The Shining's Danny Wasn't Allowed To See The Full Movie Until 5 Years After Filming
I don't remember what the first R-rated film I ever saw was. I know it was fairly early on, probably around age eight or nine, and it was not some plan I'd concocted to see one or anything like that. Sometimes you just happen upon an R-rated film as a kid, and even though I had parents who were fairly protective about what I watched growing up, that kind of thing just happens. I do vividly remember the first R-rated film I saw in a theater was: "V for Vendetta." I was 12 years old, and I can still picture the bargaining conversation between my dad, my uncle, my two years older cousin, and I about seeing it opening weekend in March 2006. I got to go, and one week later, we had the same conversation about Spike Lee's "Inside Man," which I also successfully went to. After that, the guardrails were off.
As I don't have kids, I have to imagine what my content restrictions would be like as a parent. I know I'd be more lax than my parents, as I think there's a great benefit to showing young people more challenging material. But I would guess that even I would have some kind of cutoff limit. Like, I don't think I'd show "The Shining" to a seven year old. That just so happens to be the age of Danny Lloyd, who played Danny Torrance in the film, when it was released in May 1980. That means he was five when they shot it.
Lloyd's parents felt similarly, and according to a profile from The Guardian, the actor didn't see the picture until he was 10 or 11. While that makes sense for most children, is it any different if you were actually in the movie?
Seeing how the sausage gets made
The main fear of a child seeing an intense, R-rated horror movie is that it will traumatize them in some small or large way. Personally, I think this mindset comes from the fact that parents don't want to deal with the emotional fallout of their child being scared, because that means they'd have to properly speak to them about the context of the fear and how it's okay to be scared sometimes. But I understand the impulse to shield a child, and "The Shining" has its fair share of material that would greatly upset your average child. After all, it upsets your average adult too.
In the Guardian profile, however, Danny Lloyd expressed that when he eventually saw "The Shining" in his younger years, he wasn't particularly scared by Stanley Kubrick's horror masterpiece, a feeling that persists through the years:
"For me when I watch 'The Shining,' it's like watching a home movie. I understand how it scares people. I think it's an entertaining movie, don't get me wrong. But I look back on it with so many memories."
When most actors talk about how they can't watch their own work, it usually stems from some sort of vanity-driven place where they think their face looks weird or made a bad poor acting choice. If it were me, I wouldn't be able to watch the movie for the simple fact that I would know the surrounding context of every shot of the movie and could never divorce myself enough from the process to experience the film as it was meant to be seen. For Lloyd, he didn't pursue a life in acting, so the memories of making "The Shining," I imagine, are particularly potent. That'd make the blood-spewing elevator a lot less scary to me too.