In the late 1990s, Stewart Thorndike found herself working as a model in London. Also in town was Stanley Kubrick, making what would turn out to be his last film, “Eyes Wide Shut.” A fan of the director, Thorndike, then in her early 20s, desperately wanted to be on that set in whatever way possible. She ended up being cast as Nuala (“N-U-A-L-A”), one of the women flirting with Tom Cruise’s character at the Christmas party that kicks off the movie. Fortunately, Kubrick’s idiosyncratic process meant she had plenty of time to observe him at work.

“Most of it he would just figure out what he wanted to shoot that day, so you’d get all dressed up and then he’d be like, ‘I’m going to shoot something else,’ ” she said. “So you just got to watch, and it was honestly the best.”

By the end, she had learned an important lesson: “I got out of it that I didn’t want to be an actor,” Thorndike said. “I wanted to be Kubrick.”

A quarter of a century later, her second feature as a director, “Bad Things,” is premiering on the horror streaming platform Shudder. It is about a woman, Ruthie (Gayle Rankin, from the series “Kindred” and “GLOW”), who inherits a hotel from her grandmother and decides to spend a weekend in the deserted premises, partner and buddies in tow, in the middle of a snowy winter. As fantasy and reality get increasingly mixed up at a property that has seen its share of, well, bad things over the decades, Ruthie’s fragile psyche starts to fray.