Lia Beldam in The Shining (1980)

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Crazy bastards are always more fascinating to watch if they are at a distance rather than sitting beside you, or as is the case in The Shining (1980), locked up in a haunted, deserted, snowbound hotel with you. Manic director Stanley Kubrick and prime maniac Jack Nicholson both reached personal highs of frenetic menace and obsession in this richly lensed adaptation of a Stephen King novel. Nicholson portrays a driven but failing type-A person who drags his emotionally battered wife and wigged-out kid along to take a winter job as caretakers at a closed-down hotel. The claustrophobic, isolated conditions are as much a depiction of Nicholson’s increasingly alienated mental state as they are of the ghostly, abandoned hotel that houses and torments him.