Horror’s most chilling scene
“No. You were five? Are you sure? Was your mum there?”
“Yeah you were there, my mum, George. We were all watching it.”
“Oh my God that is very, very bad. That is terrible. Don’t tell anyone.”
I watched Stanley Kubrick’s film The Shining when I was five and I haven’t been the same since. My mum says I didn’t blink for a full two days afterwards. I must have, though, because whenever I closed my eyes I’d see flashes of twins standing in doorways, blood cascading down a hall and the word “redrum” on the back of a door.
There was a reason for this wildly inappropriate screening – our family friend, Lia, was in it. Like, she’s in The Shining. So there I was, little old me, sitting next to Lia, watching her on screen in what is regularly cited as horror’s most chilling scene.
I’ve known Lia since I was 0. She lived on our road in Battersea with her husband George and son Will who’s my brother’s age. It was on this exact road, ten years before I was born, that the limo came to pick Lia up and take her to Elstree Studios.
Generally speaking, The Shining seems to drive people crazy. It was difficult to climb out of the internet hole I fell down when researching this piece. I started on Reddit, where fans discussed the significance of clocks in the film and what it means that the time displayed never makes sense. Then one of them mentioned The Wendy Theory, so I Googled that and spent about 45 mins when I should’ve been working watching a dizzying YouTube documentary about how Jack is not the one with paranoid schizophrenia, Wendy is, and we should watch the film through that lens instead.
I read a thesis-length blog post that analysed the significance of Native American art in the film, then a slightly shorter one about the placement of a red book in Jack’s interview scene, then a more harrowing one about how The Shining is actually all about child abuse. I got deeply invested in the film’s so-called ‘inconsistencies.’ Like, I don’t know if you’ve seen the film, but if you haven’t then watch it and notice how furniture will disappear in one take and reappear in the next. Or there’ll be a hole in the door one second that magically seals itself up. Inconsistencies? Pah! Do you even know Stanley Kubrick? Did you know he won a GUINNESS WORLD RECORD for the number of takes in Wendy’s swinging baseball bat scene? Those were real tears, real fear. She had to do it 127 times. Her hands were bleeding.
So me and my new friends from r/theshining agree Stanley Kubrick clearly created these riddles and mistakes to keep us talking about it 41 years on. So to honour his intentions, and because I have zero writing fodder this deep into lockdown, I gave Lia a call.
Lia’s from a small town just outside Zurich which consisted, she says, of “about four buildings.” She doesn’t want to discuss her age but says “imagine we filmed that scene when I was in my 20s, and that was 41 years ago.” She came to the UK to study when she was 18 and met her late husband George who she got engaged to six weeks later. She was working as a model at the time – for Dior, Balmain, even Princess Margaret – “I did a lot of nudes but nothing smutty of course, I had a very good agent called Top Models, and they sent me to audition for The Shining.”
Her initial audition was for the ballroom scene which is towards the end of the film, but Leon Vitali, Stanley’s PA, spotted her nudes in the back of her portfolio and asked her to audition for a different scene. “We did a screen test,” Lia says. “And in retrospect he was extremely rude. He asked me – ‘does the lady require any head?’ Which I didn’t understand at the time but now I know is a nasty sexual expression.”
She got a call-back and a week later the limo came to pick her up and take her to the studios. “I got a beautiful dressing room with a bathroom and there was a kettle there, and a little bed and they told me to make myself comfortable.”
Vidal Sassoon came and darkened her hair, and Lia was given a beautiful dressing gown and ushered into the green bathroom to film her scene.
“Stanley Kubrick explained exactly what was happening. I asked him what the film was about and he said I don’t need to know because I’m a ghost. But he was very charming, never grumpy. Sometimes he let me sit in his chair.”
They did hundreds of takes, which meant she spent a full week getting off with Jack Nicholson.
“It was really rather pleasant,” Lia says. “I told him I’m not an actress so I might need your help here – because I was terribly nervous – but he immediately kissed me as if we were actual lovers which was a big surprise I have to tell you.” Lia says she looked forward to shooting their scene each day. “George asked me if I was in love with Jack Nicholson and I told him only for this week.”
There was a lot of waiting between takes and Lia would often have a coffee and a chat with her co-ghost, Billie Gibson. But did she realise she was going to be part of the most iconic scene in horror?
“Not one clue,” Lia says. It was only when she read Stephen King’s book later that year that she realised the kind of film she’d be part of – but had no idea she’d still be talking about it 41 years later.
When the film came out nothing much changed for Lia – she received royalties for a time but no one really recognised her and she never planned to pursue acting. She’s since flown around the world attending horror conventions, hanging out with the twins and Danny, whose real name is, in fact, Danny. She had a lot planned for the film’s 40th anniversary last year but it all got lost to the cultural abyss of 2020.
Lia may have scared the shit out of me when I was five, but I did the same to her a year or so later. My brother Max and I used to stay at Lia’s house in the countryside near Guildford – it was a big, creaking abode, full of staircases and fireplaces, surrounded by a huge garden and next to acres of fields and woods.
My main aim when staying there was to be fully involved in whatever Max and Will were doing at all times. They were two years older than me and tried to shake me off wherever possible but I would trail them like a loyal dog until their games got too dangerous and I’d sprint off to find Lia.
One morning, about a year or so after I watched horror’s most chilling scene, I woke up to a strange scuffling outside my bedroom. It was dark still, but I could see that Max and Will were not in their beds. The shits – they were trying to shake me loose!
I jumped up and ran down the stairs and out the back door. They were fully dressed, marching round the corner of the garden, and I sprinted after them. “What are you doing!!!”
“For fuck’s sake.”
They were going on a bike ride! Without me!!!
I asked if I could come and they said yes fine but they had no time to spare so it better be now. So I hopped on my bike – no shoes, just pyjamas – and away we went, out into the field in front of the house and along the lane and into the woods. The sun came up and we were out for hours, clambering up trees and racing through the leaves and trying to do wheelies.
We cycled back exhausted and happy several hours later to find Lia sitting at the kitchen table, pale as a ghost.
Lia told me I was paedo-nip, going out into the woods like that wearing nothing but pyjamas, and told me never to do it again. I explained those two horrible boys were sneaking off without me which got them in trouble too, so not all was lost.
Lia doesn’t remember this happening. “Oh my god – no. I don’t remember that. I must have had a heart attack,” she says. “Gosh – that must’ve been terrifying.”
Watch Lia’s scene here.
-By Alice Austin
