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. 

I wrote about Shelley Duvall’s tremendous performance as Wendy Torrance in The Shining for Decider.

You may not have heard of the monumental horror-image before, but like the Supreme Court and pornography, you know it when you see it. The little girls in The Shining, the statue of the demon in The Exorcist, the titular entities in The Wicker Man and It Follows: Though they’re rarely discussed compared to jump scares, gore, monsters, slashers, torture, or other hallmarks of the genre, the monumental horror-image is everywhere. Chances are good that if a movie has ever really frightened you, you have strange, standalone sights like these to thank.

The things you see in images like these aren’t brandishing a chainsaw or baring a mouthful of fangs, but something about them feels completely terrifying anyway. It’s not just scary, it’s wrong, like you’re seeing something that should not be.

Why “monumental?” In part, because subjects of these images are horrifying more for what they represent than what they actually do. In most cases, they don’t do anything but stand there. Yet seeing them alone is enough to indicate that something dreadful going on. Just as monuments in real life commemorate events or embody ideals, these images function as horror’s forward-facing surface — “monuments” to the deeper evil they connote.

Inspired by a twitter thread I did on the topic that went viral recently, I wrote about the monumental horror-image for The Outline, and they made an incredible visual presentation out of it that you really should check out if this subject interests you at all. This piece was nearly 20 years in the making and i’m so proud of how it turned out.