevolent, supernatural force.
• Ambiguously Human: It's implied that Lloyd is the physical embodiment of the Overlook Hotel itself, rather than the spirit of a real person. This is supported by the fact that he is the only "ghost" that never left the Overlook and that Danny was never forced to imprison in his mind.
• The Bartender: Self-explanatory. This role is his entire existence.
• Beware the Quiet Ones: Somewhat soft-spoken, but is likely someone mortals shouldn't mess with.
• Faux Affably Evil: If he really is the personification of the Overlook, it certainly makes his polite demeanor this.
• Legacy Character: Jack takes his job in the second movie.
• Mouth of Sauron: Like Grady, he serves as the voice of The Overlook, especially in the movie.
• Nightmare Fuel Station Attendant: Is a rather eerie figure.
• Soft-Spoken Sadist: Always speaks in a calm tone as he helps to pull Jack into the hotel's evil.
• The Voiceless: Early in the novel. It's one of the most unsettling things about him - Lloyd has no dialogue in response to Jack in an early appearance, only sentences that imply Lloyd is responding somehow.

Topiary Menagerie

The Hedge Animals

"The thing was, you couldn't look at all of them... not at the same time..."

—Jack Torrance

A group of topiary animals in the Overlook's garden, consisting of a rabbit, a dog, a bison, and most famously, a pair of lions. Having been part of the hotel since it was built, as revealed in Before The Play, the hedge animals are one of the hotels most iconic features in-universe, but unbeknownst to most visitors, they are not nearly as harmless as they seem...

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• Adapted Out: Despite being one of the signature scenes from the novel, Kubrick replaced them entirely, removing them in favor of the now-iconic hedge maze. According to Word of Godinvoked, this was due to the special effects at the time not being up to the task of making the animals believable.
• Can't Move While Being Watched: The animals can't move while they're being watched, but the thing is, they're spread out across the garden in such a way that it's impossible to keep an eye on all of them at the same time, letting them advance.
• Cats Are Mean: All the animals are dangerous, but the lions are by far the most aggressive and predatory.
• Garden of Evil: The garden is one of the most dangerous areas of the Overlook, owing mostly to the topiary once they become hostile.
• Would Hurt a Child: They begin stalking Danny while he's playing in the snow, and almost manages to catch him before he makes it back to the hotel stairs, one of the lions clawing his jacket in the process.
  • Even worse: the very first death attributed to the Overlook was, according to the prologue Before the Play, the son of the Overlook's builder and first owner, Bob T. Watson. The child died of a horse accident as he was riding through the construction site for the future hotel. He died on the exact same spot the topiary animals would then be planted over.

Watson

Watson, The Caretaker

Played By: Barry Dennen (1980 film) and Pat Hingle (1997 miniseries)

"Keep an eye on the pressure, or mark my words, you and your family will wake up on the fucking moon..."

The caretaker of the Overlook Hotel, and the grandson of the man who once built it.

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• Almighty Janitor: Downplayed, he knows just about everything about the workings of the hotel, including how to handle the aging equipment, but since he doesn't have any Shine, he doesn't even believe in the supernatural nature of the building, much less know anything useful about it.
• Demoted to Extra: His role is a bit smaller in the Kubrick version, he still gives Jack the rundown of the hotel, but most of the exposition is cut.
• Invisible to Normals: Like Ullman, Watson doesn't have any Shine potential, and thus, the hotel has no power over him. As a result, he considers the ghostly stories about the Overlook to be nonsense since he's worked there most of his life without so much as a cold breeze.
• Mr. Exposition: As the regular caretaker, he's the one who explains to Jack about the history of the hotel and its inner workings.
• Nice Mean And In Between: He's the In-Between to Halloran's Nice and Ullman's Mean. He's crass and casually homophobic, but Watson is a decent guy and quite friendly to Jack.
• Noble Bigot: He's hard-working and nice enough for the most part, but doesn't think much of homosexuals, which admittedly is not exactly a rare opinion to have in the 1970s.
• Riches to Rags: Not him personally, but his grandfather was the original builder of the hotel, and sunk the entire family fortune into the project, ruining him. The family was kept on as caretakers after the hotel was sold, and both they and Watson himself have worked at the hotel through dozens of owners.
• Sir Swears-a-Lot: He has quite a filthy mouth. When Al Shockley can't remember Watson's name, he refers to Watson as "that guy who swears all the time".

The Stone Family

Abra

Abra Rafaella Stone

Played By: Kyleigh Curran

• Astral Projection: Is capable of this near the end.
• Beware the Nice Ones: Abra is a sweet kid but she is definitely not someone to be taken lightly.
• Blessed with Suck: At one point in the story, she experiences the Baseball Boy's Cruel and Unusual Death at the hands of the True Knot and is nearly rendered insane.
• Child Prodigy: Can be described as when it comes to the Shine. She's far more powerful than Dan or any other psychic seen, her powers thus making her a prime target for the True Knot especially since they've not encountered someone like her in a very long time.^note It's mentioned that psychics used to be more powerful but something has caused them to become weaker with each generation, to the point where the True Knot are essentially slowly starving to death.
• Deuteragonist: For Doctor Sleep. The plots of both the film and novel are just as much a Coming of Age Story for her as it is a story of Dan recovering from his alcoholism and depression.
• Fangirl: In the movie, she has several RWBY posters on the walls of her room and an Emerald Sustrai figurine by her bed. And when Rose tries to invade her mind, she projects herself with Emerald's hair.
• Hair-Trigger Temper: A trait she shares with Jack and Dan, her grandfather and uncle respectively. It comes out during the main stretch of the novel, as Abra deals more and more with the murderous True Knot, and keeps getting worse as she gets older. In the film adaptation, her enjoyment of Pay Evil unto Evil is emphasized instead, as her family tree isn't mentioned in this continuity.
• Little Miss Badass: Abra is host to perhaps the most powerful Shining in history, dwarfing Dick Hallorann's powers and even making Dan's look pretty unimpressive. The epilogue of Doctor Sleep — which takes place three years after the events of the story proper — discloses that, even at fifteen years old, Abra still hasn't reached her full power as a Shiner. In short, you don’t want to get on her bad side — it’s a dangerous place to be.
• Macguffin Super Person: The True Knot need her to keep from dying out, with Rose planning on keeping Abra captive as a stable long-term food source (Rose explicitly describes it as akin to keeping a cow alive to get milk for decades compared to butchering a cow to have a few meals of steak once).
• Madness Mantra: The poor girl can only half-hysterically sob "They killed him!" to her parents after she experiences the horrific torture and death of Baseball Boy at the hands of the True Knot.
• Meaningful Name: Abra is the most powerful Shiner in the entire franchise, and has a name reminiscent of "abracadabra" (a word popularly associated with stage magic).
• Pay Evil unto Evil: She takes great pleasure in hurting and killing the True Knot. When Crow Daddy is slowly dying from his injuries in the film, Abra literally kneels right next to him, smirks, and whispers to him "I hope that hurts." Of course, given that the True Knot are a bunch of child-killing vampires, they really have it coming.
• Psychic Powers: Has the most powerful Shining ever seen.
• Race Lift: Abra is a white girl with blonde hair and blue eyes in the book, but she's black (albeit mixed-race) in the movie. Consequently, her father Dave is also black in the film while he was white in the book.
• Psychometry: Touching Bradley Trevor's baseball glove helps her Shine the location of the True Knot.
• Student–Master Team: With Dan.
• Unrelated in the Adaptation: She's no longer the niece of Dan and granddaughter of Jack in the film, though she still calls Dan "Uncle Dan" both out of affection and as a Mythology Gag.
• World's Best Warrior: She's all but stated to have the most powerful Shining talent in history. Rose the Hat is visibly stunned when she realizes that Abra is inadvertently shining on her and the True Knot killing the Baseball Boy in Nebraska in her sleep and from all the way in eastern Massachusetts — over a thousand miles away.

