For this year’s 31 Nights of Horror Challenge, the Night 28 prompt is Stephen King. We watched the movie Doctor Sleep (2019)on Netflix.

Storyline

Years following the events of The Shining (1980), a now-adult Dan Torrance must protect a young girl with similar powers from a cult known as The True Knot, who prey on children with powers to remain immortal.

Years after the traumatizing events at the Overlook Hotel, Dan Torrance is now an alcoholic struggling to find a job. He moves to a small town in New Hampshire and becomes “Doctor Sleep”. He then meets Abra Stone, a teenager with the brightest shine he’s ever seen. When he learns that a cult of evil beings called The True Knot are chasing her with the intent to eat her shine, he does everything in his power to protect her…including returning to The Overlook.

‘Doctor Sleep’ delivers exceptional performances, particularly Rebecca Ferguson’s captivating Rose the Hat and Ewan McGregor’s emotionally grounded Danny Torrance, while exploring supernatural themes and trauma with impressive depth. Mike Flanagan’s direction successfully balances honoring Kubrick’s legacy with King’s vision. However, opinions divide on the horror elements, with some finding it lacks genuine scares and relies too heavily on atmosphere. The 152-minute runtime proves divisive, with pacing issues noted especially early on, though most found the character development and storytelling engaging throughout.

Our thoughts on Doctor Sleep (2019) 

Great job Mike Flanagan.

I don’t know what’s going on with movies lately, I have high expectations and films suck, or in this case, my expectations were fairly low, and I was blown away.

What a truly worthy follow up to The Shining this was. Almost forty years on, it captures the tone, spirit and vibe of that great film.

You’d think at over two and a half hours it would be overlong, it isn’t,that running time allows the complex story to be told, and for the characters to be fully developed.

Young Kyleigh Curran is remarkably good, and in great company with Ewan McGregor and Rebecca Ferguson, very well acted.

A great start, with that amazing music, and those glorious panoramic shots. It takes time before you arrive at that destination, the one we all waited for. The recreation is remarkable.

All those involved, take a bow, this was outstanding, 9/10.

9 out of 10 stars

Trivia 

In the scene where hospital cat Azzie jumps on the desk in front of Dan, before he follows her to what should be an empty room, he puts down the magazine he was reading. It’s the same January 1978 issue of Playgirl Magazine his father, Jack Torrance, read in the lobby of The Overlook while waiting for Stuart Ullman and Bill Watson on Closing Day in The Shining (1980).

Mike Flanagan painstakingly recreated the sets of the Overlook Hotel from blueprints acquired from Stanley Kubrick‘s estate. This made this film the second in two consecutive years to resurrect the hotel (digitally or otherwise), as it also played a prominent role in Ready Player One (2018).

Most elements from The Shining (1980) were recreated with duplicate sets and lookalike actors, though three shots were reused: the aerial shot of the water and the island and the two shots after it of the car driving on the mountain road. The shots were degrained, recolored as day-for-night, and had snow digitally added.

Stephen King first got the idea for Doctor Sleep in 1998 at a book signing when somebody asked him what happened to Danny Torrance from his novel ‘The Shining’. This was a question King had often asked himself, as well as what would have happened to Jack Torrance had he found AA (Alcoholics Anonymous). When people kept repeating the question, King always jokingly replied that Danny eventually married Charlie McGee, the girl from Firestarter (1984). However, King eventually started thinking seriously about how old Danny was and what happened to Wendy and decided to find the answers with a sequel, but it was a tall order.

The cat Azzie is based on Oscar, a tabby cat who resides at Steere House Nursing and Rehabilitation Centre in Rhode Island. Oscar appears able to predict the impending death of terminally ill patients. He will sit or sleep by their beds for a few hours before they die. Since the publication of an article featuring Oscar in a New England medical journal in 2007, Oscar has been present for over 100 patient deaths. In 2013, Oscar suffered an allergic reaction and died for a few seconds before he was revived by vets. In the film, Azzie is portrayed by Bonkers, a cat that belongs to The Newton Brothers, the film’s composers.

The True Knot’s costumes were designed with the idea that they picked up fashion from past centuries in which they lived.

The use of the heartbeat is an homage to The Shining (1980). Throughout Doctor Sleep (2019), the tempo of the heartbeat is used to increase or decrease tension.

Actress Rebecca Ferguson revealed in a 2019 interview that, while horror in general is not one of her favorite movie genres, she is a huge fan of the novels by Stephen King: “I don’t see why we wouldn’t want to make films out of everything that he writes. It’s so adaptable. It’s so understandable. It’s so relatable and the imagery, it’s like you don’t really have to make scene images anymore, you just have the book.” She also added that although she doesn’t like violence directed at children, she happily made an exception for this film.