WARNING: Spoilers are unmarked.
Novel
- The sad fact that, despite seeing what it did to his father, knowing Dan is an alcoholic can sting hard. Like Father, Like Son indeed...
- The bad death of the baseball boy.
- Snakebite Andi begging Daddy not to hurt her as she cycles out.
- Dan seeing his dad's ghost one last time after Rose's defeat.
- As despicable as the True Knot is, their deaths at the hands of Concetta's mist is saddening. Two of them touch foreheads as they cycle out. One mouths the words "I love you" to another, but they both cycle out before she can answer. Like with Snakebike Andi, Dan feels sorry for them both.
Film
- The film's mood at the open of the story is a full on Downer Beginning compared with the book. Jack Torrance was claimed by the Overlook and the hotel was left standing instead of burning down. Wendy and Danny are in Florida recovering from the trauma, Loraine Massey is now haunting Danny in their bathroom, and while Richard Halloran is around to help Danny, he's a Spirit Advisor from the start due to his early death in the Kubrick film.
- Just after a hangover and a tryst with a woman, Dan discovers that this woman is raising a child but steals her money anyways, reasoning that it's payback for her stealing his money to buy coke. This comes back to bite him later when the woman's ghost visits him, stating that she died and her baby went along with her.
- He does put the money back with some prompting from Dick, but another implied element is that the woman is already dead, especially with how there's vomit next to her.
- Even worse in the Director's Cut is that the woman tells him that her neighbors heard the sound of her child's crying and did nothing due to the fact that the child would cry while she left him alone to go out. That means she died first, then the baby starved to death, and no one checked because hearing the baby crying was a common occurrence to the neighbors.
- He does put the money back with some prompting from Dick, but another implied element is that the woman is already dead, especially with how there's vomit next to her.
- The sad fate of Bradley the baseball boy, who is tortured to death and mocked by the True Knot just to extend their own lives. He doesn't even get the sweet revenge of giving them all a case of the Measles like he does in the book.
- When Dan and Billy follow Abra's clairvoyant lead and uncover Bradley's remains, they both start vomiting from the foul stench and presumably the horror that adults would do such a thing to a child. Danny and Billy reject the people who did this as members of the human race.
- This scene is so upsetting that it drove some people to walk out of the movie and many others to switch it off. Jacob Tremblay's performance as a frightened little boy is horribly realistic. It's not hard to read sexual abuse subtext from this scene either, meaning that survivors of childhood sexual abuse may wish to avoid watching the scene in full.
- Dan getting his eight-year token from AA, and dedicating it to his father who (in a sense) was killed by his alcoholism, saying that he knows that deep down his father always wanted to be where Dan is right now, celebrating his sobriety.
- In the director's cut, Violet's mother is shown looking for her as the True Knot drive away from the campground. It's quite possible she'd passed away by the time the True Knot were defeated nearly 40 years later, never knowing what happened to her daughter.
- Dan losing his friend Billy who is telepathically manipulated by a dying Snakebite Andi into killing himself.
- Shortly afterward, Crow Daddy arrives and kills Abra's father Dave before abducting the girl herself. All three of these events nearly drive Dan back to the bottle.
- Dan ends up sacrificing himself, setting fire to the Overlook and taking his father's place from the original novel.
- Even more of a tearjerker when you realize that, for years, Dan had been tormented by the events of the Overlook, turning to alcohol to cope with everything and that it is in his death that he finally gets some relief from the torment he suffered over the years.
- And that's nothing to say of his final moments, with him reverting to how he looked as a child and seeing his mother one last time.
- Dan confronting his father's ghost. He's able to finally confront his demons but the Overlook has completely consumed Jack, with the elder Torrance having no trace of his own identity left apart from his alcoholism, violent tendencies, and the name of "Lloyd the Bartender" that the Overlook has given him. Jack doesn't even recognize his own name, or the names of his wife and son.
- The even worse interpretation of this is that Jack is long gone and the Overlook is just using his form to taunt Dan.
- The other, even more heartbreaking interpretation, is that Jack is still there and tells Dan to his face that he always hated him and Wendy, then shows anger when Dan refuses to fall off the wagon like he did, showing that Dan has become a better man than Jack ever was.
- The latter interpretation is lent more credence in the Director's Cut, where Jack outright refers to Dan as his son and calls him "Doc", which his mother also did. That said, Dick Hallorann assures Dan early on that version of the film that Jack had some good inside before the Overlook corrupted him, so in that case, the Overlook may have become aware of Dan's "nickname" upon consuming Jack's memories and uses his form to taunt him and believe that his father truly hated him.
- Dan reveals to Jack's ghost that when he turned twenty, Wendy died, and mentioned how in her last moments, all he could see on her face was flies (or "death flies" as he calls them, since that is what appears on someone's face when they're close to death), so much so that he couldn't look at her in the eyes when she passed. The idea that Wendy, who already went through such suffering , passed just around Dan just becoming an adult is just saddening.
- The Director's Cut also reveals that after moving to Florida (since, according to Dan, he and Wendy didn't want to "see snow" again), Wendy would have difficulty looking directly at his face, because she saw Jack's eyes. Dan had to use his Shining on Wendy's mind to stop this, not for himself, but so she wouldn't have to be reminded of her husband at all.
