In the final scene a photograph is shown indicating it was taken at the 4 July 1921 ball, while "Midnight, the Stars and You" by Al Bowlly with Ray Noble's orchestra can be heard; the song was recorded in 1934.
Dick Hallorann (Scatman Crothers) is depicted as possessing "The Shining," a blend of telepathic and precognitive gifts. Yet, when he returns to the Overlook he somehow fails to foresee his own death at Jack's hands.
This contrasts with the novel, in which Dick can sense his likely imminent death.
It is claimed that the hotel was constructed in 1907–1909 and that it may have been attacked by American Indians while it was being built; however, the American Indian Wars had already concluded by 1890.
In the bathroom scene of the film, Jack tells Delbert Grady: "You killed your wife and daughter." Immediately beforehand, a reference is made to 'daughters' (which is correct).
As Jack uses an axe to hack through the door, he only breaches one of the recessed panels and shouts, "Here's Johnny!" Yet when he turns at the sound of a snowmobile and the camera cuts, two panels are missing despite him not having struck them with the axe.
While Wendy is explaining Danny's injury to the doctor, she says that at the time Jack vowed never to drink again and he's been dry for five months. Later, when Jack is recounting the incident to the barman, he declares it happened "three goddamn years ago!"
In the opening long shot of the Overlook Hotel (immediately before the 'The Interview' title card), the maze is not visible, despite being located quite close to the hotel throughout the rest of the film.
When Wendy goes to see Jack in the lobby while he is typing (around 45 minutes into the film, where he becomes highly irritated that she has interrupted him), he tears the current sheet from the typewriter and does not insert a new one; yet as she walks away and he resumes typing — with no pause in the dialogue or action — a fresh page is already in place.
When the tennis ball is rolled to Danny at the Overlook Hotel, the carpet pattern on the floor shifts between cuts.
On the second occasion when Jack is speaking to Lloyd at the bar, one can clearly see ice cubes in the glass Jack's holding. After Lloyd utters "Orders from the house," the ice has entirely melted away.
While Danny and Hallorann discuss "the Shining" over a bowl of ice-cream, the shots of Danny alternate repeatedly: at times he appears with pronounced dark circles under his eyes and ice-cream at the sides of his mouth, and at others those circles are almost imperceptible and there are no traces of ice-cream.
Jack's typewriter is swapped from a white manual Alder to a black model of the same make.
During Stuart Ullman's interview with Jack, a nameplate sits on his desk. When Wendy discovers the switchboard has failed and must use an amateur radio, the nameplate has disappeared. Later, when Jack returns to the room to remove the tubes from the radio, the nameplate has reappeared in the centre of the desk.
In the sequence featuring the bat, the bearskin rug in front of the fireplace disappears and then reappears.
In the scene where blood pours from the lifts, the doors open left-to-right. Earlier, while Wendy and Jack are being shown round the hotel, they step out of a lift whose doors open right-to-left.
When Jack enters the hotel manager's office to switch off the radio, there is a light switch on the wall to the right of the door. Earlier, when Jack enters the office to see Mr Ullman for "the interview," that same wall is plainly without any light switch.
While Wendy and Danny hide from Jack in the bathroom, the interior shots show snow piled in the corner of the windowpane. By contrast, the exterior shots of the window, filmed as Danny flees, show no snow. The scene repeatedly alternates between these interior and exterior views, so the snow appears and disappears.
When Jack is at his typewriter and Wendy asks "get a lot written today?", a table and a chair are positioned against the wall in the background. In the following shot of Jack they have disappeared, only to reappear in the subsequent shot.
While Jack is speaking with Mr Grady in the men's room, and Grady sets the tray down, it repeatedly shifts from the gap between the second and third taps to that between the third and fourth taps and back again throughout their exchange.
When Wendy drags Jack into the larder, several knives are mounted on a short stretch of wall. She locks Jack in the larder and seizes one of the knives — the blade she takes wasn't there moments earlier, and the remaining knives have been rearranged.
When Wendy gets up and rushes into Danny's room whilst he's shouting "Redrum," she is holding a cigarette. By the time she has come through the doorway and into Danny's room to pull him away, the cigarette has disappeared, with no time for her to have disposed of it.
Numerous apparent continuity lapses — background items vanishing and reappearing, doors opening the wrong way, objects moving about — were deliberately introduced. Given Kubrick’s reputed IQ of 200, it is quite plausible he planted these seeming errors to unsettle the viewer, often on a subliminal level — much as with the purposely disorientating layout of the Overlook. Bear in mind, this is a haunted hotel, with little reason to 'play by the rules.'
The portion of a sandwich that Danny consumes at the start of the film.
