The Overlook Hotel is an imaginary building, the main setting for Stephen King's novel The Shining (1977) and for Stanley Kubrick's 1980 film of the same name.
Located in the Colorado Rockies, the hotel is also featured in the television version of the novel, and it is often referred to in the sequel to the novel itself, Doctor Sleep (2013), and in Billy Summers (2021).
The hotel in fiction and reality[]
As a setting for the bloody events of the Torrance family, King was inspired by the Stanley Hotel, located in Estes Park in Colorado, which was actually the scene of several alleged paranormal manifestations. The writer stayed there in 1973, in room 217, where he began writing the novel.
King describes it as a very large hotel, lost in the mountains of Colorado and tens of kilometers away from the nearest towns; isolated holiday resort during the summer, it is populated by ghosts and the scene of paranormal activity during the closed winter months. Jack Torrance takes on the role of caretaker in the fall of 1975, gradually going mad and trying to exterminate the family. King narrates that the Overlook was built between 1907 and 1909 by Robert Townley Watson, father of two; one of his sons dies on the hotel estate when he falls from his horse, while his wife dies of the flu. The father sells the property even if he is later hired as caretaker together with his son.
The Stanley Hotel, the real location that inspired the writer, has its own "ghost tour" for lovers of the supernatural: in 2006 the Syfy television channel shot an episode of the Ghost Hunters series.
Kubrick's film[]
The main location for the external filming of Kubrick's famous film was Timberline Lodge in Oregon; the interiors were, however, rebuilt in the studio (Elstree Studios in Hertfordshire, London), based on the real ones of the Ahwahnee Hotel, in Yosemite National Park in California. The director said:
“I wanted the hotel to look authentic, rather than similar to those traditionally spooky hotels you see in the cinema. I thought the labyrinthine arrangement, and the large hotel rooms alone would provide a rather scary atmosphere. (...) It seemed to me that the perfect guide for this type of approach could be found in Kafka's literary style"
Among the numerous changes and adaptations by Kubrick compared to the book, the room number of the famous "Redrum", which passes from 217 to 237, seems to be at the insistence of the management of the Timberline, worried about the negative and frightening image of the room on future customers.