"Keep Manitou Weird!" suggest.
But now the town, near Colorado Springs, has become the subject of a horror movie by one of its former residents.
Summer Moore, a 39-year-old actress and writer based in Los Angeles, used her years growing up in the area, where she attended Liberty High School, as the source of inspiration for her 90-minute horror feature, "The Warning."
An article about the project in the Colorado Springs Gazette states:
In the film, Moore plays a TV journalist who sets out to investigate if the legends and stories of satanic activity in Manitou are true.
To flesh out the script, she contacted about 50 people from high school. Some talked about the ruins - remnants of the gold ore processing mill at 21st Street and U.S. 24 (now the Gold Hill Mesa development) - where occult events reportedly took place. Another friend told her about finding dead cats hanging from trees in the woods outside of Manitou.
Moore had her own eerie high school experience to draw from, though it happened in Black Forest.
"I found two severed dog heads in the middle of the road," she said. "I flipped out. During that time there was weird stuff going around Colorado Springs, but they said Manitou was the centralized place."
She and her crew filmed here for a week in the fall of 2013, shooting scenes in Manitou, Black Forest and the tunnels on Gold Camp Road. A viewing of the film's trailer, with its hand-held camera work and characters traipsing through woods, brings to mind another horror movie - "The Blair Witch Project" - a 1999 film about three students who travel to a small town to collect documentary evidence about an urban legend.
She hopes "The Warning" will have a similar effect.
The Gazette article states that the film will screen on Saturday at the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema in Littleton. But when CPR contacted the movie theater to check on the screening time for "The Warning," theater staff had no knowledge of the film.
However, the film will be available for purchase starting Saturday on Amazon.com.
