It's all about the stare. The Kubrick Stare.

Stanley Kubrick. The madman of filmmaking. Well one of them at least. If you know anything film you know who Stanley Kubrick is and the role he has played for the film industry.
The long list of films Kubrick shows how good he was and how eager he was to get details in every shot perfect. But the fact is I'm not here to talk about his perfectionism if I was we'd never see the light of day again.

No, were gonna talk about one of the things that made Kubrick's characters work. The stare, the Kubrick Stare. If you look for it it's in a lot of films and obviously Kubrick's own works.
A Clockwork Orange had two examples that stand out. The first is the very shot of this film with our hero (and I use that term loosely) Alex pulling off the stare in a way that shows you right away what were in for. The fact that he never blinks makes it pretty scary and it holds even as the camera zooms out and the music hits its peak.

The other example is actually a weird upward example of this near the end of the film. As Alex is being tortured by the music that makes him ill during his Ludvigo Treatment the writer who Alex tormented early on in the film can be seen looking up towards the ceiling in a manner very similar to how the Kubrick Stare would be done. From what I can tell this is supposedly a reference to old photos of Beethoven.

It was also in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, remember David Tennant as Barty Crouch Jr? Yep he does it there. Jack Nicholson in the Shining, he does it there too though that was a Kubrick film so it makes sense to be honest.,
This is a pretty difficult thing to talk about but that's because there's a massive list of examples even in more recent films. But the fact is I absolutely love it as a shot. Why?
I follow Alfred Hitchcock's theory on eyes. That they're windows to the soul ,watch any of his films and you'll notice that eyes are pretty important in establishing a character like the cop in Psycho to make him scarier Hitchcock just covered his eyes with thick dark sunglasses and called it a day. And it worked
But I'm a little different, I believe you can show off someone's soullessness by showing their eyes. And the Kubrick stare proves it. Give a good actor the chance and you have a something truly terrifying on your hands.

Oh and fun fact. Kubrick himself pulled this off a lot when he wanted to be serious and intimidating. Don't believe me? That's him in the first panel on the top left. 

And finally I leave you with a quote from the legend himself Roger Ebert. Because this took several weeks to write and it needs to end at some point and it might as well be good. 

"In that showdown, and at several other times in the film, Kubrick indulges his favorite closeup, a shot of a man glowering up at the camera from beneath lowered brows. This was the trademark visual in A Clockwork Orange, and Jack Nicholson practiced it in The Shining. What does it mean? That Kubrick thinks it's an interesting angle from which to shoot the face, I think."