Hawkins, Indiana, is planting itself right in Lafayette with a newly unveiled corn maze, and it’s everything a Stranger Things fan could want.
Exploration Acres showed off the maze on Monday, which pays homage to the poster of the Netflix smash hit’s second season. Take a look:
The full view of Exploration Acres' new Stranger Things-themed corn maze. (Photo: Mark Seest)
Tim Fitzgerald, president of Exploration Acres, says – coincidentally – this will be the farm’s eleventh maze since their first in 2008. He says the design came out of his daughter Abigail encouraging him to check out the show. Fitzgerald binged the series and was hooked.
“[I] thought there was enough imagery to create a cool maze design. I also thought our farm would be the perfect setting, for fans, since we were in a rural Indiana location with woods and a pumpkin patch,” Fitzgerald said.
Fitzgerald reached out to Netflix back in January with a preliminary design, and they were receptive to the idea. Their Creative Marketing team worked with him on the design and the legal agreement, and the end result is a goliath agricultural mural.
The colossal maze is 20 acres and a little larger than 15 football fields. Its design gives it over 10 miles of 6-foot wide paths. And, believe it or not, it wasn’t cut into its design, it was planted that way.
“The maze is actually as sharp as it appears,” Fitzgerald said. “There has not been Photoshop retouching.” The farm tilled their corn maze paths until 2016; new technology has since allowed them to plant the maze to grow into its design.
Exploration Acres planted the seeds back in June so the corn would stay green longer, and they planted rows closer together to increase the density. But how the seeds were planted is a bit more involved.
“The whole maze was actually planted at night in the dark using GPS guidance from satellites in lunar orbit,” Fitzgerald said. “A tractor with a special planter, equipped with an iPad and special software was used to plant the seeds in a dot matrix pattern. It’s similar to how an inkjet printer head works, but we used a planter.”
Fitzgerald’s favorite bit of the maze? The depiction of Eleven front and center of the maze.
“She looks like a sorcerer commanding energy from the Shadow Monster overhead,” he said. “If you look closely, we were able to create a special effect that looks like pulsating energy around the lightning bolts. That was only possible with the new planter technology. It could never have been tilled to produce that effect.”
Of course, the biggest question after an unveiling like that: What’s in store for next year? Fitzgerald knows, but he isn’t letting any details slip.
“We have already been given licensing permission for next year’s maze. It won’t be another Stranger Things maze, but it will be historic to mankind,” Fitzgerald said.
You’ll have a chance to explore the maze when it opens on September 14. Tickets are available now.
No guarantees there won’t be any demogorgons, though.
Featured photo courtesy of Mark Seest (via Exporation Acres).
