There doesn’t have to be this disagreement, or an either/or approach, to The Shining.”Ĭentral to his strategy was reviving the Overlook Hotel, which burned to the ground in King’s book (and thus doesn’t exist in the novel Doctor Sleep), but survived at the end of Kubrick’s movie. That was such a strange feeling.” Despite that fractured lineage, Flanagan was convinced there was a unified path forward: “I really believed that, look, there’s a way this could all actually work together. But all the images in my head as I read this book were Kubrick’s. I was so excited when it was published, I grabbed it the first day it hit the shelves, and I powered down this story about sobriety and recovery and responsibility, and I loved it, and it was so quintessentially Stephen King. “I had this bizarre experience when I read Doctor Sleep. It was always this thing that hurt my heart a little bit. And I always had this ache, just from the perspective of a fan, that King didn’t like the movie, and that they were so different. But as a lifelong Stephen King fan, I also adored the book. It traumatized me and it changed how I looked at horror cinema, and cinema in general, as I began to study it more as the work of art that it is. Kubrick’s film entered my life when I was very young-way too young to see The Shining, but I did it anyway. As a fan of all three, it was irresistible.”Īsked why he wanted to take on a project fraught with such problems, the prolific Flanagan-who’s established himself as horror cinema’s brightest talent thanks to Oculus, Hush, Before I Wake, Gerald’s Game, and 2018’s Netflix series The Haunting of Hill House-admits it’s simply because, “I loved The Shining. I was like, look, what a gift this could be as a fan, for me, to experience a film that honored and celebrated the novel Doctor Sleep, Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece, and the novel The Shining. “It’s like the kid in The Shining, in that it has the DNA of its parents-King and Kubrick-but this descendent still had to find its own identity in the world. So I preferred very much to look at it as a descendent to The Shining rather than a sequel,” he explains. “Any time I said ‘sequel to The Shining’ in my own head, I panicked a little bit. Nonetheless, no amount of pressure could dissuade the 41-year-old filmmaker from tackling King’s 2013 novel Doctor Sleep-and the key to overcoming it, he says, was the right frame of mind. It’s the most intimidating and daunting project I’ve ever worked on.”

“I’ve lost so much sleep trying to navigate through this. 30 (via sneak peeks it opens wide on Nov. “I’ve felt like I wanted to throw up for the last two years, every day,” he chuckles, shortly before his latest debuted in theaters on Oct. Yeah, Mike Flanagan knows he’s taken a big risk with Doctor Sleep. Making a sequel to The Shining that simultaneously respects Stephen King’s original 1977 novel and Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 film, which King famously disliked?

The shining and doctor sleep