The ax from “The Shining” will soon take up residence at the Stanley Hotel

One of the fake axes used in Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 horror classic “The Shining” has been donated to Estes Park’s Stanley Hotel for its new movie-memorabilia museum and film center.

The prop ax sold for $175,000 at auction earlier this week, according to published reports. It was then anonymously donated for display in the Stanley Film Center, a sprawling film and music entertainment complex that’s been in development for years on the Stanley’s property.

The ax is the film center’s first donation, according to incoming film-center CEO Rand Harrington, and will be displayed during hotel tours until the film center is completed in 2024.

“I can’t think of anything more appropriate than this piece of film history to start the museum’s collection,” Harrington said in a press statement. “The Center and its museum are going to be a must-go destination for film lovers from around Colorado, the country and world.”

Stanley officials do not know yet whether the prop ax is made of wood or foam, according to a spokesman for the hotel. MovieWeb reported this week that it’s made of foam and resin.

The Stanley Hotel, which opened in 1909, was the inspiration for the 1977 Stephen King book, “The Shining.” The author said his mind began creating the tale of a family trapped in a snowbound hotel after staying at the Stanley’s “haunted” room 217 in October 1974, while he was living and teaching in Boulder (40 miles to the southwest of Estes Park) with his family.

“King’s imagination went wild as he wandered the abandoned hallways, ate alone in the grand dining room and talked up the bartender,” BBC Travel reported in 2014. “By the end of the night, he knew he had enough material to start writing his next book.”

“The Shining” connection has for years drawn tourists to the hotel, which in King’s book and its screen adaptations is called The Overlook. Director Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 film of the same name was not produced at the Stanley, but a 1997 ABC miniseries was shot on-site.

The $175,000 prop ax was used on screen by Jack Nicholson, who played main character Jack Torrance in the 1980 film. The movie’s most famous scene with axes is where he hacks away at a wooden door to get to his terrified wife (played by Shelley Duvall), eventually quipping, “Here’s Johnny!” However, this one appears to have been used in the snowy-maze scene at the end — based on photographs — when a disoriented Torrance limps through a sub-zero hedge maze in maniacal search of his wife and son.

The Stanley’s ax is only one of several prop axes from “The Shining” that have sold for big bucks, including a foam ax prop that sold for $57,600 last year, and a wooden ax prop that sold for $211,000 in 2019, according to Forbes.

Dylan Kosinski, a representative for the GottaHaveRockandRoll.com auction house, said the latest one was purchased by “a successful businessman, who’s a big fan of the movie,” according to TMZ, beating out 12 other prospective buyers.

“The ax prop is displayed in a 25 x 2.5 x 40.5 shadow box frame with photos from the film. Very good, screen used condition,” the auction company wrote online during the prop’s bidding period. The final bid for the “stunt fireman’s axe” was $140,000, with a $35,000 premium, totaling $175,000.

Officials at the Stanley have been trying to get the film-center project off the ground for years as part of the hotel’s massive, ongoing redevelopment, which has added new buildings to the historic property at the cost of tens of millions of dollars over the last decade. Officials hosted the Stanley Film Festival from 2013 to 2015, which was reincarnated as the Overlook Film Festival in 2016. The latter festival was set at Mt. Hood, Oregon’s, Timberline Lodge — the location for exterior shooting on 1980’s “The Shining.”

John Cullen, who runs his Grand Heritage Hotel Group out of the Stanley, paid $3 million for the foreclosed hotel with a group of business partners in 1995. His love of the 47-acre complex — which sits on the National Register of Historic Places and includes the original, 97-room hotel and more than a dozen other buildings — grew over the years until he decided to trade his hotels in San Diego, New Orleans and elsewhere for sole ownership of the Stanley in 2000, The Denver Post has reported.

The film center will be a multi-genre movie and music venue with a museum, but one focused on horror movies. As a non-profit entity funded, in part, by a Colorado State Regional Tourism grant, the center is anticipated to bring new economic activity to the state, hotel officials wrote.

However, the center — now estimated at $40 million to build — is the sole surviving project from that grant, according to the Denver Business Journal. It will include a theater, restaurant, museum and more, Cullen told the Loveland Reporter Herald, and is located on the east end of the Stanley property, attached to the carriage house and concert hall.

The first phase — a 5,000-square-foot restaurant with large patio and a 2,000-square-foot theater — is to open in July, Cullen said.

The hotel has also been the site of promotional events such as a private gathering of movie critics to promote “Doctor Sleep,” the surprisingly compelling film adaptation of King’s so-named sequel to “The Shining” that starred Ewan McGregor in 2019. It was arranged and paid for by Warner Bros., according to the Colorado Office of Film, Television and Media.

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