9 Classic Stephen King Movie Villains Who Chill You To The Bone

4. Jack Torrance - The Shining (1980)

The Shining is perhaps the most famous of all the Stephen King film adaptations, and the part of Jack Torrance, unforgettably played by Jack Nicholson in a career defining role, is notorious for being a particularly fiendish bad guy. Jack is a recovering alcoholic, tenuously holding onto sobriety, who takes the post of winter caretaker for the isolated Overlook Hotel. Meanwhile, his young psychic son Danny has dreadful premonitions of what might transpire. And those premonitions surely come true as Jack descends into madness, driven to heinous deeds by cabin fever, the ghosts of the hotel and the general evil ambience. Nicholson plays Jack as a man whose sanity is already on the slide at the beginning of the film. He has given up drinking because he hurt Danny's arm during a drunken binge, and that is before anything happens in the Overlook Hotel, setting up the potential for violence later on. Stephen King didn't want Nicholson to be cast as Torrance because he knew from the actor's past that he would appear unhinged from the start. In fact, King was so unhappy with the film that he later crafted his own miniseries to right the wrongs in 1997.