Lucy

Lucia "Lucy" Stone

Played by: Jocelin Donahue

• Adaptation Relationship Overhaul: Her being Dan's half-sister is left out of the film.
• Mama Bear: Ferociously protective of Abra, as one would expect from any great mother, and brooks no nonsense at all when it comes to her daughter's safety.

David

David Stone

Played by: Zachary Mohmoh

• Death by Adaptation: Crow Daddy stabs him in the heart in the movie.
• I Need a Freaking Drink: When he learns about the cult of child-murdering vampires that have targeted his daughter, he responds by pouring himself a couple of glasses of scotch.
• Papa Wolf: Will do anything to protect his daughter, including gunning down monstrous cannibals like the True Knot.
• Race Lift: White in the book, black in the movie, just like his daughter.
• Supernatural-Proof Father: Zig-zagged. He is willing to admit his daughter's Psychic Powers when confronted to the evidence. Yet he'd rather consider the possibility of an earthquake in New Hampshire than a telekinetic manifestation of Abra's power.

Concetta

Concetta Reynolds

• Adapted Out: She has an important supporting role in the novel, but is completely removed from the film.
• Cool Old Lady: A poet, philosopher, and razor-sharp wit right up into her late nineties.
• Deadpan Snarker: Concetta is a great sharp-tongued granny for the ages, as her grandson-in-law repeatedly experiences.
• Dying Moment of Awesome: Like Jack, the recently-passed ghost of Concetta plays a vital role in destroying the True Knot.
• Never Mess with Granny: Through Dan, Concetta passes her cancerous, terminal Steam on to the True Knot, killing nearly all of them in one fell swoop and permanently preventing them from ever harming Abra.

The True Knot

In General

A group of sadistic and semi-immortal psychic vampires, who extend their lives and rejuvinate themselves by torturing psychic children to death and feeding on their Shine. They live in groups as vagabonds and drifters, always searching for their next victims.

