The link between ‘The Shining’ and ‘Dumb and Dumber’
Off the top of your head, name two movies more dissimilar than Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining and Peter Farrelly’s Dumb and Dumber. Operating at opposite ends of the cinematic sphere, whilst Kubrick’s film is a critically acclaimed horror classic, Farrelly’s stars Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels as two idiotic best friends who pull funny faces and annoy everyone they come across on their road trip across America.
Still, despite just how annoying Dumb and Dumber might sound, there’s no doubt that the film has its fans, making $247.3million in 1994 from a budget of just $17million. Kickstarting the career of Carrey in the very same year that he released The Mask and Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, Dumb and Dumber would come to define the tone of 1990s comedy in general, with the era relying on silly comedy conceits to sell movie tickets.
So, what exactly did the film have in common with Kubrick’s film and, indeed, Stephen King’s novel of the same name?
Well, the answer lies in where both movies were shot. During one sequence in Dumb and Dumber, the pair of goofy friends stay over at the fictional Danbury Hotel, a guest house that in real life is called Stanley Hotel, located in Estes Park, Colorado. This is the location that inspired the creation of King’s The Shining, with King checking into the guest house on October 30th, 1974, one day before Halloween.
The only guests in the hotel during the time, King found the experience enormously frightening, stating in the book Stephen King: America’s Best-Loved Boogeyman: “That night I dreamed of my three-year-old son running through the corridors, looking back over his shoulder, eyes wide, screaming…I woke up with a tremendous jerk, sweating all over, within an inch of falling out of bed. I got up, lit a cigarette, sat in a chair looking out the window at the Rockies, and by the time the cigarette was done, I had the bones of the book firmly set in my mind”.
Too excited about the fact that he was in the very same location as King when he had conjured The Shining, Carrey requested to stay in the ‘haunted’ hotel room, number 217. Lasting only three hours in the room, as reported by The Atlantic, with the hotel’s tour guide Kevin Lofy adding: “What happened to him in that room, we don’t know. He’s never spoken of it”.
To imagine what Carrey might look like if he had appeared in The Shining instead of Jack Nicholson, check out a deep fake of Carrey in action as Jack Torrance below.
