Do we like them?

Do we like Jack Torrance?

A character from The Shining (1980)

Our score: 1 out of 10. No. He starts out as a flawed man trying to start over, but he's a danger to his own family long before the hotel finishes with him. We wouldn't back him, and we'd lock the door.

Jack Torrance is a former schoolteacher and aspiring author. He is a recovering alcoholic whose temper has already cost him a job. He takes a five-month post as winter caretaker of the huge, snowbound Overlook Hotel in the Colorado Rockies. He wants quiet, a fresh start and time to write. He brings his wife Wendy and their gifted young son Danny with him.

The film plays Jack as brittle and prickly from the start, which makes him less sympathetic than his version in Stephen King's novel. The hotel manager warns him about cabin fever, and Jack brushes it off. As the weeks pass, the writing stalls, his patience thins, and his family becomes the target of his frustration. He is hard to like and harder to trust.

We score him a 1 because there's no heroic turn to redeem him. Whatever the Overlook does to him, the film shows a man who gives in to his worst instincts and chooses to turn on the people who depend on him. He's one of horror's great performances and one of its least backable men.

In the end he becomes a full-blown threat to Wendy and Danny, hunting them through the hotel, and the film ends with Danny outwitting him in the snowy hedge maze outside. He dies out in the cold, and the hotel keeps him.