Summary
- The Torrance family being the only guests at the Overlook mirrored Stephen King’s own experience at the Stanley Hotel.
- The Overlook Hotel and the Stanley Hotel both have haunted histories, inspiring King’s iconic horror story.
- Jack Torrance’s solitary drink at the bar, like King’s, serves as a self-insert moment in the story of The Shining.
The Shining is one of the most iconic horror stories about a haunted location of all time, but few know that the insidious Overlook Hotel is actually based on a real resort Stephen King stayed at with his family. Perhaps better known for its place in the pantheon of Stanley Kubrick’s filmography, The Shining was originally a horror novel penned by Stephen King. The story follows the Torrance family during their stay in the evil Overlook Hotel, a deeply haunted resort buried deep in the Rockies.
There are several scenes in both the book and film adaptation of The Shining that can clearly be pulled from Stephen King’s experiences staying at a real-life resort, the Stanley Hotel. The story goes that after so many stories set in his hometown of Maine, Stephen King was interested in crafting a horror tale with a fresh setting, throwing a dart at a map of the U.S. and landing on Boulder, Colorado. Here, King went through several esoteric experiences that inspired him to write The Shining while staying at the Stanely Hotel in the nearby town of Estes Park.
Sadly, Stanley Kubrick didn’t look to the Stanley Hotel as a cinematic stand-in for the Overlook in his film adaptation, instead opting to glean exterior shots from the Timberline Lodge in northern Oregon while capturing most of the interiors on soundstages in England. This could be one of the many reasons why Stephen King wasn’t a fan of Kubrick’s film, which turned out very different from its literary source material. Funnily enough, the Stanley Hotel was used as a filming location in, of all things, 1994’s Dumb & Dumber.
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7 The Torrance Family Being The Only Guests In The Overlook Hotel
Directly Paralleled The Plight Of Stephen King’s Own Family
Every good horror story needs a sense of isolation, and that goes double for those that revolve around haunted locations. Without a reason the characters can’t simply run away, the threat of a haunted place will always be minimized, calling for some external force to keep horror protagonists cornered.
In The Shining, King accomplishes this by naming the Torrance family as the temporary groundskeepers of the Overlook Hotel during its off-season in the Winter, being the only guests in the entire building. This premise actually mirrors what King went through with his own family, including his son, only a young boy at the time, and his wife, Tabitha.
In Rebecca Pittman’s The History & Haunting of The Stanley Hotel, Stephen King explained that he and his family managed to catch the Stanley Hotel at the very tail end of its working season. The three of them were the only guests in the entire massive inn, eating dinner in an empty, echoing dining hall devoid of all other life with the other chairs overturned on the tables.
6 The Overlook Hotel Has A Long History Of Ghosts
Just As The Stanley Hotel Did Before King Ever Visited
The novel expands on the idea that the Overlook Hotel is essentially its own living, breathing entity, more of the villain of the story than Jack is in comparison to Kubrick’s version.
It’s safe to say that the Overlook Hotel is one of the most iconic haunted locations in film, as well as horror storytelling as a whole. With The Shining, King essentially invented many horror tropes that have gone on to be repeated in many other stories, such as the presence of an ancient Native American burial ground or creepy spectral children. The novel expands on the idea that the Overlook Hotel is essentially its own living, breathing entity, more of the villain of the story than Jack is in comparison to Kubrick’s version.
It turns out that the inspiration for a haunted hotel was also a likely product of Stephen King’s stay at the Stanley Hotel. Though its reports of spiritual activity existing before King’s presence have been contentious, the Stanley Hotel claims to have a haunted history. It’s hard not to imagine that Stephen King and his family didn’t hear some spooky tales during their stay at the historic building, with the presence of eternal guests likely giving King the inspiration for a hotel that has an ancient reputation for spectral activity.
Just like the Overlook, the Stanley Hotel seems to have been crawling with ghosts long before the arrival of its lonely off-season visitors. Some of the identities of the spirits supposedly inhabiting the Stanley have even been identified over the years, with former owners F.O. and Flora Stanley, for whom the place is named, still reportedly roaming the halls. It’s no wonder King got so much horror story inspiration from his brief stay at the Stanley Hotel.
5 Jack Torrance Goes Down To Have A Solitary Drink At The Overlook Bar
Jack Acts As A Clear Self-Insert For King Here
Among the myriad themes of The Shining, alcohol abuse is a clear running thread that is especially pervasive in the book, if not the movie. Regardless, both interpretations include a scene in which Jack Torrance goes to have a lonely drink at the Overlook Hotel’s striking bar. In the movie, it’s here that he stumbles into a party from another time, curiously accepting the sudden appearance of anachronistic guests as the depths of the hotel’s corruption bubble to the surface of his psyche.
Just like Jack, Stephen King is alleged to have taken a lonesome trip to the Stanley Hotel’s bar during his stay there, once again being the only patron in the entire establishment. A bartender just like Lloyd is said to have served King during his stay at a strikingly similar bar, an experience that must’ve been just as eerie and liminal as Jack’s in the story. While Lloyd plays a more minor role in the book, serving Jack 20 Martinis at once to lower his defenses to the Overlook’s supernatural assaults, he lingers on screen for longer in Kubrick’s The Shining.
