If you look through enough “Greatest Horror Movies of All Time” lists, you get used to seeing Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining near the top, usually duking it out with The Exorcist or Jaws.

It is a beautifully shot film full of unsettling imagery, but its legacy owes more to a tantalizing photograph in the final frame than it does to its straight forward ghost story. The photograph shows Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson), who the audience last saw freezing to death in the 1980s, at a formal dress Fourth of July party in 1921.

How is that possible? Did the Overlook Hotel somehow absorb Jack into the past? Is he a supernaturally reincarnated agent of murder and madness? Coming up with an answer to that is half the fun of The Shining.

Believe it or not, there are exactly 216 people in the famous photograph from the end of The Shining…

I was thinking of the mystery of the photograph when I sat down to watch Rodney Ascher’s documentary Room 237 which, the NetFlix summary promised, would reveal the hidden secrets of The Shining. That was a lie.

The first voice heard in the movie is former ABC News journalist Bill Blakemore and he is explaining how The Shining is really a movie about the genocide of the American Indians. A few minutes later, film historian Geoffrey Cocks explains how it is a metaphor for the Holocaust. Juli Kearns obsesses over imagery of labyrinths and minotaurs. Jay Weidner thinks the whole thing is Kubrick’s apology for faking the Apollo 11 moon landing footage. What?

Room 237 isn’t about The Shining at all. Room 237 is about an endless rabbit hole of obsession with The Shining.