logo has faded from the screen, opening with the same Hector Berlioz notes as Stanley Kubrick’s film – though not sustaining them. The saving grace is Flanagan (who adapted Stephen King’s Gerald’s Game and played with ghosts in Oculus and The Haunting Of Hill House) knows it, and leans into it, creating an intriguing thought experiment: how do you make a movie about a haunted man that is, itself, haunted by a previous film?ĭoctor Sleep embraces its legacy before the Warner Bros.

And now that book is a movie as well, and because Hollywood is Hollywood, its status as an existing studio property means that movie – written, directed and edited by Mike Flanagan – must also be a sequel to Stanley’s film.

And where Steve’s book ended in a fiery conflagration that consumed the Overlook Hotel, Stanley’s movie ended with the hotel doing just fine, having consumed another soul in its endless feeding cycle.Įventually Steve wrote another book, Doctor Sleep, which picked up the story of Dan Torrance as an adult, some three decades after the events of The Shining as he’s drawn into another supernatural conflict. Stanley, for his part, was more interested in the baroque aspects of Steve’s book, and saw Jack as a man who was mad all along, and just looking for an excuse to pick up an axe and start swinging it. Steve felt Stanley’s film missed the point of his book, which was about alcoholism and dread and how failures can haunt a person more horribly than any malevolent spirit. Once upon a time, a man named Steve wrote a book called The Shining, about an alcoholic writer named Jack, his worried wife Wendy and their young psychic son Danny, who understands the isolated hotel where they’re spending a winter is trying to drive his father insane.Ī man named Stanley liked the book, and made it into a movie starring Jack Nicholson, Shelley Duvall and little Danny Lloyd, and that movie made Steve very sad.

Sequel to doctor sleep