Come Play With Us (The Shining Twins/Kubrick)

The Grady Twins — The Shining Tee

“Come play with us.”

Few images in horror are as instantly unsettling as the Grady twins standing at the end of an empty hallway in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining.

Played by real-life sisters Lisa and Louise Burns, the matching girls appear to young Danny Torrance as he explores the Overlook Hotel on his Big Wheel. Blue dresses, white knee socks, identical barrettes, hands held neatly at their sides—they look perfectly innocent. Which, of course, makes them considerably creepier.

Their screen time is surprisingly brief, but Kubrick turned them into one of the defining images of the entire film. Danny encounters the girls standing motionless in the corridor before horrifying flashes reveal their murdered bodies. Their invitation to play “forever and ever and ever” ensured that matching dresses would never seem quite as wholesome again.

Interestingly, they're commonly called the Grady twins, although the film never actually establishes that the sisters are twins. Earlier dialogue describes Grady's daughters as eight and ten years old. Kubrick nevertheless presents them as nearly identical, creating the eerie symmetrical image that has become inseparable from The Shining.