After viewing this documentary, you may never again see Jack Nicholson’s performance in The Shining, nor the movie itself, in the same way. The documentary’s general thesis maintains that Stanley Kubrick used The Shining as a vehicle to admit his role in helping to fake the moon landings.

“Room 237” refers to a room in the mountain lodge where the action of The Shining takes place, suggesting the 237 thousand miles mean distance from Earth to the moon as it was reckoned in 1980, according to one of the narrators. The actual distance has since been revised slightly upwards to an average of 238,855 miles, according to NASA, which the public still seems to trust.

The film doesn’t claim the US never went to the moon. It simply argues that what people saw in July of 1969 was faked, a result of what’s known in the film industry as “Front Screen Projection“. It works by projecting scenes behind actors in which the actors appear to move.

It also claims that some of the moon anomalies noted by Richard C. Hoagland were actually reflections caused by the Front Screen Projection process rather than being the gleaming alien towers that Hoagland excitedly theorized.

Front Screen Projection in 2001: A Space Odyssey:

Room 237