Stanley Kubrick released The Shining in 1980, and more than 30 years later, viewers are still struggling to understand its hidden meanings. Loved and hated by equal numbers, the film is considered a genre standard by many loyalists, while others dismiss it as the lazy result of a legendary director working far below his talent level.

In between these two poles, however, live the theories of ardent fans who are convinced they have decoded The Shining's secret messages regarding genocide, government conspiracy, and the nightmares of history. Rodney Ascher's Room 237 fuses fact and fiction through interviews with the fans and scholars who espouse these theories. Five devotees of the film explain their wildly different ideas about its true meaning in a kaleidoscopic deconstruction of the horror classic.