The Shining is a 1980 psychological horror film directed by Stanley Kubrick and based on Stephen King’s novel of the same name. Jack Nicholson stars as Jack Torrance, a struggling writer and recovering alcoholic who takes a winter caretaker job at the remote Overlook Hotel with his wife Wendy and their young son Danny. As the hotel becomes isolated by snow, Jack’s sanity begins to collapse, while Danny’s psychic ability reveals the building’s violent past. The film is one of the defining horror works of the twentieth century, known for its slow dread, unsettling hotel geography, iconic imagery and the way it turns family, isolation and domestic space into something monstrous.
The film was shot through a mix of American exterior locations and extensive studio work in England. The exterior of the Overlook Hotel was filmed at Timberline Lodge on Mount Hood in Oregon, while the opening aerial shots of Jack’s car driving through the mountains used Going-to-the-Sun Road and the area around Saint Mary Lake in Glacier National Park, Montana. Most of the film, however, was created at EMI Elstree Studios in Borehamwood, Hertfordshire, where the Overlook interiors, hedge maze and even a large exterior façade were built on soundstages and backlot space. Some of the interior design was inspired by the Ahwahnee Hotel in Yosemite National Park, which helps explain the hotel’s grand Native American-influenced décor. This combination gives The Shining its strange power: the Overlook feels like a real mountain hotel from the outside, but inside it becomes an impossible, maze-like psychological space built entirely for Kubrick’s camera.
Timberline Lodge
Timberline Lodge is best known as filming locations for the exterior of the Overlook Hotel in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980).
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