7 Movie Characters Everyone Hates On For The Wrong Reasons

4. Wendy Torrance - The Shining

Why Everybody Hates Her: "Will somebody shut this woman up? Jesus, put a sock in it, will you? What a terrible, whimpering old hag! If I wanted to watch somebody running around a hotel pulling grotesque facial expressions, I'd have agreed to go on vacation with my wife!" But Wait... Wendy Torrance, as played by Shelley Duvall in Stanley Kubrick's adaptation of Stephen King's novel, is perhaps one of the most badmouthed characters ever put on the big screen: almost everybody who sees The Shining ends up thinking: "My God, who cast this person? She's driving me mad!" But this statement suggests that Wendy's purpose in the movie was to do... well, what, exactly? So whereas there's a tendency to complain, it's also a hollow complaint. That's to say, what are people rallying against when they ridicule Wendy? Did they want somebody who was more conventionally "attractive," who battled her husband with a braver face? Surely that would have undermined the point - that Wendy is a long-suffering wife who has been constitently beaten down by her husband's strong nature. Couple that with the fact that she still survives - and still manages to save her son -and the criticisms don't hold up. King himself called Kubrick's Wendy "one of the most misogynistic characters ever put on film," but fails to see how - in many ways - the Wendy of the movie is superior to the one in his book, who is a fairly bland, former beauty queen. If she's more "likeable" in the book, so what? It doesn't make her more or less misogynistic a character. Duvall's Wendy shows us a realistic vision of a women trapped in a terrifying situation, and yet we seem to hate her for it?