SoylentNews

HughPickens.com [hughpickens.com] writes:

For fans of Stanley Kubrick's classic paranormal thriller, "The Shining," Julie Turkewitz has an interesting article in the NY Times about how operators of the Stanley Hotel, Stephen King's inspiration for the Overlook Hotel, have used “The Shining” and its paranormal plot as pure marketing gold [nytimes.com]. The resort retains an in-house psychic, offers ghost tours to tens of thousands of visitors a year, and hosts a film festival at which townspeople dress up as zombies and eat “brains.” Kubrick was asked not to depict room #217 [timberlinelodge.com] (featured in the book) in The Shining, because future guests at the Lodge might be afraid to stay there. So a nonexistent room, #237, was substituted in the film. Curiously and somewhat ironically, room #217 is requested more often than any other room at Timberline.

But generations of real-life visitors to the Stanley have been let down to find that the fictional labyrinth is just that. “People kept on looking for the maze,” says John W. Cullen, owner of the property. The hotel held a contest seeking designs for a maze to be built on one of its lawns and judges selected Mairim Dallaryan Standing of New York as the winner [cpr.org]. The contest earned 329 entries from 40 different states as well as countries from all over the world, including Brazil, the United Kingdom, Iceland, Ukraine and Australia. The only trouble is that Cullen chose to form the maze from juniper trees, making the Stanley’s maze far less imposing than the 13-foot labyrinth in the Kubrick film. “However these will grow up with us and in about five years, they will be 5 to 6 feet in height, and we will be sending search parties out for little ones [eptrail.com],” says Cullen. While there is no hedge maze in King’s original novel, it’s an important symbol in Kubrick’s film, says Ernesto R. Acevedo-Muñoz, chair of the film studies program at the University of Colorado Boulder. “It’s a much more eloquent way to represent Jack’s mind and his insanity [wikipedia.org],” the professor says.

---

Original Submission