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• Achilles' Heel: One sure way to defeat the True Knot is to deprive them of their Steam. Failing that, firearms or luring them to dangerously haunted sites are suitable alternatives.
• Adaptational Badass: The film version of the True Knot is considerably more intimidating, competent and dangerous than their book counterparts; not only are they taken out solely through combat over the film's course (whereas most of them are killed through measles in the book), but they also all get higher kill counts (i.e., Crow Daddy killing Abra's father Dave and Snakebite Andi making Dan's friend Billy shoot himself) and are harder to trick/defeat.
• Adaptational Attractiveness: The True Knot as a whole. In the novel, while they usually appear human, their true form is a monstrous kind of Humanoid Abomination with elongated mouths, which they turn into when they feed. The movie shows them as being more conventionally attractive (with the exception of Rose, who's still beautiful), and considerably younger than their book counterparts. King even initially conceived of the True Knot in the book as a group of retirees traveling the country in RVs looking for prey, whereas here they come across more like a mix of New Age Retro Hippies and somewhat wealthy homeless people.
• A God Am I: Several members of the True Knot consider themselves gods, with Crow in particular calling himself one.
• Big Bad Wannabe: What the True Knot ultimately are, especially in the book: a bunch of thoroughly depraved assholes that have a hard time doing anything beyond preying on defenseless children. And they never, ever stop boasting how great they are, even while being handled. A good example of this in action is when Danny lures Rose to the Overlook Hotel and unlocks the hotel spirits he kept locked in his mind, and she is hopelessly outclassed and dead in seconds.
• Contrasting Sequel Antagonist: To the Overlook Hotel and its ghosts from the previous film. Both are malevolent paranormal entities which appear mundane and inconspicuous to Rubes' eyes and yet they feed on Shine from others, often if not always causing gruesome death and suffering in the process; and they take a ruthless interest in devouring a particularly brightly-Shining main character in their native works. However. The Hotel is an eldritch Genius Loci, inhabited by the spirits of people who died in it decades prior, whereas the True Knot are vampire-like, quasi-immortal humanoid abominations that pass off as humans. The Hotel can't move beyond its grounds, nor could its resident spirits in their main appearance (not so much in their reappearance), and the Hotel has a reputation as a high-class resort; while the True Knot must endlessly travel to avoid being found out, never putting down roots, and they deliberately stay under the radar to avoid being found out. The spirits of the Hotel belong to people who in life were very wealthy and refined and remain so in death, while the True Knot are working-class and live a very rustic, nomadic existence. The spirits of the hotel express racist and sexist views, partially due to being from past time periods where such attitudes were far more common, while the True Knot are at least somewhat diverse and are led by a woman. The spirits of the hotel are mostly people who didn't know each other and express little affection for one-another, while the True Knot are a family of choice who genuinely care very deeply for each other. The Overlook's modus operandi during its main story drives one of the main cast to attempt to murder his own family for the Hotel, whereas the True Knot's more direct child-kidnapping and murdering methods instead drive the main characters' family to band together against them.
• Devoured by the Horde: They befall their prey like zombies or hyenas. A prime example is them jumping Grampa Flick after he dies.
• Emotion Eater: They devour feelings along with "Steam", the essence of a person's Shine. People who know what the Shining is and can use its powers have quite a bit more Steam than other people, so the True Knot focuses on them first and foremost. Fear and pain particularly flavour the steam to the True Knot's liking, which is why they inflict Cold-Blooded Torture on their victims to prolong the suffering as much as possible.
• Evil Is One Big, Happy Family: They call themselves the True Knot because they're "knotted together" like a family, and indeed, they show a great deal of kindness and compassion towards each other (just not anyone else). But they also see nothing wrong with devouring whatever steam is left once one of them dies.
• Faux Affably Evil: They're all fairly polite and skilled at luring in people but it's a complete façade.
• Goldfish Poop Gang: While they may be a nasty bunch of semi-immortal child murderers, they're mostly outmatched pretty thoroughly by Abra and her adult protectors when push comes to shove. Partially lampshaded by more than one character, noting that their usual targets are unsuspecting children, and thus victims who can't fight back.
• Hate Sink: They are a clan of sadistic quasi-immortal beings responsible for several homicides. However, of them all, two stand out as especially deplorable:
  • Barry the Chunk lures a young boy named Bradley by offering him a ride only to sadistically mock him when he and the other True Knot torture him to death for his steam.
  • Snakebite Andi, a "pusher," joins the True Knot of her own volition after making a habit out of leaving markings on those she compels with her voice. Despite despising people who harm children, Snakebite Andi joins the True Knot while fully understanding it entails torturing children to consume their steam. Before succumbing to her wounds, she forces Billy into killing himself out of spite. This act nearly drives Danny into drinking again.
• Humanoid Abomination: Their true forms having jaws with a single tusk inside. Walnut also hypothesizes about their condition, believing them to still have DNA but to have a changed nervous system, the latter of which causes the True to react badly to flying.
• Immortality Hurts: Steam may make them live forever, but if they get killed, they "cycle" which is basically fading in and out of existence several times before disappearing, and feeling it all.
• Informed Attribute: Dan counters the suggestion of calling the authorities to deal with the True Knot by saying that they are rich and connected, while not caring much about authorities. Crow Daddy makes a reference to an asset in the NSA getting him the knockout drug, but otherwise they display none of their alleged resources over the course of the movie.
• Karmic Death:
  • They survived for so long by consuming children who could not fight back, so it’s only appropriate when they contract the measles from one of their meals and are then picked off by a child and her family who they severely underestimated.
  • In a more species-wide sense: when the True Knot die from whatever cause, they invariably "cycle" (fade in and out of existence), which causes them to writhe in excruciating agony for several seconds or entire minutes before they're finally allowed to expire. An appropriate way for all of them to experience their final moments, given that they literally torture innocent children to death to sustain their existences.
• Life Drinker: But only of people with the Shining. They hunt down children with it as adults lose power and flavour, but they also spectate disasters such as 9/11 to drink in the essence of any shiners that may have lost their lives (and the pain of others).
• Long-Lived: It's spelled out that they're not truly eternal-lived. They still age, just at a massively decreased rate which enables them to potentially live or thousands of years — Rose states that they take about a century to physically age two years. In the movie version, Grandpa Flick's death is implied to be down to old age as much as starvation.
• Meaningful Rename: Each member of the True Knot takes on a new name typically based on some part of either their personality or physical appearance after joining (i.e., "Rose the Hat" and "Snakebite Andi").
• No Body Left Behind: Their bodies dissolve into Steam and only leave behind Empty Piles of Clothing, which is very convenient when you've got to kill them.
• Our Vampires Are Different: The True Knot are basically psychic vampires, being former humans that feed off of the Shine of psychic humans so as to stay eternally young along with enhancing their own Psychic Powers. Abra even calls Rose a vampire at one point.
• Proportional Aging: So long as they feed regularly on steam, the members of the True Knot live for an extraordinarily long time. However, they do still age, just at a far slower pace than normal people. From Rose's pitch to Andi before turning her, it can be inferred that they roughly age one year for every fifty chronological ones, as she tells the 15-year-old Andi that in a century she will "maybe" be 17. However, Rose also says that long-lived does not mean immortal, as Grampa Flick dies after having lived what is implied to be well over two thousand years after he doesn't get enough Steam.
• Really 700 Years Old: Excluding Snakebite Andi (who joined in 2011), all of the True Knot are several hundred years old. Special mention must be given to Grampa Flick, who's old enough to remember Europeans first discovering the New World and is even implied to have fed on Roman emperors.
• Revenant Zombie: Outwardly appear to be regular humans, but joining the True Knott turns them into undead who retain all of their personality and who need "Steam" for their long life. Transforming into this revenant form is also like "dying" and returning to life.
• Secretly Wealthy: They're stated to be extremely wealthy as a result of accruing money over decades and centuries, with one member being mentioned as having billions saved up, but aren't really able to spend much of it due to their lifestyle forcing them to always be on the move.
• Smug Snake: They treat everyone other than them with contempt, refusing to refer to normal people as anything other than "rubes". But as Abra points out, they're nothing more than arrogant vultures who hunt down children. As such they massively underestimate Abra's intelligence, resourcefulness and potential allies.
• Squishy Wizard: They're played up as very powerful psychics and have some extra strength over regular people, but they are still vulnerable to blunt force trauma such as vehicle accidents, and hunting rifles are just as devastating on them as a regular person. Their reliance upon Steam also means they weaken and eventually die when starved. They are also defenseless or woefully unprepared against a sufficiently hostile and powerful Genius Loci such as the Overlook Hotel.
• Transhuman Abomination: All of them used to be humans with some Shine, but after taking part in a ritual where they painfully ingested some Steam from a previous child victim of the Knot, they became Long-Lived, slow-aging vampiric creatures who look and act human at first, but they consume Steam extracted from Shiners to survive, and their flesh and bodies literally flicker in and out of existence as they're dying before they completely evaporate into Steam. In the novel, they distort into a monstrous form with a tusk in the mouth when feeding. The movie version places emphasis on the True Knot's inhuman nature via their body language becoming animalistic and cockroach-like when they're sufficiently agitated.
• Vampires Are Rich: The True Knot are quasi-vampires who feed on a person's magic and are said to be vastly rich.
• They Look Just Like Everyone Else!: Most look like late middle-aged to elderly tourists.
• Vampiric Draining: They extend their lives by sucking the life force out of innocent people.
• Was Once a Man: They used to be normal people once, and although they can look normal, their distorted forms when feeding show that their humanity is long gone.
• Weaksauce Weakness: Despite how they're played up as very dangerous foes, they die to getting shot with sniper rifles, same as any regular human. Albeit, with the caveat that hits to the extremities can be survived. Billy and Dan utterly humiliate most of the True Knot's members when a group is sent to Abra's fake projection. From Rose feeling everyone's pain, it hurts a lot as well; rather then being an instant knock-out death where they don't know what hit them, being shot appears to be a slower, painful death.
• Would Hurt a Child: They specifically hunt down children with psychic powers (which they call "Steam") because their power is much tastier to them. Moreover, fear and pain purify the taste so they take joy in torturing them and sucking their soul dry before leaving their corpses in shallow graves.

