Fictional Hotels in Films: Overlook Hotel (The Shining)
Created by American horror novelist Stephen King, the Overlook Hotel stands out as a unique and terrifying antagonist. Unlike most villains in popular culture who are human, the Overlook Hotel, a recurring presence in King’s novels and their film adaptations, is a sentient entity. It’s depicted as a character with its own desires and purposes, setting it apart from the more common trope of merely haunted locations in literature and cinema.
Background
The Overlook Hotel serves as the primary antagonist in several iterations of Stephen King’s The Shining: the 1977 novel, the 1980 film adaptation, the 1997 miniseries, the novel sequel Doctor Sleep, and the 2019 film adaptation.
This secluded hotel, nestled in the Rocky Mountains, boasts a history of unfortunate events, including suicides, gangland hits, and numerous suspicious ownership changes. Despite this dark past, the Overlook maintained its reputation as a luxurious destination, renowned for its opulent grounds and breathtaking mountain vistas.
The Stanley hotel
The Overlook’s genesis can be traced back to a single night in 1974. During a brief stay in Boulder, Colorado, Stephen King and his wife, Tabitha, checked into The Stanley hotel, a resort hotel in nearby Estes Park. The hotel, closing for the winter season, offered an eerie atmosphere that profoundly impacted King.
According to George Beahm’s Stephen King Companion, King explored the deserted halls, encountering a bartender named Grady. As he returned to his room, Room 217, the hotel’s remote location, grand size, and unsettling desolation ignited his imagination. A chilling thought — “What if somebody died here?” — crystallised in his mind as he pulled back the pink curtain of the claw-footed bathtub.
While The Stanley hotel served as a significant inspiration, King emphasises in the novel’s front matter that the Overlook Hotel is a purely fictional creation. He states, “Some of the most beautiful resort hotels in the world are located in Colorado, but the hotel in these pages is based on none of them. The Overlook and the people associated with it exist wholly in the author’s imagination.”
Timberline Lodge
Directed by legendary filmmaker Stanley Kubrick, the film adaptation of The Shining utilises Timberline Lodge, situated on the slopes of Mount Hood in Oregon, for its exterior shots of the Overlook Hotel. While Timberline Lodge diverges significantly from the Colorado-based Stanley hotel, which served as the novel’s inspiration, its rustic architecture, historical significance (being a U.S. government-built lodge with influences from Native American design), aligned perfectly with Stanley Kubrick’s aesthetic vision.
The film’s opening features aerial shots of Timberline Lodge, establishing the Overlook’s imposingly suspicious presence. However, a subtle inconsistency emerges: the grounds of Timberline Lodge lack sufficient space to accommodate the expansive hedge maze featured in the film. Whether this discrepancy was intentional on Kubrick’s part remains uncertain, mirroring the deliberate mismatches between the Overlook’s interior design and the actual structure of Timberline Lodge, which seem to contribute to the film’s unsettling atmosphere.
Initially, the Timberline Lodge staff and management expressed concerns that featuring Room 217 in a horror film might deter guests. The management requested a change to the fictional Room 237, which Kubrick readily agreed to, as there is no Room 237 at Timberline Lodge. Ironically, after the film’s release, Room 217 has become the most requested room at the lodge.
The Ahwahnee Hotel
While the exterior of the Overlook was captured at Timberline Lodge, the film’s interiors drew significant inspiration from the Ahwahnee Hotel at Yosemite National Park. Designed by Gilbert Stanley Underwood, the same architect behind Timberline Lodge, the Ahwahnee Hotel shares a certain architectural kinship with the Overlook Hotel. However, all interior filming for The Shining took place at Elstree Studios in England.
Elstree Studios
The interior shots of the Overlook Hotel were nearly entirely filmed at Elstree Studios in England. While inspired by the grandeur of the Ahwahnee Hotel at Yosemite, notably its Grand Lounge, the Overlook’s interior design was largely a studio creation. Kubrick took significant liberties, allowing the layout to shift from scene to scene. This creative freedom, facilitated by the studio setting, enabled him to play with spatial relationships and achieve iconic visual effects, such as the blood-gushing elevator, that would have been impossible to achieve on a real-world set.
The iconic hedge maze, a prominent feature in the film, was a significant departure from King’s novel, which featured animated animal topiaries. The Stanley hotel, the inspiration for the Overlook, did not have a maze, though one has since been added to the hotel grounds in homage to the film. Neither Timberline Lodge nor the Ahwahnee Hotel featured a maze.
The film’s depiction of the maze relied heavily on creative studio techniques. Scenes of characters navigating the maze utilised constructed sets, while the famous overhead shot was achieved by filming actors from a high-rise building and combining the footage with a painted backdrop. This approach further emphasises the film’s disjointed relationship with reality, as the overhead shot of the maze does not align with the maze map seen within the film or the model of the maze displayed within the Overlook Hotel itself.
The Overlook Hotel
Numerous accounts have detailed the spatial anomalies and inconsistencies within Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining film. These include rooms with inexplicable windows, doors leading nowhere, shifting room locations, vanishing furniture and fixtures, and props teleporting between rooms. The Overlook Hotel itself defies conventional logic in its spatial layout.
Jan Harlan, an Executive Producer on The Shining, addressed these inconsistencies in an interview with Xan Brooks of The Guardian. Harlan confirmed that the set’s disorientation was deliberate: ‘The set was very deliberately built to be offbeat and off the track, so that the huge ballroom would never actually fit inside. The audience is deliberately made not to know where they’re going.
Legacy
The Shining, though released more than four decades ago, continues to fascinate audiences, and some of its filming locations remain accessible to visitors. The Stanley hotel, the birthplace of the Overlook, has wholeheartedly embraced its connection to the film.
The Stanley hotel offers tours, including a visit to the “Stephen King Suite” in a restored caretakers’ cottage. This immersive experience features a recreation of the iconic bathroom from the film, along with a prop axe wielded by Jack Nicholson. The tour provides a glimpse into the hotel’s history and the supernatural occurrences that inspired King’s creation.
Timberline Lodge, while acknowledging its role in the film, maintains a more reserved approach. While open to the public, it doesn’t actively cater to the fans of The Shining, likely to avoid the perception of exploiting the film’s horror elements. The lodge’s website includes a disclaimer: “Rest assured, Timberline is not haunted!”
Selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress in 2018 as “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant,” The Shining is frequently cited as one of the best horror films of all time. Rotten Tomatoes reports an 83% approval rating from 105 critics, with an average score of 8.6/10. The Shining continues to exert a powerful influence on global popular culture, with its legacy evident in countless memes, parodies, and homages across film, television, video games, and music.
Fictional Hotels in Films Series
This series explores how iconic fictional hotels become central to compelling cinematic storytelling.
