Overlook Hotel
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The Overlook Hotel is the fictional hotel from Stephen King's novel The Shining and its adaptations. Timberline Lodge, a mountain resort in Oregon, was used in Stanley Kubrick's adaptation of the book while the Stanley Hotel, King's inspiration for the Overlook, was used in a TV adaptation for ABC.
[edit] History
The Overlook was considered to be one of the most beautiful resort hotels in the Rockies, if not the world. It had many illustrious guests: Vanderbilts, Rockefellers, Astors, Du Ponts, Marilyn Monroe, Truman Capote, and presidents Woodrow Wilson, Warren G. Harding, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Richard Nixon.
Robert Townley Watson began building the Overlook in 1907. It was located in the Rocky Mountains, 40 miles west of the nearest town, (the fictitious) Sidewinder, Colorado (The novel references a close proximity to Estes Park, Boulder, and the Rocky Mountain National Park.) During construction, workers discovered an ancient Indian burial ground on the site and human remains were unearthed and removed to another location. Following this, a number of mysterious deaths occurred during the building of the hotel, inspiring local tales of vengeful Indian spirits angry about the disturbance of their resting place. The Overlook Hotel was finally completed in 1909 and opened to the public in 1910. Despite the eerie tales about the strange, untimely deaths that occurred, the Overlook itself was an attractive, elegant and spacious hotel with panoramic views of the mountains and it proved immensely popular, receiving more visitors than expected.
The fledgling hotel proved to be a financial burden on Watson, so he sold it in 1915. Many strange events followed and rumors of hauntings and a curse abounded. It was sold and resold in 1922, 1929, and 1936. The hotel was finally abandoned, vacant until the end of World War II, when it was purchased and renovated by a Howard Hughes-inspired millionaire named Horace Derwent. The Overlook became one of Derwent's most valuable holdings in Colorado. Derwent boasted that the Overlook would be the "Showplace of the World," but this did not come to fruition. He spent more than three million dollars restoring the hotel in an attempt to create his showplace before a single patron ever walked through the doors. Even with all of the Overlook's faboulously wealthy guests, the hotel never recovered a single dime.
The Overlook's financial loss proved to be too great, and in 1952, Derwent sold the hotel to Charles Grondin, the head of a group of investors based in California. The group ran the hotel for two seasons before selling it to a company called Mountainview Resorts. This company went bankrupt in 1957, closing the Overlook for the rest of that decade. The Overlook fell into disrepair during this period, but it was leased and repaired in 1961 by four writers who reopened it as a writers' school. However, the school closed again when a drunken student died after falling out of his third-story window onto the terrace below.
In 1963, a Las Vegas investment firm bought the Overlook. It reopened a few months later. However, the sale was peculiar because the head of the firm was Charles Grondin, who had bought the hotel from Horace Derwent in 1952. Grondin had been tried and acquitted for tax evasion in 1960, and had become the executive vice president of the Chicago office of Derwent's company. This led to speculation that Derwent controlled Grondin's Vegas organization and had bought the Overlook a second time under peculiar circumstances. In 1964, an investigation revealed that the Vegas firm that owned the Overlook had connections with Mafia kingpins. Grondin denied these charges. In 1966, however, a gangland-style triple murder was committed in the Overlook's presidential suite, one of the victims being a notorious mafia hit man named Vito the Chopper.
The Overlook recovered from the scandal and business continued as usual. In 1970, Stuart Ullman took over as manager of the hotel. Soon after he began his tenure, more unusual and horrific events occurred in the Overlook. A panicked cleaning woman claimed to have seen the corpse of a guest in the bathroom of Room 217 (the guest's corpse was en route to her funeral at the time of the sighting), and Ullman promptly fired the cleaning woman.
[edit] Events of The Shining
In 1970, Ullman hired a man named Delbert Grady to be the Overlook's winter caretaker. Along with his wife and two daughters, Grady spent the winter months in the hotel. When the Overlook's staff returned to open the hotel for the summer season, they discovered that Grady had murdered his family with an axe before killing himself.
In 1977, Ullman hired a new winter caretaker named Jack Torrance. Torrance was an aspiring playwright and a recovering alcoholic who saw the caretaker job as an opportunity to repair his fractured family life. Torrance, along with his wife Wendy and son Danny spent the winter tenure in the Overlook, which was marred by terrifying occurrences.
Jack and Wendy were unaware of their son's psychic abilities, including his ability to read minds. These abilities were referred to as "the shining" by Dick Hallorann, the hotel's cook who had the same abilities. The entire Torrance family was unaware that the Overlook Hotel had been somehow transformed into an evil sentient entity, filled with ghosts and evil spirits that sought to absorb Danny into the hotel to become something more. The Overlook's paranormal inhabitants, such as the dead woman in Room 217 (237 in the Stanley Kubrick adaption) and the living hedge animals on the roque court, began threatening Danny. Jack and Wendy were not aware of these strange events.
Eventually, the Overlook started exploiting Jack in its desperation to get to Danny. The evil spirits in the Overlook, including the ghost of Delbert Grady, told Jack that Danny and Wendy were conspiring against him and that he should kill them both. The hotel also used Jack's past alcoholism against him to get him to start drinking again. After Jack attacked Wendy and Danny in the ballroom, they locked him in the Overlook's pantry. The hotel let Jack out, equipping him with a roque mallet, so he could make Danny "take his medicine." Jack wounded Wendy and Hallorann (who had come back to the Overlook at the telepathic request of Danny) before cornering Danny.
Danny realized that the person attacking him and his mother was not really Jack Torrance, but the hotel itself, which was possessing him. Danny told Jack that the hotel had made him start drinking again and had made false promises to correct past events. The real Jack emerged to tell Danny that he loved him and to get out before the hotel took over again he used the mallet to kill himself. The creature that remained was prepared to kill Danny until Danny realized that Jack had forgotten to release the Overlook's boiler pressure and the hotel itself had forgotten too. Danny, Dick, and Wendy barely escaped the Overlook before its boiler exploded, destroying the hotel. The hotel's evil entity tried to convince Hallorann to kill Danny and Wendy, but he resisted and they escaped.
In Stanley Kubrick's film, the hotel was not destroyed. Instead, Jack Torrance was absorbed into the hotel in a ghostly time warp of madness and murder. After chasing his wife and son outside into a blizzard, Jack died of exposure while trying to find Danny in a hedge maze. Wendy and Danny escape in a Snowcat. Jack's image then appears clearly in the forefront of an old photograph (of the July 4 1921 Ball) inside the hotel lobby.
[edit] Supernatural attributes
Even though the Overlook seems to be merely an inanimate hotel, certain parts of the book suggest that it is in fact a sentient entity. Delbert Grady's ghost refers to the hotel as the "manager" who has appointed Jack as the caretaker. A powerful voice only Hallorann can hear though his psychic abilities first tells him to turn back when he tries to help the Torrances, and later tries to coax Hallorann to kill them. Indeed, at the climax of the story, Danny realizes the man attacking him is not the real Jack Torrance, but is really the hotel itself. The hotel then kills Jack with the mallet, gruesomely "shedding" Jack's body, becoming a living composite of all the ghosts in the hotel. This is the hotel's animate, supernatural form.
The Overlook Hotel is not only haunted by the ghosts of those who died violently within it, but the hotel is itself a host to a being of unknown origin; apparently, the souls and, perhaps, special abilities of those killed during construction also belong to the entity. Possibly, the entity believes if it can harness sufficient "supernatural" power, it can "break free" of the building in which it has somehow become trapped.