Rose the Hat

Rose the Hat (Rose O'Hara)

Played By: Rebecca Ferguson

"Well, hi there."

The leader of the True Knot.

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• Adaptational Badass: In the film, Rose is much less easily provoked and manipulated and mostly reacts with Tranquil Fury to the deaths of her comrades. In the final showdown, she effortlessly brushes aside all of Dan and Abra's attempts at tricking or capturing her, corners Dan on the stairs in the same way his father did his mother in the book and while in the book she was taken down by the combined efforts of Dan, Abra and Jack Torrance, in this, Dan is forced to unleash all of the monsters of the Overlook Hotel from their prison in his mind, and it's a pretty Pyrrhic Victory since immediately following her being Devoured by the Horde, the hungry spirits turn their attention to Dan.
• Adaptational Nationality: She's implied to be Romani in the book, though nothing is definitively stated. In the film, she has an Irish accent, hinting she's from there instead.
• Adaptation Relationship Overhaul: In the book, Rose the Hat is part of a polyamorous romance with both Crow Daddy and Snakebite Andi. In the film, while Rose and Crow are still romantically linked, Rose has more of a "mentor/pupil" dynamic regarding Andi so as to reflect the similar relationship between Dan and Abra.
• Arch-Enemy: Of Danny Torrance and Abra. She and Abra have a particular mutual enmity, as Abra witnessed Rose murdering a child, something that deeply traumatized her. Rose in turn views Abra as a good meal, and becomes increasing enraged as the two begin murdering members of the True Knot.
• Asshole Victim: Her death in both the novel and the film is extremely satisfying.
• Astral Projection: The psychic ability she is shown to be using the most in both the film and book.
• Berserk Button: Don't damage her hat. Just don't. And don't ever call her a coward.
• Big Bad: Of Doctor Sleep, both the book and film.
• Break the Haughty: Rose learns the horror of becoming the hunted from Abra's superior tactics in her astral mind world. Rose is lured into a trap so Abra can learn all of the secrets of the True Knot and is forced to flee in terror with real injuries to boot. After this, Rose loses some rationality and takes things personally, ultimately being suckered into the Overlook Hotel. Here, she meets her terrorized demise from Dan's trapped ghosts.
• Compelling Voice: She can use her voice to force people to obey her, as shown by Snakebite Andi.
• Contrasting Sequel Antagonist: To the Overlook Hotel. The Overlook was a building that couldn't move beyond it's grounds while Rose is a human being who has to move regularly due to her lifestyle. The Overlook had a reputation as a high-class resort for the wealthy, even having Presidents stay there, while Rose has deliberately stayed under the radar and avoids anything that could be used to trace her. The Overlook acted alone and had no connections beyond it's guests who were trapped in it's confines and are implied to absolutely hate it while Rose has a family she cares for deeply.
• Creepy Souvenir: Many of Rose's accessories are trinkets from various children she has killed, including bracelets, hairbands, toys, and even a bicycle chain (woven into her hair).
• Cruel and Unusual Death: She gets an agonizingly painful death when Dan unleashes the Overlook ghosts upon her who proceed to devour her essence. Special mention should be given to how the spirits are shown to be reaching their fingers right under her skin to draw out more Steam.
• Curb-Stomp Battle: As powerful as she is, she's nothing compared to the Overlook Hotel, who (after Danny gives it back its ghosts) proceeds to take her down in seconds.
• Curb Stomp Cushion: Her Battle in the Center of the Mind with Dan and Abra followed by her one-on-one fight with Dan in the Colorado Lounge. Abra does succeed in slashing at her ankles a few times and Dan almost seals her away in his mind with his suitcase method, but Rose quickly realizes she's being tricked and proceeds to basically plow through any defense the two can throw at her until Dan is forced to unleash the ghosts of the Overlook upon her.
• Death by Irony: Rose becomes extremely curious when she reads Danny's mind and finds the lock boxes in his mind. Dan is all too happy to let her have the spirits locked inside, and is first tackled suggestively by Mrs. Massey like a parody of Rose's close relationship with Snakebite Andi.
• Depraved Bisexual: Played with. She's evil and she's bisexual while engaging in a twin-gendered polyamorous romance, but her genuine care for her romantic partners is her largest redeeming quality.
• The Determinator: Once she has her mindset on getting her hands on Abra, nobody can talk her out of it, and anything Abra and Dan do to stop her only makes her more determined.
• Devoured by the Horde: In the film, she's consumed by a horde of the Overlook's remaining ghosts. All that's left of her when they're done with her is her signature hat.
• Dies Differently in Adaptation: In the novel, she is thrown from an observation tower by Dan, Abra and the spirit of Jack Torrance, giving her a fatal Neck Snap when she hits the ground. In the film, she is tackled to the ground and Devoured by the Horde of the Overlook Hotel's ghosts after Dan finally unleashes them from his mental prisons.
• Disc-One Final Boss: Rose is the main villain of the movie until the last 15 minutes when she is killed by the Overlook Hotel, which becomes the Final Boss of the film.
• Disney Villain Death: In the book, Dan, Abra, and the ghost of Jack combine their powers to push her off an observation tower, snapping her neck when she hits the ground.
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones: The only good thing you can say about her is that she truly cares about the True Knot, particularly Crow Daddy. When Dan and Billy (and later Abra with Danny's help) kill them, she doesn't take it well.
• Evil Cannot Comprehend Good: Rose is so seated in her ways and hooked on her pseudo-immortality that she can't comprehend why Abra & Dan would have a problem with torturing Shining children to death to extend their own lives. In the film, she assumes Abra is simply too young to understand fearing death, and is completely oblivious that most people don't resort to child murder to avoid it.
• Expy: invoked Stephen King clearly took a lot of inspiration from Count Dracula when writing her character; Both Dracula and Rose are deceptively intelligent and powerful queer-coded vampiric sorcerers of Romani descent ultimately undone by their hubris and inability to consider basic empathy or humanity from their foes, and mostly hunt after the defenseless dreggs at the bottom of society in their quest to preserve their own immortality. The main difference between the two is that Dracula in Bram Stoker's original novel is actually described as looking absolutely hideous, whereas Rose the Hat is more reminiscent of the reinventions of Dracula given by modern pop culture in being sexualized.
