Versions of the stare have appeared in Kubrick’s work since at least 1964’s Dr Strangelove, and in other directors’ oeuvres even before that.

(Anthony Perkins’ climactic leer to the camera in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, from 1960, is as Kubrick Stare-y as close-ups get.)

But it was McDowell’s unhinged chief droog, Alex DeLarge, in Kubrick’s own A Clockwork Orange from 1971, who definitively pinned down the look.

In a 2014 interview, McDowell revealed that Kubrick had asked him to come up with an expression he could use as the character’s reaction to a deafening blast of Beethoven’s 9th.

“So I was doing various things,” he recalled. “[My] eyes were kind of up and glazed over, and [my] mouth kind of took on a weird look. And when he started to laugh, we knew we had it.”

Actors and filmmakers have been deploying it with skin-crawling success ever since.

Anthony Hopkins smiling in his cell in The Silence of the Lambs might be the most chilling Kubrick Stare that Kubrick didn’t direct.

Joaquin Phoenix delivered a particularly upsetting one as the young Emperor Commodus in Gladiator, with flecks of blood on his face. And for Heath Ledger, it was understandably the go-to expression for the Joker in The Dark Knight.

Given the highly constructed nature of the shot, it’s always especially fun when a Kubrick Stare is spotted out in the wild.

Trump’s mugshot now seems likely to dominate this lively sub-genre, though other recent notable examples include a number of Madonna’s recent Instagram selfies, including an eyebrow-twisting corker from February 2020, and a January 2022 appearance by Elmo from Sesame Street, in which the fluffy red Muppet listens to his friend Zoe sing a song about Rocco, her pet rock. The brink of madness is closer than we might like to think.

Telegraph, London

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