45-year mystery behind eerie photo from The Shining is believed to be solved

It’s a moment etched in horror movie history.

In Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 horror classic The Shining, the camera zooms in toward a black-and-white photograph hanging in the hallway of the Overlook Hotel. It’s dated July 4, 1921. Dead centre stands Jack Torrance — played by Jack Nicholson — smiling in a crowd of partygoers.  

But the photo wasn’t taken on set with extras. It was a real photo from the 1920s, and Nicholson’s face had been superimposed over someone. But whose face was it? 

Now, after 45 years of theories and speculation, the mysterious man’s identity and context of the eerie photo are believed to have been uncovered by an academic and journalist. 

“I suppose I wouldn’t have been so bothered if it hadn’t been that the film mattered to me. I thought it was an important film,” retired British academic Alasdair Spark told As It Happens host Nil Köksal.  

The Shining — based on the novel by Stephen King — tells the story of Jack and Wendy Torrance and their young son Danny, who spend a winter as caretakers of the haunted Overlook Hotel. Torrance, a recovering alcoholic and aspiring writer, slowly descends into madness as the hotel’s supernatural forces take over him. 

Conspiracy theories about the image’s origins have circulated since the film’s release. 

According to retired academic Alasdair Spark, a cropped version of the original photo — the one in which Jack Nicholson’s face was superimposed — was revealed in a 1985 book, The Complete Airbrush and Photo-Retouching Manual, shedding new light on the mystery by revealing the man whose face had been covered up. 

In 2012, the image resurfaced online, sparking fresh debates. 

“[There were] lots of discussion about who he is and how strange he looks,” said Spark.

“Others said he was Edmund Platt, governor of the Federal Reserve in 1921, and the people around him were bankers, so the photo was proof that Kubrick secretly wanted to expose the financial elite,” he recalled.

“I thought, ‘I don’t really think that’s true and I’m going to find out and determine what actually is going on in the photograph,’ and I’m happy to say I think I did.”

Man in the photo 

In 2024, a Reddit user named Connor Plunkett used a facial recognition tool to try and identify the man at the front of the crowd. It returned a match: Santos Casani, a famous ballroom dancer in 1920s London. 

That’s when Arik Tolar, a New York Times journalist on the visual investigations team, reached out to Spark to help investigate. Spark says Tolar had been skeptical, and “actually discounted it and didn’t think it was a proper identification.” 

But Spark wasn’t so sure, and together, they began digging further. 

They found and looked at many other photos of Casani and discovered that his real name was John Golman. It was discovered that Casani, his stage name, had been in an accident that caused facial injuries. 

“The scars on his face matched the scars on the unknown man, a.k.a. Casani. Bingo,” said Spark. 

“Many people had seen this disfigurement as devilish — that word was used — or evil. What I learned was he was an RAF veteran. He had crashed his aircraft and been badly wounded. He’d had a lot of plastic surgery, and that accounted for the strange look of his face.” 

Where was the infamous picture taken? 

While identifying Casani was a breakthrough, one major mystery remained, says Spark. 

“The entire original photo and negative wasn’t known, nor the details of who, when, where, what,” he said. 

For years, it was believed the image came from the Warner Brothers archive. But, “no one could ever find out where the Warner Brothers photo archive was and that seemed to produce a dead end,” said Spark. 

As the next step, the sleuthing duo decided to look through old photographs to see if they could find other images of the same place or people to help pinpoint it, but nothing turned up.

Finally, Spark contacted Murray Close, the photographer who took the picture of Jack Nicholson that was inserted into the original image. 

The photographer revealed that “there was no such thing as the Warner Brothers photo archive [and] that was a complete mistake.” 

Instead, Close had sourced the original photo from the BBC Hulton Photo Library in London, now part of Getty Images. 

The photo, it turns out, was taken at a Valentine’s Day dance on February 14, 1921, in the Empress Ballroom at the Royal Palace Hotel in London.

“I do feel a sense of achievement. We knew the photograph with Jack Nicholson in [it]. We knew that there was an unknown man, but we didn’t know who he was. We didn’t know where it was, we didn’t know when it was,” said Spark. 

“It’s a delight to be able to close that gap in knowledge.”