• Fatal Flaw: Arrogance — having survived for so long and seen so much, Rose in the movie never considers that she might get chomped instead of the other way around, when she faces bigger fish than herself for the first time in centuries. Abra's exceptionally-potent shine is more than bright enough for her to mentally outpower, outmaneuver and hurt Rose in ways that none of her previous prey ever did, yet instead of conceding that Abra is more than she can chew and backing off, Rose is enticed by the idea of farming Abra's excessive steam for years and keeps coming after her, which ultimately gets her entire family killed. When Abra and Dan subsequently lure Rose into the Overlook Hotel, it doesn't occur to her that the duo have suckered her into a supernatural trap (at least not one that might be able to overpower her like Abra did), despite the warning signs she perceives walking through the hotel. She's also fatally blind-sided by Dan's ability to lock-up Steam-hungry ghosts to use against her: upon perceiving the lock boxes in his mental world without realizing what's inside them, Rose eagerly demands to know what's in them and assumes they're "something special", not considering that they might be a threat to even her which Dan keeps locked up for a reason.
• A Father to His Men: The only people she cares about is True Knot, her "family". Whenever a member is killed, she's getting more and more furious and at some point her conflict with Dan is more about revenge than simply survival.
• Faux Affably Evil: She's exceptionally charismatic and always speaks in a polite tone but is pure evil underneath. It's most noticeable in the film, where she's quite friendly and charming even while torturing and murdering children.
• Fighting Irish: It's mentioned she was an Irish immigrant around the time of the Wild West.
• Green-Eyed Monster: In the film, she's virulently against the idea of transforming Abra into one of the True Knot. It's implied she's afraid Abra would oust her as the True Knot's leader.
• Hoist by His Own Petard: In the movie, her storing up on the Shining she had taken from children ends up being her undoing, as Dan manages to lure her to the Overlook Hotel and then unleashes all the ghosts he'd trapped in his mind on her.
• Hot Gypsy Woman: Is implied to be Romani, given that Dick says that her kind is "always on the lam," used to ride camels in the desert (possibly referencing the Romani's descent from India), and later rode caravans in Eastern Europe. Rose wears a top hat and a lot of jewelry, which is true to typical representations of Romani in Western media. And of course, being played by Rebecca Ferguson, she's beautiful, as she herself brags about.
• Immune to Mind Control: As a result of having a Compelling Voice herself, Rose can recognize when Snakebite Andi is trying to compel her to act and prevent it from working.
• Ironic Name: A metatextual case; Roses are an important Arc Symbol in the greater cosmology of the Stephen King multiverse, serving as subtle reflections of the Dark Tower, "the axis on which all worlds spin". Rose the Hat, meanwhile, devours innocent children with the Shine and spreads nothing but needless pain and suffering in her wake, meaning that she is basically everything that the Dark Tower stands against.
• Karmic Death: Rose has spent hundreds of years feeding on children who couldn’t fight back just to live longer and feeling like she is above regular humans. In the movie, she ends up being eaten by the ghosts of the Overlook that make her and the True Knot seem like children. In an extra bit of irony, they consume her the same way she and the True Knot did with the baseball boy.
• Might Makes Right: Part of Rose's entire ethos. She believes that ordinary people (a.k.a. "rubes") are completely inconsequential, and anyone else who has the Shining that isn't part of her "family" deserves to be treated like a cattle fit for slaughter simply because until Dan and Abra come along, no one else she hunts is strong enough to effectively fight back.
• More than Mind Control: She can do the straight version through a Compelling Voice, but has an insidious way of sniffing out and targeting multiple characters' weaknesses and fears (most notably Snakebite Andi).
• A Mother to Her Men: Her only redeeming feature is her loyalty to her minions. When the majority of the True Knot are being shot to death by Dan and Billy, her agonized screams are implied to be just as much from her emotional turmoil over her proverbial "family" essentially dying right in front of her as they are from her sharing their pain through the True Knot's Psychic Link.
• Ms. Fanservice: Explicitly described as the most beautiful woman most people have ever met, and she knows it. Of course, Beauty Is Bad; she likely got that way because of how much Steam she's eaten.
• Muscles Are Meaningless: A case that's likely thanks to her Shining ability. When she confronts Dan in the Overlook Hotel's Colorado Lounge, she catches his fire axe one-handed as he swings it down at her, elbows him to the floor, and then swings the same axe right into his leg all in one fluid motion. Keep in mind that Rebecca Ferguson is a good five inches shorter than Ewan McGregor.
• One-Winged Angel: After the rest of the True Knot have been killed, Rose consumes all of their remaining supply of Shining, giving her more than enough power to take on both Danny and Abra. Of course, this also ends up backfiring big time, as all that Shining just makes Rose all the more appetizing to the residents of the Overlook.
• Poke in the Third Eye: She is capable of this when someone attempts to spy upon her with remote viewing, as Abra finds out when she looks through Rose's eyes. However, this is Inverted when Abra rebukes Rose's grip upon her mind, and send Rose flying a considerable distance. When Rose later uses Astral Projection to go to Abra's home and attempt to leaf through her mental file cabinets, she springs a trap that Abra left and has her mind read instead while Rose is helpless with her hand painfully stuck in the cabinet she tried to open.
• Rule of Symbolism: Her Signature Headgear being a lovely pork pie hat evokes the image of a stage magician, which is quite appropriate for the Big Bad of a Urban Fantasy book series based around Psychic Powers.
• Sadist: In the film, she deeply enjoys hurting people. While torturing the Baseball Boy to death, she gleefully informs him it will hurt and takes great joy in slowly killing him. She also deliberately draws out her fight with Danny just to draw out his suffering.
• Signature Headgear: As made clear by the name "Rose the Hat", she wears a nice pork pie hat that she almost never takes off. It's even the last part of her to remain after the ghosts of the Overlook devour her.
• Vain Sorceress: Her personality, especially as far as Abra is concerned, has shades of this. One gets the implication that Rose is basically what would happen if the Evil Queen from Snow White had managed to live into the modern day.
• Villainous Breakdown: Has several over the course of the book, the biggest being when Crow is killed. In the film adaptation, she has her last breakdown once Danny frees up the ghosts from inside his mind-boxes, displaying denial and horror once she sees the horde advancing upon her, before they painfully and fatally extract her Steam.

