Shelley Duvall’s ‘Shining’ Eyes Were The Audience’s Portal Into The Overlook Hotel

It can’t be because she’s over the top. 

It’s true that the acting of Shelley Duvall in Stanley Kubrick’s unsurpassed horror masterpiece The Shining is pitched to an upper register. A quavering voice that gives way to high-pitched screeches, eyes that grow wider and wider like some kind of “Black Hole Sun” special effect, the general impression that if you made a loud enough noise she might actually explode…I’m not denying that this is cranked-to-eleven acting. It’s just that Jack Nicholson is also in this movie, you may recall, and he’s so far over the top he achieves low earth orbit. You think anything Duvall does in this movie is wilder or weirder than “Here’s Johnny”? Bless your heart.

But a great actor is gone, and it behooves us to wrestle with the historical record regarding her greatest role. I would argue that the issue detractors have with Duvall as Wendy Torrance — the terrified wife of her increasingly unhinged novelist and alcoholic (but I repeat myself, haha) husband Jack, with whom she is snowbound together with their psychic son Danny in the extremely haunted Rocky Mountain getaway called the Overlook Hotel — isn’t that she’s far-out or over-stylized in her performance. Kubrick fans by this point had enjoyed the star turns of Peter Sellers, Kirk Douglas, James Mason, Shelly Winters, Sterling Hayden, and Malcolm McDowell, to say nothing of Nicholson himself. (Okay, Keir Dullea and Ryan O’Neal are kind of outliers in the charisma department, but every rule needs exceptions.)

So not, it’s not that Duvall is over the top. It’s what she’s been asked, or ordered, to be over the top in service of: being weak, scared, in over her head, panicked, unsure of what to do. As the writer and game designer Ken Lowery put it to me: “People are, perhaps ironically, weirdly threatened by depictions of vulnerability.” Just on a visual level, she’s handed a huge knife that she carries ostentatiously for the whole end of the film, but which she can barely keep it firmly held within her grasp, because, she teaches us, the forces that have been unleashed against her cannot be defeated by knives.Seeing somebody so unsure of themselves sets off echoes of our own inadequacies within ourselves; seeing someone in such obvious danger reminds us of the ways we feel unsafe. 

Horror and horror-adjacent films are particularly strong showcases for this kind of work, especially from women actors, thankless though the results may be. Performances like Duvall’s in The Shining, Marilyn Burns’s in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Sheryl Lee ’s in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, Florence Pugh’s in Midsommar, Isabella Rossellini’s in Blue Velvet, Eiko Matsuda’s in In the Realm of the Senses, or Isabelle Adjani’s in Possession — each in their own way, they confront the viewer with states of emotional abjection we’d just as soon never face, particularly from women, whose desire and suffering alike society would prefer to take place in silence. As a result these astonishing star turns repel as many viewers as they compel, rarely earning the awards-circuit plaudits showered on comparable depictions of male abjection. (Here we can perhaps blame horror’s overall critical disrepute at least in part.)

Don’t let’s repeat that mistake here. The days of Duvall in The Shining as universal punchline are long past, partially due to a reckoning with director Stanley Kubrick’s on-set despotism toward her, partially due to the uningnorable strength of the performance itself, which over time has battled past its caricatured reputation. But Duvall is much more than just a study in emotional extremis as Wendy. She is our audience identification character. She is us.

Thank about how much Kubrick relies on Duvall’s facial expressions, body language, and whimpering voice to sell the viewer on the horrors we’re witnessing. We see “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” through her eyes. We see “REDRUM” through her eyes. The dogman, the bloody elevator, the “Great party, isn’t it?” guy, the room full of skeletons, the psychotic abusive husband battering down her door with an axe while quoting The Tonight Show: We see it all through her eyes, her huge, wet vibrating eyes. 

I guarantee you none of that stuff is half as scary without Shelley Duvall’s reaction shots. Without her, the dogman is just a guy in a Halloween costume, not some kind of embodiment of undead depravity. Without her, “Here’s Johnny!” is a quote the legal department cleared, not a gleeful threat of domestic violence. Without her, the blood from the elevator doors is a cool surrealistic visual, not a sign that the very fabric of reality has been torn apart and the wound is going to drown her unless she finds her son and flees as far and as fast as she can.

Shelley Duvall had some of the most beautiful eyes in Hollywood history; Bette Davis eyes, Ella Purnell eyes, Emma Stone eyes, Anya Taylor-Joy eyes. Indeed many of her early roles counted on the sex appeal those eyes radiated. But by taking on Wendy Torrance, Duvall showed she was fully aware of her physical instrument’s full range of capabilities. The same eyes that seduced half the male cast of Nashville, say, could also be used to convince an unsuspecting audience that your son was communicating with the spirit world, that your dry-drunk husband had gotten into a spectral bottle and grabbed a weapon to wield against you, that things had gone so wrong that the world itself is bleeding. That’s a special gift, one without which — without Shelley Duvall —  the greatest horror movie ever made would be measurably less great. 

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.