Why The Shining's Wendy Torrance Is an Underrated Final Girl

By Laura Evans for CBR.com

The Final Girl has, in some ways, become just as iconic as the Slasher villains that populate the horror genre. Laurie Strode, Nancy Thompson, Sidney Prescott... the survivors of the monster reign of terror tend to rank among the most iconic heroines of 1980s cinema, including even Ellen Ripley and Sarah Connor to a degree. Yet among the survivors of 1980s horror classics, one particular Final Girl often goes overlooked, mocked, and spoken of with derision and disrespect if mentioned at all: Shelley Duvall's Wendy Torrance, the final (adult) survivor of the iconic 1980 horror film, Stanley Kubrick's The Shining.

The Shining is loosely based on the 1977 Stephen King novel of the same name. The film is a departure from the book both in casting and focus, being more of a visual, visceral horror flick than the novel's more slow-burning psychological drama. Wendy is the mother of psychic child Danny and the wife of recovering alcoholic Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson); the family heads out to the remote snowed-in Overlook hotel for Jack's last chance to make good as the caretaker of the inn for the winter. Trapped alone in the snow, the haunted hotel slowly affects everyone's minds until Jack attempts to murder his family, leaving it up to Wendy to save her son and escape.

Why Wendy Is an Underrated Final Girl

Wendy is not the Final Girl in the original novel; in the book, caretaker Halloran survives and helps save Wendy and Danny in the final act. However, Halloran does not survive the Shining film. Danny does survive alongside Wendy, but since, for instance, Danny and Lindsey both survive Michael Meyers alongside Laurie Strode in Halloween, it's clear that being the only living survivor of the monster is not a requirement for being a Final Girl. The status is less about being the sole survivor (many characters survive Scream alongside Sidney, for another example) than it is about being the one to confront and escape from the monster in the climax.

Thus, Wendy Torrance fulfills all the requirements of a Final Girl. She faces and survives the monster in the climax of the story, even protecting another (Danny) in the process. She suffers from being terrorized by both Jack and the spirits of the haunted hotel, put through a chillingly realistic series of traumas and horrifying imagery in one of the most intense and terrifying films ever made. The realistic fear and anxiety from Shelley Duvall's Shining performance was a product in many ways of what Duvall suffered in real life at the hands of the film's director, giving her performance even more frightening weight as she conveys the fear of the Overlook Hotel to the audience.

Why Wendy Doesn't Deserve the Hate She Gets

Wendy's ordeal in The Shining is all the more harrowing because she is not fighting a strange monster, a creepy inhuman being that she can easily let go of. She is forced to fight and potentially kill her own husband, destroying her family life and ending the man she loves to survive and save her son. Even worse than Sidney Prescott having to kill her boyfriend in Scream, Wendy must face the monstrous version of her spouse in a showdown trapped in the snow and cope with some aspects of horror that can ring all-too-real to audience members: a loving family member turned into a terrifying monster.

However, Wendy is not usually treated with the love and reverence afforded to most classic Final Girls -- quite the opposite. She almost always makes lists of the most hated and "annoying" women in horror. She is not even awarded the Final Girl title; she is treated with so little respect; in the eyes of fans, she apparently doesn't deserve to be a true Final Girl, usually because she is deemed annoying. But annoyance does not disqualify a character from being a strong Final Girl, a survivor of a horror film, and a victim of a monster who stands tall and fights back. And for that reason, Wendy Torrance has become horror's most underrated Final Girl.