Crow Daddy

Crow Daddy (Henry Rothman)

Played By: Zahn McClarnon

• Adaptational Backstory Change: In the book, he's explicitly stated to be a former lawyer, having graduated from Harvard in the Class of 1938. In the film, however, his pistol holster (specifically, a Union Army Cavalry officer's for a Colt Model 1860 revolver) strongly implies that he used to be a former tracker for the Union Army during the American Civil War.
• Adaptational Badass: He's noticeably more competent in the film than he was in the novel through having a leveler head and generally being more intelligent; in order to kill him off, he has to be catapulted through a windscreen and into a tree, rather than being forced to turn a gun on himself by Abra's superior mental powers. Furthermore, he is implied to have a Shining talent of being able to track people in the film, whereas his novel counterpart lacked any Shining ability at all.
• Affably Evil: In the film, he's sincerely soft-spoken and friendly. It only makes him all the more creepy, as he's just as vicious as the rest of the True Knot.
• Amoral Attorney: He was a lawyer prior to becoming a member of the True Knot.
• Asshole Victim: He killed Abra's father David Stone so he gets to enjoy a Psychic-Assisted Suicide in return.
• Ate His Gun: But not by choice, with Abra forcing him to do so in the book.
• Composite Character: The film version of Crow Daddy combines the job of tracking targets from Barry the Chink and serving as Rose's Number Two in the original novel.
• Dies Differently in Adaptation: In the book, Abra makes him shoot himself. In the film, Dan kills him by willingly possessing Abra and using her telekinesis to crash his car, catapulting him out of the vehicle and letting him get impaled on a tree branch.
• The Dragon: For Rose. She trusts him completely and relies on him.
• Hoist by His Own Petard: In the movie. Crow Daddy's arrogance in his own immortality causes him to pick up the habit of not buckling himself in while driving. Dan, while possessing Abra, takes full advantage of this by crashing the car and sending him through the window.
• Impaled with Extreme Prejudice: Danny-through-Abra manages to trick him into crashing the van into a tree and impale himself to death, as revenge for his murder of Abra's father.
• Ivy League for Everyone: He's a Harvard-educated lawyer, class of 1938.
• Number Two: Explicitly described as this.
• Mouth of Sauron: One of his most important jobs is negotiating for the True Knot, representing them in deals with 'rubes'.
• Psychic-Assisted Suicide: In the movie, Dan willingly possesses Abra and forces him to crash his car, killing him. It's also the case in the book, where Abra forces him to shoot himself with his own gun.
• Race Lift: His novel counterpart is implied to be a white man, whereas his film counterpart is Native American because of him being portrayed by Zahn McClarnon.
• Sharp-Dressed Man: When negotiating for the True Knot.

Snakebite Andi

Snakebite Andi (Andrea Steiner)

