7. Stanley Kubrick Vs. Scatman Crothers & Shelley Duvall
With a reputation as one of the scariest horror films ever made, it's not too surprising to hear that there was a lot of tension on the set of The Shining. And the mastermind behind most of this tension was director Stanley Kubrick. Kubrick already had a reputation as an infamous perfectionist, but he took his perfection to new levels on The Shining's set, particularly lashing out on stars Scatman Crothers and Shelley Duvall. Kubrick was absolutely ruthless when it came to getting the perfect take. He once made Crothers perform 50 consecutive takes for one scene, which was a relatively uneventful moment where Crothers' character gets out of a snowmobile and walks across the street. No dialogue was spoken in this scene. And yet Kubrick was somehow even more sadistic in the treatment of his female lead, Shelley Duvall. Kubrick ordered the crew to avoid Duvall and when she got sick on set, he instructed everyone to leave her alone. He would regularly yell at her for messing up, perhaps even crossing the line into verbal abuse. The worst of his abuse came with a marathon retake session. The scene has Duvall's character hitting Jack Nicholson's character with a baseball bat in self defense. Kubrick made her do this scene an astounding 127 times, an amazing fact considering that Duvall was probably frustrated enough to at least consider bashing his brains in with her bat. It's rumored that Kubrick was deliberately acting like this as a way to form a bizarre connection with insane main character, Jack Torrence. When reading about all
the other creepy stuff he did on the set of The Shining, that is honestly one of the only explanations that doesn't make him as insane as Jack.