“The Shining’s Overlook Hotel & The Overlooked Brilliance of Doctor Sleep”

By Cody Wagner

                  There’s a certain fascination when it comes to horror and why we are attracted toward it, particularly in film and literature. We’re either repulsed or gravitate to it in childhood. It all depends on what was the story to christen oneself in a baptism of fear, and how. Never being the same for better or worse. One of the films that was a gateway drug into the horror genre for me was Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980). I was a young kid when I first saw it. Way too young. My mom’s a huge horror buff and had so many movies lying around, either from Blockbuster or perhaps burning onto a blank DVD through means (but you didn’t hear that from me).

It felt like a fever dream of an angry father trying to kill his wife and child with an axe while the viewer feels more claustrophobic and feeling like one would go insane the more one stays in the Overlook hotel as the film went on. It was hypnotic in a way, and I was intrigued in horror and character studies ever since. It’s a classic. A true staple in horror with methodical, precise filmmaking from the master Stanley Kubrick with the story basis from the master of horror literature, Stephen King. Then in 2019, Warner Brothers announced a sequel in Mike Flanagan’s Doctor Sleep.

                  The initial announcement shocked me. A follow up to such a classic film? How dare they! Then I read that the writer and director was Mike Flanagan. He had a tight filmography even at that point (which I know regard him as a master in his own right) with, The Haunting of Hill House, Oculus, Hush, and Stephen King’s Gerald’s Game so Flanagan was already familiar with adapting Stephen King’s work. He was my favorite director at that point, so despite the mere blasphemous idea of touching The Shining, I was looking forward to it in support of Flanagan. I saw it in theaters with my closest friends who’re film buffs like me, and you know what? Doctor Sleep is a brilliant follow up to The Shining and is a shockingly tender mediator between the novel and the film versions of The Shining that stands strong on its own merits.

When the film was in production, Stanley Kubrick disregarded Stephen King’s initial script in favor of a script in a different direction by Diane Johnson and himself. King was used to this treatment when people would adapt his work. He believed that a film would not change his novel/short story, and an artist should have their own take on his work to make it their own. Kubrick then made it his own and King hated it. When pressed about it, King would go on to say, “Where in the ending I went hot, he went cold.” Which I will refrain from spoiling here, but in addition to the ending I believe this applies to the portrayal of the characters.

King’s characters are multidimensional and fleshed out, particularly with Jack Torrence as a complicated man with demons from his alcoholism but overall, not a bad person. Kubrick’s characters are nearly caricatures with only the names still intact. Not a bad thing, especially with how the cinematography, editing, eerie score, and terrific performances (with Jack Nicholson delivering a masterful performance) comes together to form a great film. King took it as a spit in the face of what he wrote as an alcoholic trying to get his act together for his family before his vices catch up to him. Instead, Jack Torrence starts crazy with zero apparent love for his family and only gets crazier from there. King was sour on the film since. Flanagan had quite the task following the legacy of not only a beloved book from a master author, but also following a classic movie that comes with the ire of Stephen King.

Doctor Sleep was also a book written by King in 2013. He pondered on the fate of the son, Danny Torrence and wrote how an adult Dan Torrence would process the trauma of the events from the Overlook hotel. Flanagan was also interested in how it turned out, so he read it and adapted it for the big screen. The film Doctor Sleep focuses on Dan Torrence as an alcoholic who’s trying to clean up his act (sound familiar?) and Abra Stone, a young girl who also has the ‘shine’ (a psychic power that Dan has), and a cult of hungry, psychic vampires who feed on shine after the both of them called the True Knot.  

This is a unique film in the sense is that it’s a hybrid of two voices of masters of their craft. The film’s cinematic vocabulary is that of Kubrick’s; cold and meticulous in its focused, lingering shots and iconography The Shining film established. Its dialogue, character treatment, and dare I say sensitivity is that of King’s. The characters here are conflicted and are fleshed out through the recovery of addiction and the redemption that comes with sobriety.

