Employees, she said, often feel pressure to whip up ghosts at a moment's notice. 'He couldn't see and that was what was so scary, so important.'īut nearby, Midge Knerr, 64, a hotel employee who served as a judge in the design contest, called the maze the right mix of elegant and intriguing and another place for visitors to search for signs of the supernatural. 'In the movie, it was like 10 feet tall,' said Ann Henderson, 63, a retired teacher visiting from Greeley, Colorado, who called the thigh-tickling labyrinth underwhelming. This summer, that decision has caused some disappointment. Cullen said he was concerned about losing children in the maze.

Danny, who has been having visions of ghosts, famously writes 'Redrum' on the wall (read it backward if you have not seen the movie).Ĭullen chose to form the maze from juniper trees that grow to just 3 feet (0.9 metres)high, making the Stanley's maze far less imposing than the 13-foot (4-metre0 labyrinth in the Kubrick film. Missing from the experience, however, has been the hedge maze that Kubrick used as the setting for the film's climax, in which the crazed winter caretaker of the hotel played by a demonic-looking Jack Nicholson chases his young son, Danny, with an ax.

Cullen, said the story had helped him turn the Stanley which, aside from the horror tie-in, has amazing views of Rocky Mountain National Park into an 'economic fortress.' When a young Stephen King checked into the Stanley Hotel here in 1974, he had a nightmare that inspired him to write The Shining, the novel that went on to become Stanley Kubrick's 1980 cult classic film.įor years, operators of the Stanley Hotel have used The Shining and its paranormal plot as pure marketing gold: 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's movie plays on a loop in hotel rooms, and the property's owner, John W.

Stephen king the shining hotel