Salon slideshow: "Hotels with a macabre past" (incl. Bates Motel & inspiration for "The Shining")

[Amerigo Vespucci]

Hotels with a macabre past

http://www.salon.com/life/feature/2011/01/23/trazzler_slide_show_hotels_with_macabre_past/slideshow.html



Chasing ghosts at the haunted Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, Colo.
Sabina Lohr/Trazzler

Midnight at the Stanley Hotel doesn't find many weary travelers curled up in bed and sleeping tightly. Instead, wide-awake guests roam the hallways videotaping and photographing, looking and listening for signs of the ghosts believed to have haunted the premises since the early 1900s. Join one of the hotel's ghost tours, and you'll be guided through the buildings and an underground tunnel while you're told tales of unexplained happenings, particularly in the ballroom. Stephen King stayed in the nearly empty hotel just before it closed for the season and was inspired to write "The Shining." Though the Kubrick movie (which the writer hated) was filmed at a different hotel, the King-approved miniseries was set here at the Stanley.



Picturing a motel menace scarier than bedbugs in Hollywood, Calif.
Megan Cytron/Trazzler

Wedged in between the explosions, flash floods, ye olde European Town, and the cowboy kitsch of the Universal Studios back-lot tour, you'll find a physical reminder of a time before reality TV and plentiful Internet porn when voyeurism was exciting, risky and terror inducing. The Bates Motel and Mansion have been moved around Universal's lot several times since 1960, surviving the decimation of fires, remakes of the film, and the increasing Disneyfication of the studio's grounds. Though modified, the motel's buildings evoke the original "Psycho" (except in color) -- with the creepy camera-angle-friendly Victorian mansion (based on a painting by Edward Hopper) looming overhead atop a small hill. Despite the fact that "Psycho" was terribly low-budget, the building has held up as well as the movie. Universal goes the shtick route here. Tram-voyeurs watch a greasy-haired Norman Bates loading an inanimate Janet Leigh doll into a trunk (with an incongruous bit of Whoville peeking over the motel roof). The taxidermist then turns on the tram, crassly wielding a rubber knife in a way that lacks the meticulously crafted suspense of the original, but delights squealing postmodern kids.