The Seriality of Stephen King’s Overlook Hotel – a Transmedial Maze

Abstract This paper investigates three different medial instances of the Overlook Hotel, a space originally hailing from Stephen King’s The Shining. Based on close readings of King’s novel, Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation and a level in the action RPG Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines by Troika Games, the following text argues that the Overlook is a serial figure founded on the concept of malignant space in possession of a potent, and often overwhelming, story of violence that despite attempts at its repression cannot be silenced, as in the tradition of the Gothic ghost story. This basic formula is then traced through different media – the novel, film, and video game – where it is seen as gradually shifting its focus from the fictional characters to the recipient, which represents the intersection between the particular affordances of the respective media and the figure of a spatially-bound aggressive storyteller.