The Grand Overlook Hotel

The Overlook

**The Grand Overlook Hotel** is the actual antagonist in the 1980 film, The Shining. However, people tend to focus on the insanity of the caretaker, Jack Torrence.

Jack Torrance becomes winter caretaker at the isolated Overlook Hotel in Colorado, hoping to cure his writer's block. He settles in along with his wife, Wendy and his son, Danny who is plagued by psychic premonitions. As Jack's writing goes nowhere and Danny's visions become more disturbing, Jack discovers the hotel's dark secrets and begins to unravel into a homicidal maniac hell-bent on terrorizing his family.

## Appearance

**The Grand Overlook Hotel** is a large Rocky Mountain secluded hotel closed for the winter season. The hotel is inhabited by sinister supernatural forces.

## Powers and Abilities

The Grand Overlook Hotel possesses the following powers and abilities:

* Possession
* Essence Resurrection
* Causes Hallucinations
* History of evil events and circumstances
* Supernatural exploitation of psychological weaknesses/Exploits Insanity

## Fate

**The Grand Overlook Hotel** remains to this day (in fiction).

## Trivia

* To get Jack Nicholson in the right agitated mood, he was fed only cheese sandwiches for two weeks, which he hates.
* Stanley Kubrick, known for his compulsiveness and numerous retakes, got the difficult shot of blood pouring from the elevators in only three takes. This would be unremarkable if it weren't for the fact that the shot took nine days to set up. Every time the doors opened and the blood poured out, Kubrick would say, "It doesn't look like blood." In the end, the shot took approximately a year to get right.
* The "snowy" maze near the conclusion of the movie consisted of nine hundred tons of salt and crushed Styrofoam.
* Stephen King was quite disappointed in the final film. The story was eventually re-adapted as a 1997 miniseries that followed Stephen King's book more closely, because of King's dissatisfaction with Stanley Kubrick's adaptation.
* The shot of the tennis ball rolling into Danny's toys took fifty takes to get right.
* All of the interior rooms of the Overlook Hotel were filmed at Elstree Studios in England, including the Colorado Lounge, where Jack does his typing. Because of the intense heat generated from the lighting used to recreate window sunlight (the room took seven hundred thousand watts of light per window to make it look like a snowy day outside), the lounge set caught fire. Fortunately all of the scenes had been completed there, so the set was rebuilt with a higher ceiling, and the same area was eventually used by Steven Spielberg as the snake-filled Well of the Souls tomb in "Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)."
* Stanley Kubrick decided that having the hedge animals come alive (as they do in the book) was unworkable, due to restrictions in special effects, so he opted for a hedge maze instead.
* Stephen King tried to talk Stanley Kubrick out of casting Jack Nicholson in the lead
* Stephen King got the idea for the book while his family were staying at the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, Colorado. They were the last guests before it shut down for the winter. He saw a group of nuns leaving the hotel, and it got him thinking that the place had suddenly become godless.
* To construct the interiors of the Overlook Hotel, Stanley Kubrick and production designer Roy Walker purposely set out to make it look like an amalgamation of bits and pieces of real hotels, rather than giving it one single design aesthetic.
* Some of the interior designs of the Overlook Hotel set were based on those of the Ahwahnee Hotel in Yosemite National Park.
* Saint Mary Lake and Wild Goose Island in Glacier National Park, Montana was the filming location for the aerial shots of the opening scenes, with the Volkswagen Beetle driving along Going-to-the-Sun Road. The Timberline Lodge on Mount Hood in Oregon was filmed for a few of the establishing shots of the fictional Overlook Hotel