Animation
Azula
Avatar: The Last Airbender · 2005
A fourteen-year-old prodigy who was raised as a weapon
Threat index 84
Fallen Hero · Film
Jack Torrance
The monster was already in the family before the hotel got involved
Attribute scores
Power55
Intellect58
Menace74
Fear factor89
Cultural impact90
Charisma70
Editorial estimates on a 0–100 scale, calibrated against every other character in the index. Not official canon.
Who they are
A failed writer takes a winter caretaking job at an empty mountain hotel and comes apart. Kubrick's version is deliberately ambiguous about how much the building is doing and how much was always there, and Nicholson plays the man as unsettling from the first scene rather than gradually corrupted. The result is the most quoted haunted-house performance ever filmed.
Defining traits
Escalating paranoiaIsolation-fueled rageSusceptible to the hotel's influenceVerbal crueltyPhysically ordinary
What makes them dangerous
He is between his family and the only exit, in a building where help is a hundred snowbound miles away.
And what undoes them
He is disorganized, drunk on his own grievance, and easily lost in the geography he thought he knew.
Things you might not know
- The famous door-breaking line was improvised on set and adapted from a television catchphrase of the era.
- That sequence required dozens of prop doors because the actor kept destroying them too quickly.
- King has been publicly critical of the adaptation, chiefly because it removes the character's arc of struggling against himself.
Why number 12 in Most Tragic
A man losing to alcohol, failure and isolation, with a building actively helping. The novel is a tragedy; the film is a horror movie about one.
Why number 13 in Scariest
The horror of a parent turning, in a building where the nearest help is a hundred snowbound miles away.
Why number 19 in Best in Film
The most quoted haunted-house performance ever filmed, in a version of the story that refuses to explain itself.
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