'Doctor Sleep' Featurette Goes Back To The Overlook With Tons Of New Footage From 'The Shining' Sequel
A new Doctor Sleep featurette gives us our best look yet at Mike Flanagan's sequel to The Shining. In the video below, go behind-the-scenes of the upcoming film with Flanagan, author Stephen King, and star Ewan McGregor, while also getting new looks at the recreation of the Overlook Hotel, the younger Danny Torrence, Dick Hallorann, and more.
Doctor Sleep Featurette
Stephen King is notorious for loathing Stanely Kubrick's adaptation of The Shining, but when it came time to adapt King's sequel novel Doctor Sleep, director Mike Flanagan knew there was no way he could ignore what Kubrick did. The end result appears to be a film that remains faithful to King's novel while also recreating several key elements from Kubrick's horror classic.
The above featurette shows us how hard Flanagan and company have worked to recreate the look of Kubrick's Overlook Hotel. We also get to see Roger Dale Floyd as the young Danny Torrence, looking a heck of a lot like young actor Danny Lloyd, who played the character in Kubrick's Shining. There's also footage here of Carl Lumbly as Dick Hallorann, and Lumbly bears a striking resemblance to Scatman Crothers, who played Dick in The Shining. It's actually a bit eerie how much the actors and sets here resemble things plucked right out of Kubrick's film – so much so that I'm starting to wonder if it's going to be distracting.
Nonetheless, I can't hide my excitement for this film. I'm a huge Stephen King fan, I love The Shining, and I think Mike Flanagan is a fantastic horror filmmaker. I wasn't a fan of Doctor Sleep when it was first published, but I re-read it over the summer and found myself enjoying it much more this time around. In Doctor Sleep, Dan Torrence (McGregor) is all-grown-up, and like his father before him, he's become an alcoholic. He uses his alcoholism as a way to tamp down his psychic abilities, aka the shining.
But Dan is forced to face his demons, and the ghosts of his past – both literal and figurative – when he meets Abra Stone (Kyliegh Curran), a young girl who also has the shining. Abra is being targeted by the True Knot, a nomadic band of "psychic vampires" who feed on children with psychic abilities. The True Knot is lead by Rose the Hat, played in the film by Rebecca Ferguson. As you can tell from that description, Doctor Sleep is nothing like The Shining. In King's novels, the Overlook Hotel was destroyed, and no longer stands. But Kubrick left the building intact at the end of his film, which has enabled Flanagan to go back there for his film adaptation.
Doctor Sleep opens November 8, 2019.