“Absolutely grotesque casting”: Stephen King couldn’t have been more wrong about Shelley Duvall and ‘The Shining’
The overwhelming majority of people are in agreement that Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining is one of the greatest horror movies ever made, which contains one of the genre’s most iconic performances from Shelley Duvall.
Author Stephen King, however, was in the minority and didn’t believe the filmmaker or the cast he assembled were capable of doing justice to his source material, to the point that he remained adamant that the 1997 miniseries is the definitive interpretation. No offence to the heavyweight horror favourite, but he couldn’t have been more wrong.
Even before The Shining was released in cinemas, King was railing against virtually every aspect of its existence. He didn’t think Jack Nicholson was enough of an everyman to sell Jack Torrance’s slow-burning descent into madness, nor did he believe Kubrick was the right auteur for the job.
While he did call him “an inventive, thinking director” who deserved to be called “one of the three or four greatest directors of our day, maybe of all time,” he still found him to be “terribly indulgent.” Everyone’s entitled to their opinion at the end of the day, but he never dropped the ball harder than he did with Duvall.
During an interview published in Playboy before The Shining had hit cinemas, he referred to Duvall being hired as the beleaguered Wendy as “absolutely grotesque casting”. While the actor was put through the physical and psychological wringer by her meticulous director during the excruciating months-long shoot, King couldn’t have been more wrong about Kubrick’s pitch-perfect presence.
Dealing with not only an encroaching sense of isolation but the supernatural shenanigans befalling her husband and son, Duvall’s wide-eyed intensity is tailor-made for how Kubrick wanted Wendy to be portrayed. She’s already hanging on by a thread by the time the Torrance family even pitched up at the Overlook Hotel, and it’s only a matter of time before she reaches her breaking point.
It’s one of the purest and most convincing displays of full-blown terror ever realised on-screen, with Wendy’s moment of reckoning carrying multiple meanings. Yes, she’s fleeing for her life from a murderous Jack, but it’s emblematic of how their marriage has been fraying at the seams long before the story kicked into gear.
Presenting an entirely fictional marriage as a living, breathing, lived-in relationship audiences can buy into as having existed for years before the first frame is no easy task, and when it incrementally devolves into a primal fight for survival, Duvall sells it just as well if not better.
King may have called her an “absolutely grotesque” Wendy when he first caught wind of the casting, but trying to count the number of horror performances in the 40+ years since The Shining that have even come close to matching Duvall doesn’t require the use of all ten fingers.
