The Shining
PERHAPS IT STILL echoes 40 years on because Kubrick’s horror overflows with iconic images: the bloody elevator tide, the butchered twins, Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) leering through the axe-smashed door. “Heeeere’s Johnny!”
But the core of The Shining comes just before this beat: it is the fear in Shelley Duvall’s eyes, as her husband tries to break into the bathroom to kill her. Their son has already struggled out of the window into the snow-suffocated outside, but she can’t fit to follow. Instead we see her desperate but selfless: “Danny, I can’t get out. Run. Run and hide. Run. Quick!”
Whether The Shining is the scariest film ever made is an eternal debate, but it certainly offers one of the most sustained depictions of fear.
“It was only with the greatest difficulty that Shelley was able to create and sustain… an authentic sense of hysteria,” said Kubrick. So he, it could be said, drove her to it.
“He beat Shelley into that performance,” Nicholson told
Empire in 2009. “She’s fantastic, in my opinion. By ‘beat it out’, I mean, he’s not a Method director: ‘Come on, Shell, just…’ I called it the toughest job that any actor that I’ve seen had, because 40 per cent of that picture, she’s hysterical. And when the shooting schedule is that long: imagine months and months and months, as an actor, of coming to work having to come up with hysteria.”
The extent to which Duvall realised why she had been cast, and what would be required, is open to debate. “I had an insight into it that she didn’t have,” Nicholson recalled. He had wanted Kubrick to pick Jessica Lange. “I said, ‘Shelley Duvall? What’s the idea, Stanley?’ And he says, ‘Well, you can’t… you gotta have somebody in that part that maybe the audience would also like to kill a little bit!’”
Co-writer Diane Johnson is quoted in John Baxter’s Kubrick biography as saying Duvall disliked the experience. “She told me later that she was driven crazy by the process of
shooting this film. She felt that Kubrick didn’t like her and drove her unmercifully.”
Duvall has been more circumspect in public. At the time she told Roger Ebert that maintaining the emotional state the character required was “excruciating”, but after hours of crying, she “went home very contented”. She’s quoted in David Hughes’ The Complete Kubrick as saying the shoot did make her unwell: “I was really in and out of ill health because the stress of the role was so great.” In a 2011 interview with Comingsoon.net she reflected on her relationship with Kubrick: “We had our moments when we laughed and joked around on set, but then there were times that we just exploded at each other!” She saw Wendy as being a “battered but loving housewife who supports her husband”, while Kubrick apparently “wanted a tough, strong, independent woman”.
Whatever the contrasts in their intent, the result speaks, or screams, for itself. “It was a hell of a shoot, but he got what he wanted out of me!”
THE SHINING IS OUT NOW ON DVD, BLU-RAY AND DIGITAL