Additionally, there is extreme post-war anxiety, mingled with the relief of the end of the unpopular fifteen-year war. We are on the brink of some extreme changes. 1975 marks the end of the Vietnam War, the birth of Microsoft, and as cultural analyst Jean Baudrillard, states in Simulations 'the linkup in space of the two American and Soviet super-satellites.' 1975 is the eve of a global technological and communication explosion you see before you today. The present action is set in the fall and winter of 1975, a truly defining year in US and world history. Now we can talk about the temporal setting of the novel. As usual, it isn't clear how these initial incidences are connected with the Overlook's state when the Torrances move in for the winter. As Halloran tells the Torrances, 'He plugged his finger into a light socket by mistake and that was the end of him' (10.80). Watson and his remaining son sold the Overlook, but were later hired as caretakers. One of them died in a riding accident on the hotel property. It was built by Robert Townley Watson who had two sons. The Overlook has a long history of violence and questionable deaths, beginning during the time the hotel was being built (1907-1909). How precisely the Overlook came to be such a place, or how the problems might be connected to the land, are up for interpretation. It's definitely intimately involved with the hell of the mind and the idea of hell on earth.

By hell, we mean the idea of hell, whatever that means to you. King has suggested that the Overlook is a kind of extension of hell, or a pathway to it. We are given few hints to the root of the hotel's evil, if there is a root. King's Pet Sematary (1983) does feature such a burial ground, but this novel does not.

Kubrick's film claims the Overlook is built on an 'Indian burial ground,' though this is only mentioned in passing. This film hasn't yet reached the iconic status of Kubrick's, but at least King gets a chance to set the record straight. The 1997 adaptation of the novel, directed by Mick Garris and written by King himself, adheres much more closely to the novel, and was filmed at the Stanley. Some of the external settings of the adaptation were filmed in Montana and the internal settings at Elstree Studios in London. Part of the Overlook's fame is due to the immense popularity of Stanley Kubrick's visually stunning film version of the novel. If you go to Estes Park, be sure and indulge in one of the Stanley's popular ' historical ghost tours,' which includes stops in Room 217, as well as complimentary hallucinated martinis and creepy cocktail nuts. Stephen King actually began writing The Shining in its Room 217. The Overlook was inspired by the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, Colorado. The Overlook Hotel is one of the most famous and most scary fictional buildings ever, right up there with the Bates Motel. The Overlook Hotel in Colorado, September 30 - December 3, 1975

Overlook hotel stephen king