Among the topics of discussion are the many liberties, large and small, that Kubrick took with the original novel. Mr. King, who declined to comment for this article, has never concealed his dislike for the film and the way the director changed and discarded scenes, themes and details. In the book Jack’s Volkswagen is red; in the film it’s yellow. No big thing, until one discovers that King’s red VW actually did make it into the film, crushed underneath an overturned semi.

But that’s not the only kind of symbolic moment “Shining” buffs are interested in; they have much bigger themes in mind. To one of the subjects of “Room 237,” Geoffrey Cocks, a history professor at Albion College in Michigan and author of “The Wolf at the Door: Stanley Kubrick, History, and the Holocaust,” the film is full of references, some subtle, some less so, to the Final Solution. There are the film’s many references to 1942, the year the Nazis began their extermination of Jews at Auschwitz: a 42 appears on a shirt worn by Danny; “Summer of ’42” is playing on the Torrances’ television; Wendy takes 42 swings with a bat at Jack. And then there’s that gusher of blood. “That’s as good a visual metonym for the horror of the 20th century that has ever been filmed,” Mr. Cocks said in an interview.

When Bill Blakemore, a veteran ABC News correspondent and another “Shining” theorist in the documentary, noticed cans of Calumet baking powder emblazoned with an Indian chief logo in “The Shining,” he knew immediately what Kubrick had in mind. “I told my friends, ‘That movie was about the genocide of the American Indians.’ ”

In 1987 Mr. Blakemore wrote an article for The Washington Post, noting the film’s use of Indian decorative elements (in one scene Mr. Nicholson hurls a tennis ball repeatedly against an Indian wall hanging), the Calumet cans and the Overlook’s location on an old Indian burial ground. “It’s about ghosts and memories and how we put together our sense of what has happened in the past,” Mr. Blakemore said in an interview. “ ‘I think a lot of things happened right here in this particular hotel over the years, and not all of ’em was good.’ He’s talking about the way the human race does it, and has done it over and over again.”