THE STANLEY HOTEL – THE SHINING

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As it couldn’t be in other way, I’m going to start this post with the most famous and at the same time the most terrifying hotel in the history of cinema. Some of you may think that The Bates Motel deserves this title, but in this blog we are talking about REAL hotels, not movie studios.

The Stanley Hotel

To start, lets locate the hotel properly, which is in Colorado, approximately five miles from the entrance to Rocky Mountain National Park. This set of buildings has nothing less and nothing more than 142 rooms divided in eleven contributing structures and opened its gates in 1909. Despite its peaceful early history, in the years following the release of The Shining, the Stanley Hotel has gained a reputation as a setting for paranormal activity. It has hosted numerous paranormal investigators and appeared in shows such as Ghost Hunters and Ghost Adventures.

Well, after the description of the hotel lets talk about that movie that has given the hotel such a haunted reputation. As many of you know The Shining is a 1980 horror film produced and directed by Stanley Kubrick and co-written with novelist Diane Johnson. It was starred by Jack Nicholson, whose performance in the film is one of his most famous ones, and Shelley Duvall, whose acting career after the movie passed without grief or glory.

The Shining poster

The movie is basically about a family who heads to an isolated hotel for the winter where an evil spiritual presence influences the father into violence, while his psychic son sees horrific forebodings from both past and future, and the rest is something that everybody who loves cinema should know.

After putting everybody in background, I’m going to talk about the key places of the hotel that appear in the movie and that I’m sure had made some of my readers pass through some of the most frightful moments ever.

THE CORRIDORS

The hotel hallways in this movie are maybe one of the key locations for Stanley Kubrick to cause panic among the public, or is there someone who has seen the movie and doesn’t remember the scene in which Danny Torrance is running through the corridors with his tricycle and suddenly sees the Grady twins? Just one word for that scene : DISTURBING.

Another important scene of the movie that happens in the hallways and also has to do with the elevators is the rivers of blood that are seen three times during the film, the first one being through one of Danny’s prophetic visions before even entering the hotel.

  • The Grady Twins
  • The bloody elevator

THE ROOM 237

In The Shining, Jack Torrance describes the door to Room 237 as “a perfectly ordinary door, no different from any other door on the first two floors of the hotel.” But what lies beyond that door is everything but ordinary. It turns out Room 237 has a real-life history. In 1917, the hotel’s then housekeeper Elizabeth Wilson was in Room 237 lighting lanterns when one of the lanterns exploded, causing the floor to give way sending the housekeeper down to the level below. She somehow survived the blast but guests of Room 237 swear they still see her spirit in the room now and then, tidying things up. All this history makes Room 237 quite popular with the curious guests. Booking for Room 237 tends to fill-up months in advance. The hotel’s fourth floor rooms, however, have the most sightings of spooky activities, such as sounds of children playing, lights mysteriously flickering on and off, and shadows gracing its windows.

Room 237

THE HEDGE MAZE

The Hedge Maze

Now where would poor Danny Torrance be without the Overlook’s famous hedge maze? He’d be in Deadsville, Population: Danny. In this case, the maze is an especially good symbol for Jack Torrance’s descent into madness. His is a winding, twisting path towards absolutely insanity… that eventually leads him to his death in the middle of the hedge maze. Yet while Jack Torrance spends the movie trying to write, Danny familiarizes himself with the maze, and it’s this knowledge that will eventually save his life.

After all you have found out in this post, it is in your hand if you want to enter the awful, gruesome and perturbing world of The Stanley Hotel of The Shining. But as I am no one to stop you guys I’m even going to help you by giving you the information on how to book for a reservation in the hotel.

Good luck guys and for those of you who are going to live the experience I hope you don’t end up like the Torrance family (that would be a pity).

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