Film
The Overlook Party at 100 Darcy Sullivan revisits the fabled July 4th 1921 Ball at the Overlook Hotel, featured in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, to find out why people are still talking about it
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Shining. The film divided critics and audiences at the time – was it dull or terrifying? Stephen King hated it, and it was based on his bestselling novel. “Kubrick just couldn’t grasp the sheer inhuman evil of the Overlook Hotel,” King wrote. “So he
uly 4th marks the centennial of one of the world’s wildest parties. This was a grand affair to rival Gatsby’s shindigs or Truman Capote’s 1966 black and white ball. The party took place at the Overlook Hotel in Colorado, and in a famous photo you can see the well-heeled partygoers pausing for just a moment in their revelling. They look as if they don’t know what awful things are about to happen – but perhaps they do. Possibly the chaos had already begun when the photo was taken. Dead centre in the photo is someone you know. He is smiling, but the smile looks feral. We know him as Jack Torrance. Jack is a murderer who tried to kill his wife and son. That, however, was in the 1970s. So how could he be in a photo from 1921? And why is he smiling? These are just two of the questions raised by the final scene of Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 film The
“While there are ghosts and visions in Kubrick’s Overlook Hotel, the focus is on Jack Torrance having the world’s worst midlife crisis. It’s possible he would have had the same meltdown during a longish stay at a Premier Inn” 36