Played By: Emily Alyn Lind

• Abusive Parents: Andi's father was a repulsive pedophile who began raping her when she was only eight. The abuse continued until she put a knitting needle through his eye-socket, after using it on his testicles.
• Adaptational Badass: In the film, rather than screaming the name of her abusive father as she is tortured to death, manages to pull a Taking You with Me regarding Billy and goes out while smugly cackling to herself.
• Adaptational Sexuality: The film leaves out her sexual encounter with Rose and her relationship with Sarey, presenting her as Ambiguously Gay at most.
• Adaptational Villainy: In the movie, Andi's backstory of being sexually abused by her pedophile father is never mentioned, making her seem far less sympathetic than her book counterpart and making her acts against men who try to "date" her seem like the cruel vendetta of a teenage runaway without a cause. Then again, her "dates" are still pedophiles who wanted to sleep with a girl who's fifteen. The Director's Cut does add a line during the conversation where Rose invites her to the True Knot that does imply that someone molested her, though it's not explicitly stated to be her father.
• Age Lift: She's already an adult when introduced in the novel, but is only a teenager in the film. Of course, she's chronologically 23 once the film jumps to 2019.
• Ambiguously Gay: In the movie version, her relationship with Rose and Sarey is non-explicit. She calls Rose "the most beautiful woman she's ever seen" when compelled to speak the truth during their meeting, and she and Rose can be seen sharing Steam with each-other in a very suggestive manner, and she shows prominent concern for Rose's physical wellbeing after her hand is maimed.
• Asshole Victim: Due to becoming a hypocrite and helping to torture-murder children.
• Became Their Own Antithesis: She starts out as someone who seeks vengeance against pedophiles who prey upon children, but then becomes someone who lures children into a van to their grisly deaths at the hands of her and her companions.
• Compelling Voice: Her power in a nutshell. She can influence anyone with her voice, for instance, tell them they feel sleepy to put them to sleep, give them orders while asleep, or even order Billy to kill himself. The ability is common enough for the True Knot to have a term for it: "pusher".
• Decoy Protagonist: The first few scenes make it looks like the story is gonna revolve around her, but she quickly becomes a side antagonist after being turned.
• Die Laughing: In the movie, she cackles psychotically after forcing Billy to kill himself while she disintegrates to death.
• Does Not Like Men: She's generally distrustful of all men, assuming them to be rapist monsters due to how horribly she was abused by her own father.
• Eye Scream: How she killed her father.
• Forced Sleep: Her special power.
• Freudian Excuse: After being raped by her father multiple times from the age of eight, she has a hatred for men.
• Gender-Blender Name: "Andi" is typically a male name.
• Go Out with a Smile: A very creepy example in the film, where she starts to laugh hysterically in satisfaction over having made Dan suffer by making Billy kill himself.
• Groin Attack: She used a knitting needle on her rapist father's balls, before putting the same needle through his left eye.
• Hate Sink: She joins the True Knot of her own volition after making a habit out of leaving markings on those she compels with her voice. Despite despising people who harm children, she joins understanding it entails torturing children to consume their steam. And before succumbing to her wounds in the movie, she forces Billy into killing himself out of spite. This act nearly drives Danny into drinking again.
• Hypocrite:
  • Before joining the True Knot, she rationalizes her habit of ruining the lives of men that she picks up as her paying evil unto pedophiles and would-be pedophiles whom were willing to sleep with an underage girl. But as soon as she joins the Knot, she has no qualms whatsoever against kidnapping, torturing and eating children.
  • She claims that the True Knot have no choice over what they do, and are only following their nature. This ignores that all members of the True Knot do actually have to choose to join.
  • She's a misandrist who spent her pre-Knot life prolifically robbing and maiming men, projecting her supreme hatred of her abusive father onto them, and she maintains this attitude towards her killers in her final moments when she spitefully spits, "Fucking men!" Yet she doesn't seem to have any qualms about the male members of the True Knot or the fact that they're led by a male elder once she joins.
• Laughing Mad: In the movie, when just as she's about to die, Andi tells Billy to shoot himself. So when he does just that right in front of Danny, she's laughing her ass off even as she disintegrates.
• Psycho Lesbian:
  • Subverted. She is a vicious, paranoid misandrist who likes the ladies, but before she was a True Knot, she wasn't actually a killer, just a thief who had a tendency to humiliate the men she conned. Discovering her sexuality with Rose, of all people, actually caused her to become a little less ruthless and distrusting (though of course, she's now a willing accomplice to child murder for the sake of her eternal life-so take with a grain of salt).
  • Similarly to Rose, her genuine love for Silent Sarey is arguably her most redeeming quality.
• Rape as Backstory: By her father, as a child.
• Taking You with Me: In the movie, as one last act of spite, she forces Billy to kill himself.
• Villainous Breakdown: In the movie, her last moments involve her laughing like a lunatic after forcing Billy to kill himself. A rare case of a breakdown following something going right for the villain.
• Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds: She was sexually abused by her pedophile father, feeding into her current psychosis.

Jimmy Numbers

Jimmy Numbers

• The Smart Guy: He's the True Knot's accountant.

Silent Sarey

Silent Sarey (Sarah Carter)

Played by: Katie Parker

Barry the Chink

Barry the Chink (Barry Smith)

Played by: Robert Longstreet

• Adaptation Name Change: His name is changed to "Barry the Chunk" in the film adaptation, perhaps regarding how he is out of shape.
• Decomposite Character: His job as a tracker in the novel is given to Crow Daddy in the film.
• Kick the Dog: He lures a young boy named Bradley by offering him a ride only to sadistically mock him when he and the other True Knot torture him to death for his Steam.
• Non-Indicative Name: He's not actually Chinese, as his nickname implies; he's a Caucasian with slightly slanted eyes.
• Politically Incorrect Villain: Gives every indication he thought of his racist nickname himself.

Walnut

Walnut (Peter Wallis)

• The Medic: He serves as the True Knot's resident doctor.

Grampa Flick

Grampa Flick (Jonas Flick)

Played By: Carel Struycken

• Alas, Poor Villain: Just before dying, he freely admits to Rose that he's scared to go.
• Dies Differently in Adaptation: In the book, he's killed (along with the majority of the True Knot) by contracting measles. In the film, he dies of old age after not consuming enough Steam.
• Elderly Immortal: Looks very old physically. Even after taking Steam, his hair is iron grey.
• The Older Immortal: Oldest of the True Knot. It's mentioned that he remembers when Europeans worshiped trees. Even his considerably younger film version is mentioned as having "fed on Roman emperors".
• Old Soldier: His cover when among rubes is an old veteran, and he keeps updating which war he fought in as time goes by. He's a military history buff, so he can play the part fairly convincingly.
• Killed Off for Real: The first of the True Knot to die.
• Screw Politeness, I'm a Senior!: Very rude and uncouth in the book.
• Time Abyss: In the book, it's mentioned that he remembers back to when Europeans worshipped trees, which would make him somewhere in the ballpark of seven millennia old.

Other Characters

John Dalton

Dr John Dalton

Played by: Bruce Greenwood

The Stones' family doctor and Dan's closest friend.

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• Cool Old Guy: In his sixties and a kind, charming man who cares about his patients and helping other addicts deal with their demons.
• Deadpan Snarker: He has his moments.
• Demoted to Extra: In the novel, he's a friend of the Stone family and helps Dan, Billy, and David to rescue Abra in the climax. In the film, he simply appears to help set Dan on his path to recovery.
• Nice Guy: He's a kind, humble man who helps Dan and never judges him for his mistakes.
• Recovered Addict: He is an AA member.

Billy Freeman

Billy Freeman

Played by: Cliff Curtis

The aging town maintenance man in Frazier, who works in Teeny Town running the train.

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• Ate His Gun: In the movie, Andi forces him to commit suicide this way.
• Badass Normal: Billy's marksmanship proves more than adequate to take on the advanced psychics in the True Knot in a gunfight.
• Big Damn Heroes: He shoots Andi just before she tries to kill Danny.
• Death by Adaptation: Andi forces him to kill himself with her powers in the movie.
• Nice Guy: He gives Danny a place to live and a job just because Dan looked like he needed them and later helps him join AA.
• Psychic-Assisted Suicide: In the movie, Andi uses her shine to compel him to kill himself when he gets too close to her as she's dying.
• Recovered Addict: Like Dan, he's a recovering alcoholic and regularly attends AA meetings.
• Stress Vomit: When he and Dan discover Bradley's corpse, he pukes his guts out.

