Duvall hadn’t acted for more than 20 years and when she agreed to appear in Scott Goldberg’s film The Forest Hills. Ahead of its release, three months after her death, the cast and crew tell their story
Felissa Rose is America’s modern day “scream queen”; at 55, the veteran of 150 movies, most of them horror. But she was, she says, genuinely frightened knocking on the front door of the Texas home owned by Shelley Duvall. It was December 2022, and Duvall, star of one of the most acclaimed horror films of all time – Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining – had not made a film for 20 years. Today, she would break the drought.
“The first thing I said was, ‘I’m so nervous and excited,’” says Rose. “‘I just love you, and may I have a hug?’ Shelley looked at me with these big, sparkly eyes, and said: ‘Of course!’ and embraced me. That’s when I started crying. She was so sweet, it was the most lovely scenario I could ever imagine.”
