It is based on the 1977 novel of the same name by Stephen King. Fans of the film had come up with a lot of theories about aspects of the film, and in 2012 a film about the film was released. That documentary is Room 237 directed by Rodney Ascher.
The documentary addresses interpretations about the meanings of the film and includes footage from The Shining and other Kubrick films. Of course, there are interviews with Kubrick enthusiasts.
The doc's title refers to a room in the haunted hotel featured in The Shining, which a character is warned never to enter.The film is very subjective, but a film that is almost 40 years old and continues to inspire debate, speculation, and mystery as it moves through a cinematic maze full of detours and dead ends.
Kubrick theorists had been theorizing before The Shining. There has long been a rumor that after directing 2001: A Space Odyssey, NASA had Kubrick direct the footage NASA used for the Apollo 11 Moon landing. The conspiracy theorists believed that there is evidence in the moon landing footage of front projection and other things that prove it was a fake Moon landing.
In The Shining, the character Danny wears an Apollo 11 sweater. And 237 isn't just a room but also a reference to the mean distance of the Earth to the Moon.
In an October 2014 interview with Rolling Stone, Stephen King said that he had seen the film and that he "watched about half of it and got impatient with it and turned it off." King, who has often said he didn't like Kubrick's adaptation of his novel, also didn't like the documentary. He had no patience for the "academic bullshit" from academics in the documentary who he thought were "reaching for things that weren't there."
I don't find the theories convincing (and I'm not a big fan of that particular Kubrick fan), but I do find the documentary itself an interesting look at how people really get into a movie.
And not everyone agrees with King about the Kubrick film or about the documentary.
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