10 Horror Movie Characters Who Were Their Own Worst Enemy
6. Jack Torrance -- The Shining (1980)
All work and no play makes some fellas try and slaughter the family.
Jack Nicholson takes crazy duties as Jack Torrance in Stanley Kubrick's The Shining. As winter caretaker for the Overlook Hotel in Colorado during its off-season, Jack holes up with a typewriter and only his wife Wendy (Shelley Duvall) and son Danny (Danny Lloyd) for company. Hoping to cure his writer's block, he bashes away at the keys over a matter of months, while succumbing to the hotel's supernatural lures.
A recovering alcoholic, Jack ought to have known better than to consign himself to a season of isolation in a location with a variety of fully stocked and unmanned bars, and his willingness to the hotel's shady temptations becomes all too apparent as his writing goes nowhere.
The ghostly bartender Lloyd gets him back on the bottle, and Jack embraces his rage, sabotages the hotel's two-way radio and goes after his family with an axe. But anger leads to hate, hate leads to suffering, and Danny outsmarts Jack in the hotel's maze, leaving his father to freeze to death.
Therapy and an MFA programme might have been the better option.