Is The Shining About The Holocaust?

Or is it a metaphor for the slaughter of American Indians?

Both theories are floated in Room 237, a documentary playing the New York Film Festival, which has various cinephiles–some astute, some bonkers–spewing their ideas as to the hidden messages in Stanley Kubrick‘s 1981 horror classic based on the Stephen King novel.

The original film, as you’ll recall, has a family going to an isolated hotel in the winter, where violence, prognostications, and flashbacks take over, and the audience is as tortured as poor Shelley Duvall.

So what does it all have to do with Nazi Germany?

Well, as the Variety review notes, one of the film’s experts reminds us that Nicholson’s typewriter is a German model, and besides, the number 42 is used throughout the film, and that corresponds with the year the Nazis implemented the Final Solution.

Hey, that’s all the proof I need.

My eyes are wide shut, I mean open, as to the multiple disturbing allegories kooky Kubrick must have woven into every freaky frame.

Maybe.

And 42 is not the only number in the movie! Far from it!

The Overlook Hotel’s Room 237, as you’ll recall, is the creepy one, full of darkness and mystery.

Well, 237 happens to be the number of the soundstage where Kubrick supposedly shot fake moon footage on orders from NASA!

Got chills?

Sound crazy?

No crazier than The Shining itself.

Besides, Variety called this doc “one of the great movies about movies.”

Check in if you dare.