Topic: Overlook Hotel

The physical inspiration for the Overlook Hotel is linked to Hearst Castle and a hotel formerly located on Lookout Mountain in Laurel Canyon. Snyder notes that Lookout Mountain was the site of a secret Air Force film studio used for psychological warfare. He suggests Kubrick used these isolated, high-society locations to hint at the decadent and dark activities of the Hollywood elite during the early 20th century.

The flying monkeys in L. Frank Baum's original text are identified as symbols for Native Americans who were displaced from their ancestral lands. Robert W. Sullivan IV connects this to Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, where the Overlook Hotel is famously built on an Indian burial ground. Both stories are interpreted as allegories for the United States' history of marginalizing indigenous populations.