This brings us to Room 237, a documentary by Rodney Ascher which examines the numerous conspiracy theories and outlandish interpretations behind one of director Stanley Kubrick’s most celebrated films, The Shining. It’s said that Kubrick then used the techniques he brought to his sci-fi opus to create an extraordinarily convincing mock-up of the lunar surface, complete with vehicles, floating space dust and semi-weightless astronauts. Although sworn to secrecy by the government, conspiracy theorists argue that Kubrick left all sorts of subtle clues to the fakery in his movies – particularly in his 1980 horror film, The Shining.  Room 237 explores this and other theories surrounding Kubrick’s film, including the suggestion that it’s an allegory about the Holocaust, or a cleverly veiled retelling of the genocidal colonisation of America by white Europeans.  This may make the documentary sound cheap or scrappily made, but I’d wager these moments are left in deliberately; Ascher’s marriage of voice-over and imagery is at times extremely funny, and echoes Adam Curtis’s style of filmmaking in its more oblique moments. The contributors’ evidence for their theories is often flimsy at best, but this is what makes Room 237 so entertaining in its best moments. The lunar landing’s theorist, for example, points to the Apollo 11 home-knit sweater as a sign that Kubrick is attempting a confession in the film (cue guffaws of amusement from the screening room audience). The evidence for the native American genocide theory? A few carefully placed tins of Calumet baking powder sitting in the Overlook Hotel’s larder. The WWII Holocaust? The presence of a German typewriter. Someone even suggests that Kubrick had somehow left an airbrushed image of his own face in the clouds, skilfully hidden in the movie’s opening credits. Room 237, then, doesn’t so much give various theorists a platform for their ideas (though it does partly fulfil this function), but rather expose just how revered and mythologised Stanley Kubrick has become as an artist. Kubrick was an obsessive filmmaker, and his movies inspire obsession themselves. At least one person interviewed for Room 237 admits to seeing The Shining dozens of times, while others describe their experience of seeing it for the first time as being so powerful that they had to clutch the armrests of their seat to stay in place. The Shining, like other Kubrick movies, has become a Rorschach test; the documentary’s contributors all see with in it something that reflects their own personal worldview – it’s history professor Geoffrey Cocks who sees the film’s supposed allusions to the horrors of World War II, for example. Room 237, then, is really about how conspiracy theories and modern myths are created. When The Shining was released in 1980, it was just another horror film, albeit one made by an extremely respected moviemaker. As the documentary points out, its reviews weren’t overwhelmingly glowing; in fact, even one or two of the contributors say they were at first nonplussed by Kubrick’s handling of Stephen King’s novel. It’s in the years since that the mythology around Kubrick and The Shining has grown, like a snowball rolling down a mountain. And like the Kennedy assassination, or Roswell, or the lunar landings, the further back in history the original event recedes, the more outlandish and fanciful the legends surrounding it become. The film depicts The Shining as a maze of hidden meanings and possible interpretations. And like Jack Nicholson’s character, whose left trapped forever in the hotel’s supernatural grip, so audiences are still captivated by the movie more than 30 years later. Room 237 is out in UK cinemas on the 26th October.