Shelley Duvall’s cruelly ironic aversion to horror: “Scary movies frighten me”
When Shelley Duvall appeared as Wendy Torrance in Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 film The Shining – an electrifying foray into fear, isolation, and family – she soon became one of the most iconic faces in horror history. Screaming for her life as Jack Nicholson’s Jack Torrance hacks at a bathroom door with an axe, menacingly quoting nursery rhymes, Duvall’s performance has been both praised and ridiculed, although critical opinion has significantly warmed in recent years.
The circumstances of Duvall’s performance have since been well-documented. The actor was forced into long and tiring takes by perfectionistic Kubrick, who had no qualms with making Duvall do takes where she had to excessively cry or scream over and over. When it came to filming the baseball bat sequence, Kubrick demanded 127 takes, which is a Guinness World Record-holding amount for the most takes to shoot one scene with dialogue. Duvall was exhausted, both emotionally and physically, and she revealed in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, “After a while, your body rebels. It says: ‘Stop doing this to me. I don’t want to cry every day.’ And sometimes just that thought alone would make me cry.”
Duvall was never the same after shooting The Shining, even though she had enjoyed an incredibly successful career in the 1970s with roles in various Robert Altman films like McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Nashville, and the gorgeously hallucinatory 3 Women with Sissy Spacek. Following her role in The Shining, Duvall spent much of the coming years appearing in children’s television shows that she created herself, like Faerie Tale Theatre, never touching the world of truly terrifying horror again.
Interestingly, the actor always had an aversion to horror before she took on the role in The Shining, and she even admitted in a conversation with Andy Warhol for Interview Magazine that she hadn’t seen Spacek’s iconic 1975 scary movie Carrie, which, like The Shining, was also adapted from a Stephen King novel. The actor revealed, “I still haven’t seen it. Scary movies frighten me. I still haven’t seen The Exorcist.”
It seems as though her interest in The Shining came from a deeper place. She knew it was a fascinating story about the way the human psyche deals with the slipping of sanity and responsibility, so even though it fell into the horror category, Duvall seemed willing to throw herself into such a compelling script. And she could hardly turn down working with someone as masterful as Kubrick, too, who surely knew what he was doing.
“It’s very frightening,” the actor explained. “When I first heard of it I was wondering why Stanley Kubrick would want to do this film and then I read the book and it turns out, I think, to be really primal about fears and about the fears that one has in a relationship with another person”.
Kubrick had never directed a horror film before, but he excelled with The Shining, which endures as one of his most popular films and a cornerstone of the genre. With terrifying twins and blood gushing from lifts – paired with the unforgettable performances from Nicholson, Duvall, and six year old Danny Lloyd – The Shining is a masterful piece of cinema that truly strikes fear into the heart of the viewer.
