Well, this trailer creeped me out, probably even more than Stanley Kubrick’s film that this documentary goes into detail deconstructing. (To be fair, I have always found The Shining to be overpraised and one of his lesser films.) Regardless of your level of love for The Shining, though, any major film fan likely found this trailer to be a clever allusion to one of the most famous images in all of cinema: the blood pouring out of the elevator in the Overlook Hotel. Except here, the elevator is replaced with a VCR.
From the eerie music that captures the tone of Kubrick’s film to the slowly rising text (reminiscent of The Shining’s opening titles), the trailer for Room 237 is just as obsessed with the small details of that horror film as the theorists telling their interpretations of the film in Rodney Ascher’s documentary. Although critic’s quotes can sometimes ruin the flow of a trailer, the blurbs are meant to fascinate cinephiles. It’s a simple yet unnerving trailer that pays homage to a reputed classic, merely teasing viewers on some of the intriguing and outlandish ideas about The Shining that Room 237 explores.