DID YOU KNOW:
The Shining
had a budget of $19 million, the equivalent of $72 million in 2024.
The idea that both Jack Torrance and Stephen King both had a drink at their respective hotels is more important than it may seem. Jack is a clear self-insert for King in many respects, sharing his familial disposition to alcoholism and the struggles it brings. By indulging at the bar, Jack (and perhaps King, as well) allows himself to become further infected by the Overlook’s malice. Kubrick’s shifting of the blame from the circumstances of the haunted location to Jack himself is likely a big part of what rubbed King the wrong way about the adaptation.
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4 Danny’s Fear Of The Hotel’s Fire Hose
Was Inspired By A Nightmare King Had Of His Own Son
Just as King is something of an analogy for King himself, Danny certainly represents his son. Nowhere is this more clear than in a scene that King has admitted was directly inspired by a mysterious nightmare he had during his overnight stay at the Stanley Hotel, in which his son was chased through the hotel’s halls by an animated fire hose.
In the biography The Stephen King Story, author George Beahm elaborates “He imagined the fire hoses coming alive, thumping across the carpet. By then, whatever it is that makes you want to make things up, it was turned on.” In the original novel, a scene plays out in which Danny vividly imagines a fire hose coming to life and becoming a great venomous snake, chasing him down the halls of the Overlook.
Being a largely internal scene that takes place within Danny’s imagination, it’s understandable why this moment was ultimately cut from Kubrick’s film. It would’ve been especially hard to shoot such a scene considering the great lengths Kubrick went to in ensuring Danny’s child actor, Danny Lloyd, didn’t know The Shining was a horror movie.
3 Jack Torrance’s Close Encounters In Room 217/237
Room 217 Was Where Stephen King And His Family Stayed
While the Overlook Hotel is quite generally haunted, no particular room seems to capture the evil of the building quite like the infamous Room 217. The book explains that Room 217 was once where an esteemed hotel guest, Lorraine Massey, stayed. After seducing countless young men to bed with her in the room, Massey ends up slitting her wrists in the room’s tub, leaving the area a particular hot spot of paranormal activity within the hotel.
In the movie, both Danny and Jack encounter Massey in various spectral forms, though the number of the room is inexplicably changed to 237. In the book, Jack’s encounter here is far more ambiguous, with only a horrific squelching sound being heard rapidly approaching the room’s door. In either case, the name Room 217 was derived from the very room at the Stanley Hotel in which King stayed with his family, allegedly the best room in the building considering the Stanley’s emptiness at the time.
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2 Jack Torrance Experiences Etheral Lounge Music In The Overlook Hotel
Much Like King And His Family Did When They Visited
One of the most striking moments in The Shining is when Jack Torrance stumbles into an out-of-time party featuring spectral guests, contradicting his own sense of time at the Overlook Hotel. The party is first brought to Jack’s attention in the form of drifting, ethereal music, luring him deeper and deeper into the insidious hotel’s bowels.
Stephen King and his family likely experienced a very similar haunting melody during their stay at the Stanley Hotel.
Charming in any other context, here the old-timey soundtrack is highly upsetting, cluing viewers in that something is very wrong with Jack’s circumstances. This culminates in The Shining‘s ambiguous ending, which implies Jack has been at the Overlook for far longer than he thinks. Funnily enough, Stephen King and his family likely experienced a very similar haunting melody during their stay at the Stanley Hotel.
While eating dinner at a dining hall empty save for themselves, the King family was treated to canned orchestral music that must’ve seemed eerily out-of-place echoing through the empty halls. As if that weren’t enough, rumors of the ghost of the hotel’s former owner, Flora Stanley, still playing her antique Steinway years after her death may have solidified the scene in King’s mind.
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1 The Torrance Family Experiences Inclement Weather
Just Like How King’s Family Was Frapped At The End Of The Winter Season
Not all the horror of The Shining is fully owed to its supernatural elements. Jack Torrance represents a very real human rage, particularly in the film adaptation, that doesn’t rely on any paranormal explanation. But an underrated element of The Shining‘s horror is the cold indifference of the Rocky Mountains’ callous winter, trapping Wendy and Danny Torrance indoors with their maniacal patriarch.
As if that isn’t bad enough, the weather is too harsh for simple travel by car, requiring the use of specialized snow carriages. Stephen King and his family likely experienced a similar level of harsh Rockies Winter, though not to the same extent as the freezing conditions that trap the Torrance family.
The cold would’ve at least been bad enough to make driving at night a bad idea. After all, the King family wound up being the very last guests the Stanley Hotel accepted before the end of the working season, suggesting that the harsh snowed-over landscape King gazed at as he smoked a midnight cigarette wormed its way into the story of The Shining.
The Shining
Stanley Kubrick’s horror classic starring Jack Nicholson and Shelley Duvall tells the story of the Torrance family, who move to the isolated Overlook Hotel so that father Jack Torrance can act as its winter caretaker. Stuck at the hotel due to the winter storms, the malevolent supernatural forces inhabiting the building slowly begin to drive Jack insane, causing his wife and psychically gifted son to be caught up in a fight for their lives when Jack is pushed over the edge.
- Release Date
- June 13, 1980
- Runtime
- 146 minutes