In the film, Dan Torrence is trying to get clean and leave behind his past including his psychic abilities. He moves to New Hampshire, goes to AA, and gets a job at a hospice. Flanagan’s sensitive writing comes through here when hospice patients are terrified of dying, so Dan uses his ‘shine’ to calm down the patients by accessing their memories and ease their anxieties. They mistake him for a doctor and earned the nickname “Doctor Sleep” from comforting patients before they take the “big sleep.” Which I thought was a clever callback to Dan’s childhood nickname being “Doc.”

It’s scenes like that I found so touching and warm that aren’t typically used in a lot of horror films, especially in Kubrick’s Shining. There’s a compassion and sense of dignity toward the elderly, sick, dying, and those in recovering that took me aback. I identified with Dan on a recent rewatch as someone who’s recently gotten sober and really gave me a new perspective with what Flanagan, who also got sober during the production of the film, was doing here.

Even the True Knot here are presented as characters and not faceless villains to justify a conflict in the plot. In Doctor Sleep, the True Knot, as lead by the leader Rose the Hat, are scavenging across America to feed off “steam,” psychic energy and the essence of people, as people who shine are getting harder to come by. So, when they find someone who has it, they don’t hesitate on either murdering them or keeping them around as a food source like milk from a cow by torturing them. Which they find in Dan Torrence and Abra Stone.

The two visions become one during the third act of the movie – Flanagan’s. The final standoff is at the Overlook hotel. Back to where all Dan’s family’s troubles began. Here there’s a scene that’s the heart of the film. As Dan awaits the arrival of the True Knot, he’s greeted at the bar by a bartender who resembles his long-dead father. The scene is quiet and is mostly dialogue on the burden of family, drowning one’s sorrow in alcohol, the shortcomings of an abusive father, and a son left to pick up the pieces. He learns a quote from AA and perfectly sums up the two films, “A man takes a drink. A drink takes a drink. Then a drink takes a man.” Poetic.

The horror in Doctor Sleep is effective because we get to know the characters well. So, when the scares do come, the fear is real because the investment in these characters are well earned. There’s spooky fun to be had when the characters reach the Overlook hotel and some horrific ghost interactions are aplenty. The score by the Newton Brothers callback just a suitable amount of The Shining’s score while still contributing their own spin to it. The cinematography by Michael Fimognari has been consistent with Flanagan’s work as he’s done nearly every one of his films and shows so the synergy feels like second nature here whilst also following Kubrick’s cinematic language here.

If there’s one thing to criticize about this movie is that because The Shining is such an impactful movie, I found the filmmakers couldn’t really escape the shadow of its predecessor. Like, it follows too much of the Shining’s likeness and traces back to iconic scenes. We know the Shining, that’s we’re watching this movie! This is all minor in my opinion and still think Doctor Sleep’s existence is justified, recreating the axe chasing scene and all.

I won’t spoil the ending here. However, King finally got the “hot” ending he wanted from the first Shining adaptation. So much so that King himself warmed up to The Shining after the further context of Doctor Sleep. If your movie can make the author ease up on an adaptation, he famously disregards, then that must be the sign of a damn good movie. Flanagan referred to Doctor Sleep as “The Parent Trap” between Stanley Kubrick and Stephen King’s take on the story. In the sense of mending the two’s long-standing feud. Kubrick has long since passed, but King softened his views, so I think Flanagan accomplished his goal.

Flanagan really sealed some legacies here. He reconfirmed Kubrick’s brilliance, despite The Shining performing poorly at the box office when it first came out, getting poor critic reception, and even nominated for some Razzie Awards. He reminded us how King’s characters feel like real people and the real horrors are our emotional conflicts and the threats to our relationships to one another. He also cemented his own legacy as someone who performed an impossible task of merging two opposing visions. He would prove his own brilliance with the Haunting series, Midnight Mass, The Fall of the House of Usher, and 2025’s Life of Chuck, another adaptation of Stephen King.