Casey Kingsley

Casey Kingsley

Frazier's municipal works supervisor.

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• Reasonable Authority Figure: In his first meeting with Daniel, he appears to be an annoying busybody and overzealous teetotaler. Actually, he offers Dan a job just based on Billy's recommendation, and later becomes his sponsor at AA.
• Recovered Addict: Used to be an alcoholic.

Andy Halloran

The paternal grandfather of Dick Halloran, and one of the most horrible people in a series of novels featuring evil ghosts, a murderous Genius Loci, and child-murdering psychic vampires.

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• Abusive Parents: Was not only abusive and sadistic, he also repeatedly molested Dick as a child. It's never stated if he did the same to Dick's father, but Andy shows open contempt towards him, calling him "yella'" for not having the guts to stand up to him. Dick describes him as being "dark" like Jack was.
• Adaptational Nice Guy: Heavily downplayed, but he isn't stated to have molested Dick Halloran in the films like he did in the novels.
• And I Must Scream: His final, and extremely well-deserved fate; Dick's (maternal) grandmother taught him how to seal Andy's ghost inside his mind, trapping him forever.
• Card-Carrying Villain: He knew full what a sadistic monster he was and was utterly unashamed of it.
• Creepy Mortician: Was one in life and ran his own successful funeral parlor, which allowed him to earn far more wealth than most black men could have ever dreamed of in the Jim Crow-era South.
• Denied Food as Punishment: One of his many acts of cruelty against Dick was to do this to him. Other times, he'd give him food that he'd put cigarettes out in and force him to eat them.
• Domestic Abuse: He was violently abusive to his wife as well as Dick.
• The Dreaded: He was this to his family who all lived in fear of his cruelty and abuse, especially Dick.
• Evil Old Folks: He was old enough to have a grandson and a vile, abusive monster who Dick absolutely and rightfully hated.
• Fatal Flaw: His sadism comes back to bite him when he simply can't resist appearing to torment Dick from beyond the grave, leading Dick to lock him away and leave him trapped forever.
• Faux Affably Evil: He was the image of good manners in public and a monster behind closed doors, often keeping the same mocking politeness to drive his abuse home further.
• Financial Abuse: Used his wealth to further hurt his family, knowing they couldn't stop him.
• For the Evulz: He doesn't seem to have any motive for his actions beyond sheer cruelty.
• Gruesome Grandparent: He was Dick's grandfather and a repulsive sadist who delighted in abusing him every way he could.
• Hate Sink: Given everything we learn about him, he may well be the most loathsome character in the two books which is saying a lot. Hell, he practically makes Jack, who at least had a sympathetic background due to being a victim of abuse himself and was entirely aware and ashamed of his behavior, look like a saint as Andy knew exactly what a vile person he was and revelled in it.
• Humans Are the Real Monsters: It's telling that even compared to the ghosts of the Overlook or the vampires of the True Knot, Andy stands out. There's no supernatural reason for his monstrous behavior nor is there even implied to be some sympathetic explanation for why he is the way he is like Jack had, he's just evil and has always been that way.
• Kick the Dog: He seemingly lived for this trope, taking immense pleasure in the physical, emotional and sexual abuse he inflicted on his family, especially Dick. He even tries to keep doing so from beyond the grave.
• Laser-Guided Karma: Fittingly for a vile beast of a man who used his power to torment others, he is trapped in a mental lockbox by Dick, his main victim, and is trapped there forever, completely powerless and unable to ever hurt or influence anyone ever again.
• Muggle Born of Mages: Possibly; his grandson was born with potent Shining, while Andy is never stated to have had any supernatural powers while alive. However, he did manage to return as a ghost, which is mostly done either by people who Shine, or those connected to the Overlook, both the books and the movies are fairly vague exactly how this works.
• Mythology Gag: Was an aquaintance of Charlie Manx, the Big Bad of NOS4A2 by King's son Joe Hill.
• Posthumous Character: Has been dead for over 50 years by the time even The Shining took place, but his actions shaped Dick into the man he became, and forced him to learn a very valuable skill.
• Sadist: He immensely enjoyed the physical and emotional abuse he inflicted upon Dick and his family as well as other children.
• The Savage South: Lived in Clearwater, Florida, for most of his life, and was eventually buried there.
• Spiteful Will: Knew that his family tried to put up with his abuse so they'd get his money when he died, so in a last act of cruelty he left the money to an orphanage in Alabama (which is heavily implied to have supplied him with children).
• Would Hurt a Child: He delighted in doing so, as he tortured and sexually abused Dick through his entire childhood, and tried to keep doing it after he died! It's also implied he did it to dozens of other children.

George Hatfield

George Hatfield

A student on Jack's debate team that suffered from a severe stutter.

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• Butt-Monkey: Jack deliberately sabotages George's timer out of jealousy of George's wealth and mocks him to his face. When George tries to get revenge by cutting his tires, Jack beats him to a pulp.
• The Cameo: He's mentioned in The Talisman.
• Jerk Jock: Justified. He's a jock who is quite confrontational with Jack, but Jack deliberately sabotage George multiple times out of jealousy. George admittedly cuts Jack's tires as revenge, but it's implied to be because he's an impulsive teenager more than anything.
• Like Father, Like Son: His father is a corporate lawyer and George wants to follow in his footsteps. He's a good debater despite his stutter, but Jack sabotages him out of jealousy.
• Speech Impediment: He's a genuinely good debater, but he has a severe stutter. Jack sabotages him by cutting George's timer short, and uses his stutter as an excuse.
• Spoiled Brat: Jack views him as such, believing George being rejected from the debate club is the first time he's been told no and he's simply lashing out. It's ambiguous if this is really true or just Jack projecting. He did try to slash Jack's tires in retaliation for being cut from the debate team but that was largely due to knowing it was a deliberate act on Jack's part and done for sheer cruelty with the implication that George wouldn't have reacted if someone like Al had cut him in a more compassionate way.