‘Room 237’ Trailer Perfectly Copies Kubrick’s Bloody ‘Shining’ Teaser

By  · Published on February 12th, 2013

This homage trailer from conspiracy documentary Room 237 is nothing short of amazing, but it’s probably also the only thing they could make to try to sell the movie. I get that there’s a lot of love for Rodney Ascher’s flick – the critical quotes in this very ad are witness to that – but it’s not like there are images from the movie itself that could make their way into a piece of marketing. Especially not legally.

That’s because the movie is comprised solely of shots from The Shining that are laboriously tortured with slow motion and freeze framing to give a bigger bullhorn to several theories regarding the hidden meaning of Stanley Kubrick’s interpretation of Stephen King’s novel.

Fans of the iconic Shining teaser trailer should get a kick out of this:

Room 237 will hit theaters March 29th, and hopefully by then they’ll have turned it into an actual movie. The cut that played at several festivals last year was the film version of a research paper where a kid slapped all his source material loosely into a three-ring binder and turned it in without trying to organize anything. It’s an engaging idea, but it hasn’t really been turned into a movie yet – just a string of headache-inducing images and cluttered voice over. So even though this is monumentally geek-tastic, it’s not really surprising that copying the original is all they had up their sleeves.

Here’s the original trailer for comparison:

Movie stuff at VanityFair, Thrillist, IndieWire, Film School Rejects, and The Broken Projector Podcast@brokenprojector | Writing short stories at Adventitious.