When Danny returned to the games room, Jack asked him whether he'd enjoyed 'bombing the universe', and Danny replied, 'Yes.' The games room contained no video games — he had been playing darts.
When Wendy slips into the bathroom to get away from Jack, the lampshade beside the bed is askew. Yet when Jack returns to the flat to batter the door down with an axe, the lampshade is perfectly straight.
Near the end of the film, when Danny (as Tony) takes the knife from the side table, goes to a dressing table to fetch a tube of lipstick and then writes 'redrum' on a door, the cap is already off and the lipstick is already extended (normally achieved by twisting the tube). Given the tension of the preceding scenes, it is extremely unlikely that Wendy (assuming it was her make-up) would have put on lipstick before lying down for a nap and then forgotten to replace the cap. The action plays out in real time, so Danny would have had to remove the cap and twist the lipstick on his way to fetch the knife and then return to it, which seems implausible. It is more likely that Kubrick had the lipstick uncapped and pre-advanced for Danny, a young actor with only one free hand.
The small painting above Jack and Wendy's bed is not there when Jack is speaking with Danny.
The ash from Mrs Torrance's cigarette as she talks to the doctor about Danny.
While Danny is scrawling "REDRUM" on the wall, the knife's handle is pointing towards him. When he moves closer to Wendy, the knife's handle is directed towards her.
(at about 1 hour 45 minutes) Jack is pursuing Wendy on the staircase. When the camera is on Jack, he has his hands raised as if asking for the bat; the shot then cuts to Wendy and Jack's hands are down. The camera returns to Jack and his hands are raised again.
While Danny and Halloran converse, the leftover ice cream in Danny's bowl changes between shots, and on several occasions it almost vanishes entirely.
Wendy's hand placement on the bat while Jack pursues her up the staircase: until she strikes him, her hands are positioned about halfway up the bat, but at the moment she hits him they are down by the base.
During Hallorann's telephone call with Larry, his scarf moves from being tucked inside his coat to sitting outside it and then back in again, while the box on Larry's table alters its angle between shots (the red-and-blue side becomes red-only).
Having killed Hallorann, Jack proceeds to the Overlook's main entrance. Hallorann had only just managed to squeeze through a single door left ajar by the storm. Yet when Jack arrives at the entrance, both doors are open — and we never see anyone open the second one in the meantime.
The position of Wendy's hand as Jack describes his nightmare.
The arrangement of Danny's hands and the ice-cream bowl as he and Hallorann discuss Shining.
How the knife is positioned when Wendy locks herself in the bathroom.
During the interview, the cigarette end in the glass ashtray on Ullman's desk vanishes and reappears on two occasions.
Whilst Wendy hurries through the hotel clutching a knife, it flips between her left and right hands.
When Danny first spots the girls in the games room, two chairs and an ashtray on the right-hand side shift position between cuts.
As Jack steps into Mr. Ullman's office for the interview, Kubrick's head and a member of the crew can be seen reflected in the window.
After his row with Wendy, Jack, furious in the kitchen, knocks utensils off the worktops; a couple of metal tins strike the camera and bounce back. It’s plainly visible that Jack starts to laugh for a moment, but he slips back into character as he walks down the corridor.
The helicopter's shadow is visible in the bottom right-hand corner during the opening sequence. (This continuity error is present only in the 4:3/1.37:1 print.)
At times shadows cast by the filming equipment can be seen on Danny's back as he rides his tricycle along the hotel's corridors.
During the climactic pursuit through the maze, the Steadicam's shadow is briefly visible.
The final frame of the arrival sequence at the start of the film is an aerial shot. In that shot the helicopter's rotor is distinctly visible, with the upper half of the view filmed through the rotor disc.
A person can be seen filming the final scene towards the end of the film, when Wendy runs out of the hotel and spots a man in a furry costume with another man in a dinner jacket performing a sexual act. His reflection is visible in the lamp on the left inside the room they're in.
As Wendy and Jack step into the flat for the first time during the tour near the start of the film, the camera's shadow is visible on them.
The light switches in the Overlook Hotel are fitted high up on the wall, as is customary in England. In buildings in the United States, switches are almost always installed lower, typically below the mid-point of the wall.
The wooden shelving in the food-storage room where Jack is confined is made from British standard-sized timber; the boards are narrower and have a different aspect ratio than the ubiquitous "2x4" boards that would commonly be used to construct similar shelving in the United States.
In the games room a United States flag is displayed vertically on the wall, but its blue canton appears at the top-right rather than in the correct top-left position.
If the area receives 20 feet of snow over the winter and the storm was the worst they had seen for years, the snow in the hedge maze would have been far too deep for Danny and Jack to run about in, especially with it banked in 30-foot drifts up to the hotel's roof.
