The Overlook in Toronto!

Last Friday night, I took a trip to Toronto's Gladstone Hotel, which for Halloween had been transformed into a recreation of The Shining's Overlook Hotel.

The Gladstone is Toronto's oldest hotel, situated in the trendy West Queen West area of town. It now functions as an “art hotel”, hosting many eclectic events throughout the year. This Shining party thing had several rooms dressed up and from their website pics below, it's certainly not a stretch to imagine the possibilities.

Pics from The Gladstone Hotel.

The main areas were the Melody Bar, which was set up like The Gold Room, the Art Bar, which housed a recreation of the famous hedge maze and the Ballroom, which is where the Daft Punk tribute happened.

I'm right behind ya!

I, however, spent most of my time upstairs because it was less crowded up there. This floor featured several door lined hallways (they were numbered in the 200's, but sadly no 217 or 237), a bunch of stills from the film hanging on the walls, as well as some fitting graffiti. I ran into a couple of ladies dressed as the Grady twins, but they sadly seemed oblivious as to who I was supposed to be, so fan fail on their part I guess. 

One out of three ain't bad ;)

The most interesting part was that there was a re-enactment of the film going on over the course of the evening. It started with this;

All work...

And then I saw a brunette sheepishly walking the halls clutching a baseball bat. There is a staircase in The Gladstone that wraps around an old school elevator, so I thought I'd just hang around that area and see what happened. Sure enough, Gladstone Jack & Wendy played out the famous scene on the staircase while everyone else partied around them. I appreciated the extra effort put forth by the organizers to do this.

This was a pretty cool experience and I'm glad I was able to witness such a unique event. Props to The Gladstone for putting it on.