"The History of the Overlook Hotel"

This quarter, my blog will be about Stephen King's The Shining. In both the book and movie versions, The Overlook Hotel plays a prominent role as the primary source of evil controlling the plot, and characters. In Stephen King’s book, Jack Torrance becomes obsessed with the Hotel and wants to write a novel about its history. What some people don’t know, however, is that there’s an actual Overlook Hotel, and it has an interesting history of its own.

The Overlook Hotel as seen in Kubrick's film

When writing The Shining, Stephen King based the Overlook on an actual hotel where he and his wife had stayed. The actual hotel is named the Stanley Hotel. It was opened July 4, 1909. The Stanley Hotel is famously haunted, and apparently, King witnessed one haunting which inspired a major element of his book. The haunting he witnessed was one of the most common at the Stanley Hotel. King apparently either saw or heard children playing when there were none actually there. This inspired him to create a back story for the children, who would show up in the novel as the children of a previous winter caretaker who had been driven mad by the hotel and murdered his family.

The Stanley Hotel

It can be safely said that without the Stanley Hotel, there would be no The Shining.