It was the late witching hour of a rainy and moonless night last December. The streets were deserted but for the idle couple staggering home from a night at the bars. My hands were starting to freeze inside my gloves and I was 20 minutes from the nearest Metro station, but none of that mattered. My pilgrimage was complete. I was staring up at the immensity of a place I had merely dreamed of actually seeing since my youngest days. It was my birthright. My destiny. My fate to be here. The "Exorcist" steps.
Adjacent to a lonely Exxon Mobil gas station in Georgetown, the 97 stone steps on which Father Karras met his doom at the conclusion of the classic film loom demonically over the nearby street. In the times I've visited this narrow ascent - or quick descent if you're on the wrong side of an angry demon - there has always been some absurd runner traversing up and down their length in some sort of workout routine created by the devil himself. But at the time of this first encounter, it was as silent as my best friend in seventh grade after I casually passed her William Peter Blatty's original text of the novel, carefully left open to one of the more gruesome portions of the book. Unfortunately, her parents, after finding out, were somewhat less silent on their opinions as to my choices in classic literature.
Pilgrimages to significant locations in film history can be as reverential and emotionally invigorating to a film buff as trekking across Europe to see an icon or church can be for the religiously devout. Some movies are made not merely by their stars or script, but by the director and their crew evoking the surroundings of the characters with such a strong sense of sensation that bare walls and simple windows call out for attention.
While the "Exorcist" steps are my most favored movie moment location in D.C., the most poignant pilgrimage I am yet to make is that of the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, Colo. While Stanley Kubrick's bastardized film version of Stephen King's novel "The Shining" was actually split in filming between The Timberline Lodge in Mt. Hood, Ore., and sound studios in London, the original idea of the isolated hotel driving a caretaker to insanity first came to fruition when King stayed in a nearly-deserted Stanley Hotel with his wife, Tabitha, and allegedly encountered Mrs. Wilson, of the resort's many "ghosts" in Room 217. Over the summer, when I visited the hotel for one night myself, I received the oddly convenient upgrade to 217. Given that this room, which has also seen the likes of Teddy Roosevelt, Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash and Jim Carrey - who fled the room in favor of a nearby hotel in the middle of the night without reason - was one of the most requested in the establishment, this was an eerie convenience. The room itself, with its clawed bathtub and four-poster bed, didn't decide to show us any particularly jarring paranormal activity that evening. The essence of 217 and the rest of the hotel breathed the seclusion and antiquity that made Stephen King's novel, and its subsequent film and television adaptation (the latter filmed almost entirely within The Stanley itself), rise from the pale flicker of the afterlife to the cold emergence of reality.
Even though The Stanley is one of Colorado's only significant film-based locations, it only takes a few moments of bumbling around a metropolitan area of California to encounter a street or building that you've seen recycled onscreen over and over to the point of nausea. As a personal moral conviction, I do my best to steer clear of Los Angeles as a whole, but the much more habitable San Francisco to the north has played host to a bevy of classics, such as "Dirty Harry," "The Rock" on Alcatraz and, most significant in recent memory, the city's Castro district was a character of its own in Gus Van Sant's "Milk." Even the panoramically beautiful Redwood National Park four hours away from the city is more significant in the sci-fi nerd's mind as being Endor in "Return of the Jedi" than for its trees.
Even without their appearances in Hollywood folklore, the Stanley Hotel would still be hauntingly majestic, the "Exorcist" steps daunting and demonic and the Castro district vibrant and colorful. However, their presence on the two-dimensional screen and subsequent translation to full-bodied reality lends them an importance - an air of cultural bravado unequaled by an individual's ability to comprehend significance. It is the collective experience that we all have had at one point, and our own interpretations of the impact that grant these locations such force.
You can reach this columnist at thescene@theeagleonline.com.
