Dick Hallorann lends his grandmother’s words to describe people like himself and Danny Torrance. She called it “Shining.” The Overlook Hotel is one of those places that shines too.

Here are a few random thoughts, sounds, and images from the many lives of The Shining.

Room 217 of the Stanley Hotel

Before there was an Overlook, there was the Stanley Hotel. Stephen King once stayed in the Presidential Suite of the Stanley, where he was visited by bad dreams, hallucinations, and was inspired to sketch out an outline for his best novel.

But The Shining is not just King’s best novel. It also served as the basis for the film of the same name, as written and directed by Stanley Kubrick. Like the hotel, this Stanley would also haunt King as he took his novel and stretched and twisted it into one of the most influential films ever made. So different from the book, King has said that it is Kubrick’s film, not his.

A reviewer calls the film, “a brilliant, ambitious attempt to shoot a horror film without the Gothic trappings of shadows and cobwebs so often associated with the genre.”

One of the most striking things, aside from masterful performances by Jack Nicholson and Shelley Duvall (heresy!? Yes, I think her performance was nearly as perfect as Nicholson’s – just drawn more from Kubrick’s haranguing rather than her innate talent.) is the spellbinding score and incidental music. From the first intonations of Dies Irae to the frenetic energy of the final chase scene, the music shapes your emotions and pulls you into the haunted world of the Overlook.

Rolling Stone, on the music accompaniment to Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining…

“Kubrick and music editor Gordon Stainforth cherry-picked maximally queasy passages from works by a clutch of Eastern European mavericks: “Lontano” by György Ligeti, the Hungarian genius whose music gave 2001: A Space Odyssey its unearthly atmosphere, and even more importantly Krzysztof Penderecki, the Polish radical whose strangulated strings, barbaric brass yawp, clatter-bone rhythms and hissing choruses in “Utrejna,” “De Natura Sonoris,” “The Awakening of Jacob” and more provided the Overlook Hotel and its denizens with an appropriately unhinged environment.”

To address the differences between the novel and the film, King sought to make a new version of the film that tracked more with the original storyline. In 1997, this version was released as a miniseries staring Steven Weber and Rebecca De Morney as the Torrances and using the Stanley Hotel as the Overlook. This version eschewed the hedge maze that Kubrick had created in place of the technically difficult hedge lions and, most notably stayed faithful to the novel’s end with Jack dying in the fiery explosion sparked by the Overlook’s overpressurized boiler.

Three decades after the original novel, King released Doctor Sleep, following the troubled life of Danny in the years after his ordeal at the Overlook. Fans of the Shining particularly enjoyed the last act of Doctor Sleep which brought us back to the remains of the Overlook, a place that exists only in the world of the original Shining film.