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Director Stanley Kubrick's The Shining is arguably the most cerebral horror film ever made. The film is studied at universities, chronicled in books, and has generally inspired levels of academic analysis rivaled only by the work of Talmudic scholars. But despite all the study, there are still few conclusive answers as to what Kubrick was actually trying to say with The Shining, opening the door for countless interpretations. Many of those fantastic – and fantastical – theories about the movie are chronicled in the documentary Room 237 by director Rodney Ascher, which premieres in selects theaters today.
"I have this nightmare of a spreadsheet that I'm afraid to look at that I put together at one point where I was trying to categorize every single theory that we found and cross-referenced them," Room 237 producer Tim Kirk told Wired. "At some point we just had to give up on that.”
Much like its subject, Room 237 -- which was funded almost two years ago via Kickstarter -- isn't a very conventional film. Its Kubrickian theorists (who are never shown on screen, only heard in voiceover) range from ABC New correspondent Bill Blakemore, who sees the film as an allegory of sorts for "the genocide of the American Indians" to Jay Weidner, who sees *The Shining'*s "ROOM No 237" key as a confession from Kubrick about faking footage of the Apollo 11 moon landing.
If it seems odd that a movie more than three decades old would now warrant a film documenting its most in-depth theories, consider this: There was no internet when The Shining was released and it would be a while after it played in theaters that VHS really took off, so the capacity for obsessive watching and re-watching, frame-by-frame analysis, and sharing of theories online is only something that's been around in the latter part of the film's history.
We are now in what writer Chuck Klosterman recently dubbed "Immersion Criticism": the kind of in-depth interpretations of popular culture that can only come after watching a particular piece of media dozens of times. “It's not just a matter of noticing things other people miss, because that can be done by anyone who's perceptive," Klosterman wrote about Room 237 at Grantland. "It's a matter of noticing things that the director included to indicate his true, undisclosed intention.”
For more of interesting and outrageous theories about Kubrick’s perceived intentions, check out our gallery above; Room 237, hits select theaters today and will also be available on demand through IFC Films.
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