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The Discomforting Legacy of Wendy Torrance


Shelley Duvall’s performance in The Shining is just one of the many bold, perplexing aspects of Stanley Kubrick’s beloved adaptation.

It wasn’t a new cut or anything, but it was a beautiful 4K restoration (in advance of the Blu-ray that fall), with Kubrick’s daughter Katharina, his former assistant Leon Vitali, and director Alfonso Cuarón in attendance. When young Danny asks what the Donner Party was, Jack, with a sadistic twinkle in his eye, relates to him the story of how a group of settlers, stranded in the Sierra Nevada mountains, had to resort to cannibalism in order to survive. Once left alone, Jack’s resentments and rage all come exploding to the surface, and his subsequent interactions with Wendy are less like the horror-flick confrontations of slasher and victim and more like the vicious, escalating arguments of a mad husband and his long-suffering wife.

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