8 Horror Movies You Won’t Watch Once You Know The Truth
3. The Shining
With so many legendary directors, they often bring an intensity to the table that veers towards abuse. And for all-time great director Stanley Kubrick, that is indeed sadly the case.
Kubrick is famed for how hard he would push his actors, how intense his shoots would be, and how his hair-trigger temper would often result in chaos on his sets. Throughout the production of 1980's The Shining, poor Shelley Duvall found herself receiving the brunt of Kubrick's anger.
For Duvall, it was an exhausting, emotional 13-month shoot on The Shining - a shoot that kept her away from her family for over a year.
As the actress herself has gone on record to state, she spent the last nine months of the shoot doing 12-hour days of sobbing and shrieking, with one particular scene of angst and terror for Duvall's Wendy Torrance taking a record 127 takes before Kubrick was satisfied.
It wasn't just the long days and multiple shoots that were troublesome for Duvall, for Kubrick would berate her at every turn. In fact, many of Duvall's lines were removed from the final product, such was Kubrick's angry response to his lead female's work.
For fans of Stephen King's source material, The Shining features a strong, stoic Wendy Torrance who stands relatively calm in the midst of her husband Jack's descent into madness. Instead, Kubrick removed that element of the Wendy character, and made Duvall a nervous, emotional wreck throughout the production.
While The Shining has long been held up as an iconic movie, it's hard to go back and watch it when you know the emotional abuse that was directed towards Shelley Duvall.