Mike Flanagan has made a career of turning unadaptable books into compelling, beloved movies. Not only did he make this clear when he turned Stephen King‘s Gerald’s Game, a book almost exclusively about a woman handcuffed to a bed, into a full movie, but he did it again when he turned The Life of Chuck into an award-winning critical darling. Just last month saw him revive the idea of Carriein all-new directions too. Seven years ago today, though, on November 8, 2019, Flanagan cemented how well he could make anything considered “unadaptable” by releasing Doctor Sleep, the sequel to The Shining.
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The place that Stanley Kubrick’s film adaptation of The Shining holds in pop culture is well established at this point, but so is Stephen King’s initial reaction to the film. Never one to mince words, King’s dissatisfaction is well publicized, to the point that he even wrote a sequel to his original novel that could reclaim the characters. To that end, a movie version of Doctor Sleep faced an impossible task, since it needed to act as a sequel to The Shining story, with the most famous version of that narrative being one that King hates. This is where Flanagan’s real magic trick is revealed: not only satisfying Stephen King’s taste by adapting the story, but also the Kubrick fans who wanted to go back to the Overlook Hotel. Even better, years later it could be an integral piece to his next franchise, The Dark Tower.
Doctor Sleep Has Aged Like Fine Wine
When the idea of a Doctor Sleep movie was first announced, it not only turned heads but immediately started the grumbling from a certain sector of fandom. How can one satisfy not only the fanbase of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining but also the sequel story that King himself had penned? Flanagan found a way, though, by not only invoking the iconography of Kubrick’s movie in how he recreated the Overlook Hotel, but also in casting actors to take on the same characters who made their debut in Kubrick’s film.
Not only does Ewan McGregor embody an older Dan Torrance, but he’s flanked by Alex Essoe as Wendy Torrance and Henry Thomas as an Overlook ghost meant to harken to his father, Jack, in some scenes. The biggest presence in a supporting role, though, is Carl Lumbly as Dick Hallorann, keeping the feelings of the original movie alive with his sage wisdom for a fellow Shiner.
Bringing back that Overlook carpet pattern and the old woman from the haunted room, among other motifs, is just one piece of the puzzle to Doctor Sleep; another is that it offered the chance to not only keep the legacy of Kubrick’s movie alive but to “correct” the changes. Some smaller ones are on display: Doctor Sleep notably loses the “3” in “237” so that it can feasibly align with King’s original “217,” but the other is how it all wraps up, with the boiler in the Overlook exploding and leaving the hotel in ruin, finally allowing King’s novel ending to appear on the big screen.
On top of all this, though, Flanagan delivers the rare horror movie sequel that isn’t just, “and then it happened again;” it’s a film about how the fallout of the original story still echoes across the lives of the survivors (and for some characters, those that didn’t make it) and how the world has changed in the years since. By moving the story ahead by decades, we get to see how Danny Torrance has been carefully shaped by his experience in the first and how he’s not only become more like his dad but found room to profoundly reject in an effort to keep himself alive.
Doctor Sleep has yet another wrinkle too, not only expanding on the lore of the psychic gifts that characters in this world can have, but in the supernatural threats that they deal with. On top of the ghosts that might show up unannounced, Rose the Hat and her psychic vampire clan, the True Knot, give the movie an antagonistic footprint that the original never had and which gives the larger lore a more interesting place. Lore that, we hope, might become even more important.
Doctor Sleep Could Be Pivotal for Mike Flanagan’s The Dark Tower
It’s no secret at this point that Mike Flanagan is a massive Stephen King fan. On top of adapting three of his books for the big screen, another for television, and working on yet another film (the upcoming redo of The Mist), he seems poised to actually deliver on an adaptation of King’s magnum opus, The Dark Tower. Flanagan’s involvement has been well publicised for years now, with the filmmaker comparing to getting the series off the ground to being like driving an oil tanker.
With the success ofCarrie‘s first season on Prime Video, though, it seems like plans for The Dark Tower are coming together in a more concrete way. Stephen King himself teased “something else that’s really special” if the show was a success. Fans took that to mean The Dark Tower, and with Carrie renewed for Season 2, it looks like the picture is all starting to come together. As longtime King fans know, The Dark Tower series is something of a linchpin to the entirety of his work, with connections to countless other stories. That in mind, it’s easy to see how Carrie and the psychic-powered characters at its center could have a place in The Dark Tower, but we must, of course, rewind and make a note that this clearly paves the way forDoctor Sleep to have a place in the show too.
Not only does the larger narrative expansion of Doctor Sleep and its reveal of others having “The Shine” as a power set give it a bit of a foothold in Flanagan’s trip to The Tower, but there are a slew of Easter eggs that cement it. The most notable of these is when an adult Dan is visited by the spirit of Dick Halloran, the former Overlook Hotel cook who still helps him in the afterlife, and says the line “Ka is a wheel.” For constant readers, “Ka” is the Stephen King equivalent of fate, and it has a major place in the larger Dark Tower story, but it’s not the only one.
Places in the scenery of Doctor Sleep make reference to major companies and locations from The Dark Tower, like Tet Transit being the bus depot that Dan uses, LaMerk Industries being a location that the True Knot uses for one of their kills, and that’s on top of Jacob Tremblay’s character (a clear Shining user) wearing the number 19 on his baseball team.
All of this is to say, Mike Flanagan’s journey to get The Dark Towermade in some form has clearly been a long one. Though it seems like now we may be even closer to getting the story told in some form or another, he’s been laying the groundwork across his Stephen King adaptations for years. So if you didn’t watch Doctor Sleep when it was released seven years ago, now’s the time; it might be very important real soon.
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