The Shining: From the Stanley to Timberline Lodge

On 30 October 1974 Stephen King and his wife Tabitha checked into the Stanley on the night it was closing for the season, the only two guests in the building. He wandered the empty halls and was served drinks in the bar by a bartender named Grady. His novel's Overlook is likewise an isolated Colorado resort that closes for the winter, and Room 217 matters in the book; the Stanley's own Room 217 is said to be the one King was offered. The 140-room hotel in Estes Park has a restaurant, spa and bed-and-breakfast, and a hedge maze was added in 2015.

Visitor guidance: The hotel is in Estes Park, Colorado, and includes a restaurant, spa and bed-and-breakfast.

Kubrick's film starts with aerial shots of Saint Mary Lake and Wild Goose Island in Glacier National Park, Montana. Then comes Jack Torrance's car on the lake's north shore, through the East Side tunnel and on toward a mountain resort and his job interview as winter caretaker. The story says Colorado, but this drive was filmed in Montana. The lake is almost ten miles long and 300 feet deep, and Going-to-the-Sun Road still follows its north shore.

Visitor guidance: Going-to-the-Sun Road runs along the lake's north shore.

In a few establishing shots, the Overlook seen from outside is Timberline Lodge on Mount Hood, Oregon. The real lodge has no hedge maze, so none appears in them. The lodge's staff and owners worried that guests would avoid Room 217 if a horror film used it, so Kubrick agreed to the fictional Room 237, the room Hallorann warns Danny to avoid. Dedicated by Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1937, the lodge sits at 6,000 feet and draws about two million visitors a year.

Visitor guidance: The lodge is open to visitors, and its ski area runs all 12 months of the year.

The Overlook's rooms owe a debt to the Ahwahnee Hotel in Yosemite National Park: Kubrick used some Ahwahnee interiors as templates for the fictional hotel's interior. The Ahwahnee and Timberline Lodge were both designed by the architect Gilbert Stanley Underwood, so the Overlook's screen exterior and its interior reference share a designer. No scene was filmed here. In the Ahwahnee's Great Lounge, which spans the full width of its wing, two large sandstone fireplaces stand at either end of the room.

This is where most of The Shining was actually made. Principal photography ran from May 1978 to April 1979, mainly on interior sets at Elstree in southern England. The Overlook set was the largest ever built there, with a life-size copy of the hotel's exterior. In February 1979 a fire badly damaged the Colorado Lounge set and delayed filming. The set was deliberately built off the track, so that the huge ballroom would never actually fit inside. There Jack finds the ballroom filled with ghostly figures, and the film closes on a hallway photograph dated July 4, 1921.