7. Stanley Kubrick Breaks Shelley Duvalls Mind With Torture The Shining
Remember what I just said about all traumas having a silver lining? Well technically thats a lie, especially when Stanley Kubrick is involved. The man was pretty obsessive on most films he once made an actor in Eyes Wide Shut walk across a room and close a door hundreds of times, just for an inconsequential shot but when it came time to don his horror hat in The Shining, you can bet that things got nutty, and quickly. Though the film is primarily concerned with the gradual decline of Jack Nicholsons Jack Torrance into axe-swinging madness, this descent is nothing without reaction namely from Torrances wife Wendy, played by Shelley Duvall. Unbeknownst to her, Kubrick was enacting a psychological horror behind the scenes of a psychological horror. He would attempt to mentally break his cast in order to better infuse the film with the madness he so desperately wanted. Obviously, as the films straight man (or woman), Duvall bore the brunt of this, with Kubrick changing the scripts, the shooting times and just flat out arguing with his actress for the hell of it before applying the coup de grace, which involved shooting the scene of a hysterical Wendy waving a bat at Torrance while going slowly up a staircase hundreds and hundreds of times. The whole affair actually caused Duvall serious mental trauma she stopped eating, became mentally ill and her hair began to fall out, a price Kubrick was willing to pay to capture real, unhinged fear on film. Unsurprisingly, she never worked with him again. Spectacularly, this perhaps isnt the biggest con Kubrick pulled throughout the filming of The Shining, he never once told Danny Lloyd, the child actor of Danny Torrance, that he was shooting a horror film, meaning that Lloyd could keep a childlike obliviousness to all the weirdness going on around him. Considering how weird his scenes get, its a wonder that Kubrick kept this charade going.