However, the maze could have prevented the snow from piling up in places, much as a dense forest can stop the snow from passing through when the trees are thick enough.
In the lounge, when Jack asks Lloyd for a bourbon on the rocks, Lloyd pours him Jack Daniel's — which, strictly speaking, is not classed as a bourbon but as a Tennessee sipping whisky, despite sharing the same recipe as a bourbon.
It’s impossible for the vast heap of Torrance's luggage, as seen when they first arrive at the Overlook Hotel, to have fitted into a Volkswagen Beetle.
The music heard in the ballroom sequences is "Midnight, the Stars, and You," which was not recorded by Ray Noble and his Orchestra with vocalist Al Bowlly until 1934 — thirteen years after the scene is set. Nevertheless, this aligns with the film's recurring motif of a time-warp paradox.
In his employment interview Ullman tells Jack the name of the former caretaker, which Ullman identifies as Charles Grady. When Jack meets Grady later on, the man gives his name as Delbert Grady. This distinction is deliberate: the differing names suggest that both Gradys have occupied the hotel previously — they are not literally the same character but rather the same "entity" or soul repeatedly drawn back to the hotel, much like Jack Torrance's character.
When Wendy brings Jack breakfast in bed she gives him fried eggs, sunny-side up. Any eggs kept for that period would normally be a frozen processed egg product. Fresh eggs wouldn't be expected, since all food would need to endure six months of storage. Any milk would have to be powdered. Their provisions would most likely resemble those used by personnel wintering at the South Pole station in Antarctica. Perishable items such as fresh produce or vegetables would have been removed before the staff departed.
However, eggs can be frozen for storage, with yolk and white separated if necessary. Milk certainly stores well in a freezer and, when thawed, returns essentially to its original state. And this is only a month into their stay. Likewise, many vegetables will keep for a long time if kept cool and dry — that's what "root cellars" were for. Alternatively, they could be frozen as well.
With some forethought, a hotel with hundreds of rooms could order in and store enough supplies to keep a single family on omelettes all winter. They would certainly have large freezers as well as a very large larder. It's 1980!
The hotel sits on the mainland of the United States; it is not isolated in the way an Antarctic base is. There is generally ready access via busy roads to food suppliers. It has been in operation for seventy years with almost no murderous rampages.
Several viewers have noted that the film offers no explanation for how Jack managed to get out of the larder to pursue Wendy with an axe. He is said to have been released by the ghost of Delbert Grady.
When Wendy brings Jack his breakfast in bed, it appears they have swapped sides; however, the opening shot is actually a reflection in a mirror.
Wendy is said to be "from Vermont," yet she speaks with a recognisably Texan accent.
Jack asks Lloyd for a "bottle of bourbon", but Lloyd hands him a bottle of whiskey; Jack Daniel's is not a bourbon. Although Jack Daniel's chooses not to call itself bourbon, the venerable brand has applied for federal approval to use the bourbon classification on its labels, and under the North American Free Trade Agreement Tennessee whiskey is categorised as straight bourbon.
As Wendy rushes out of the room clutching Danny, convinced Jack may have harmed him, it becomes clear she is in fact holding a dummy.
After Wendy locks Jack in the dry storeroom, the first time he rises after being injured and topples into the surrounding boxes, it becomes clear from the manner in which they fall and the hollow sound they produce that the boxes are empty.
As Wendy strikes Jack on the head with a baseball bat on the stairs, the bat bends, revealing that it is made of rubber.
While Wendy and Danny are watching television, neither the mains lead nor any aerial or cable lead is connected to the set.
The hedge maze, which is said to lie behind the hotel, cannot be seen in the aerial shot of the whole building during the film's opening.
After Wendy locks Jack in the larder, we hear him banging on the door repeatedly as he tries to get out. The door doesn't budge at all, yet in the interior shot we see it give when he shouts "go check it out" and pounds his hands against it.
When Mr Ullman interviews Jack and explains why the hotel is shut for the winter, he finishes his sentence with his left hand grasping his right. A second afterwards, his right hand is grasping his left — a mirror image.
When Wendy comes upon Hallorann in the hall and the camera closes in on him, his eyelid twitches just before the scene ends.
As Jack walks towards the Gold Room, his reflection does not appear in the final mirror.
Danny's bowl of ice-cream shifts position while he and Halloran are discussing The Shining. Later in the exchange the bowl also seems to be a different one.
As the family drive to the hotel at the beginning of the film, Wendy's window is completely down despite the cold and the deep snow on the ground. Furthermore, her hair is hardly stirred by the draught from the open window.
When Scatman Crothers first opens the freezer door the handle is on the right; however, once he steps into the freezer the handle is on the left. Also, a pane of glass is missing from the outside wall.
