Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining has made way for a number of theories on what the movie really means, and one of them suggests it’s all about one of the CIA’s infamous mind-control experiments. In 1977, Stephen King introduced readers around the world to The Shining, a horror novel heavily influenced by King’s personal experiences, mostly his struggle with addiction. The Shining established King as one of the best authors in the horror genre, and the novel has become a must-read for horror enthusiasts.

The book was famously adapted to the big screen by Stanley Kubrick in 1980, who made a lot of changes to King’s story. Both the novel and the movie follow Jack Torrance (played by Jack Nicholson), an aspiring writer and recovering alcoholic who takes a job as off-season caretaker of the Overlook Hotel, located in the Colorado Rockies. Jack takes his wife, Wendy (Shelley Duvall), and son Danny (Danny Lloyd) with him, but when a snowstorm leaves them cut off from the outside world, the supernatural forces living in the hotel begin to play with Jack’s sanity. Meanwhile, Danny struggles with his psychic abilities (referred to as “the shining”) as they allow him to see the hotel’s horrific past clearly.

Related: The Shining Theory: What Jack Was Actually Writing

While the movie isn’t Stephen King’s favorite, it’s now considered one of the best movies ever made, and its amount of detail, ambiguities, and Kubrick’s tendency to hide deeper messages and themes in his movies have made viewers come up with all types of theories on what The Shining truly is about. One of those theories says the movie is about a CIA mind-control experiment, all based on a poster on one of the walls of the Overlook’s playroom. When Danny is playing with some darts at the playroom, he turns around to find the Grady twins standing in the entrance. On the wall behind them, to the left, is a skiing poster that says “Monarch”, which some find to be a weird piece of decoration given that Stuart Ullman claims there’s no skiing in the area. According to theorists, “Monarch” was a codename for the CIA’s infamous MKUltra program.

The Shining playroom ski poster Grady twins

Project MKUltra was a program of experiments on human subjects with the intention of identifying and developing drugs and procedures to be used in interrogations in order to weaken the subject and force confessions through mind-control. Back to The Shining, the theory suggests the caretaker job is just a front so that the government could test mind control techniques on isolated subjects, and so everything that happens to the Torrances at the hotel are nothing more than hallucinations caused by the experiments (in other words, there’s no such thing as the ghosts of the Grady twins and Lloyd the bartender). Those backing the theory explain that Bill Watson, who is presented as Ullman’s assistant, is actually the head of the program, and is called into Ullman’s office during Jack’s interview to observe Jack and make sure he’s the right subject.

Like many other theories about Kubrick’s The Shining, there’s not much that can back it up, and it wouldn’t explain elements like Danny’s “shining”, as he already had it before they arrived at the hotel. However, it’s a different and potentially interesting way of watching the movie, though it won’t solve the story’s biggest mysteries.

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