DOCTOR SLEEP
Mike Flanagan’s new horror flick is not just an adaptation of a Stephen King novel, but also the sequel to Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. Whatever happens, there’ll be redrum on the roolfecnad.
MAKING A SEQUEL TO THE SHINING THAT KEEPS BOTH STEPHEN KING AND STANLEY KUBRICK FANS HAPPY IS AS DAUNTING A GIG AS CARETAKING A HAUNTED HOTEL. YET WITH , HORROR WUNDERKIND MIKE FLANAGAN MIGHT JUST HAVE PULLED IT OFF
WALKING AROUND THE Overlook Hotel is a trip. Empire enjoys the privilege of many incredible set-visits, from greenscreen planets to vivid real-world locations. This, though, is something else. We’re really here. In that reception area. On that staircase. By that room numbered 237. And a day after we leave, it will all be gone.
It’s November 2018 and we’re in Atlanta for Mike Flanagan’s Doctor Sleep, an adaptation of Stephen King’s 2013 sequel to his 1977 book The Shining, but also a substantial nod to Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 masterpiece. Flanagan’s team have meticulously recreated Kubrick’s set. Every inch is as we last saw it in on screen, and there will be flashbacks: this temporary Overlook is new, but haunted by ghosts nevertheless. Room 237’s terrifying, cackling old lady gives us an incongruously cheery hello. From around a corner, the young twins unceremoniously emerge, almost as frighteningly as they do in the original film.
Flanagan greets us, his T-shirt decorated with the classic yellow Shining film poster. “I’ve been wearing a series of nerdy Shining T-shirts,” he explains of his attire. He’s a super-fan. “I never would have believed we’d get a chance to do this,” he says, delight spilling out of him. “It’s very strange to walk onto a set for the first time and know where everything is. Playing in the world of The Shining… I never thought it was gonna be possible.” It wasn’t. He made it so.
“THANK YOU!” SAYS Flanagan when Empire describes his films as traumatic mindfucks. Since his feature debut, 2011’s Absentia, he’s been looking inwards to find fear: rather than serving up jump scares, he goes for psychological deep dives. In Absentia, a woman’s husband appears after having gone missing seven years earlier. Oculus features a mirror that manifests personalised hallucinations. Before I Wake concerns a boy who conjures up ghosts and demons whilst he sleeps, including his adoptees’ dead son.
Those three are all studies of grief, and all have personal roots. Before I Wake was inspired by Flanagan becoming a father for the first time and watching his son sleep, imagining what his dreams might be, wondering if such knowledge would aid his parenting. Last year’s The Haunting Of Hill House, which Flanagan adapted from Shirley Jackson’s classic novel for Netflix, dissected his fear of his family being fractured.
Stephen King, then, with all his metaphorical monsters, is perfect Flanagan fodder. The young Flanagan was hooked from the start: born in Salem, no less, he read It when he was ten and, despite being terrified, the character work compelled him to get to the end. He then read all of King’s books, multiple times, including The Shining, although he’d already seen the film which, as a young teenager, he’d found “completely traumatic”, he says. “It stuck with me too — it burrowed in.”
For years he’d paid tribute to King’s work, and specifically The Shining — Oculus’ supernatural mirror was Flanagan doing a portable Overlook, ready to throw out demonic visions wherever it was plonked. “I’ve been cherrypicking The Shining, story-beats and moments that I really love,” he says of the book. “Visually as well, we’ve had shots on all of our projects where we’ve said, ‘This is our Kubrick shot. This is our Shining moment.’ It’s been part of the DNA of every project I’ve done, so that now that we really are living in that world, it’s been insane.”
He’d wanted to adapt Doctor Sleep since King published the book in 2013. The story follows Jack Torrance’s son Dan (Ewan Mcgregor), now a grown man and a fully functioning alcoholic in his own right. Having been understandably
scarred by childhood events, he has quelled his ‘shining’ abilities for years, but as he bins the booze he begins using them to help the dying move on peacefully. Meanwhile, he comes into contact with a young girl, Abra Stone (Kyliegh Curran), who has even more powerful abilities than him, and asks him to help her take on The True Knot, a group of ageless supernatural travellers who feed off such children, torturing and murdering them.
Flanagan’s hiring was made easier because of an existing relationship with King, who had loved his 2016 film Hush, about a deaf-mute woman taking on a masked killer. That lead to King helping Flanagan to adapt his novel Gerald’s Game, which he’d been wanting to do for years. King loved that too, so when Flanagan and his long-term producer Trevor Macy met with Warner Bros. in 2017 to pitch for Doctor Sleep, they had a headstart.
Flanagan, though, did not make things easy for himself: he wanted to include the Overlook. The problem was that, as opposed to Kubrick’s climactic deep-freeze, at the end of the novel the hotel was burned down. Yet Flanagan was adamant.
“I looked at Dan’s arc as someone trying to make peace with the trauma that was visited upon his family when he was a kid,” he explains. “The book is beautiful in that it shows how the fingerprints of the Overlook are wrapped around his life as he continues to develop. Also, revisiting the scene of the crime speaks to what I thought was a requirement to any cinematic follow-up to the Kubrick film. The audience would want to go back there, like I did when I read it.”
King’s grievances with Kubrick’s film are well documented. In the novel, Jack Torrance slid slowly into insanity; King felt that Kubrick’s Jack had no arc, nuts from the start. “When we first see Jack Nicholson… he’s crazy as a shit-house rat. All he does is get crazier,” he told one interviewer, positing that this erased the element of tragedy. He saw Shelley Duvall’s Wendy, meanwhile, as a “screaming dishrag”.
Flanagan was “terrified” when he sent his script to King. “We were straddling this line between honouring the Kubrick vision and trying to be really faithful to the novel,” he says. “Knowing how he feels about Kubrick, I knew that if we got into the Overlook discussion it could go south really quickly. But, based on what we’re doing, he ended up becoming really supportive of that idea.” With King’s approval, they were off. KUBRICK’S ESTATE GRANTED Flanagan and Macy permission to consult the original architectural drawings for The Shining’s Overlook, and everything here in this Atlanta soundstage is accounted for. Flanagan and Macy had an adult version of Danny’s trike built, so that between takes, cast and crew could go for broke. “We got to do the carpet/wood ride,” says Rebecca Ferguson, who plays The True Knot’s leader Rose The Hat, still excited. “We rode as fast as we could. We got to be little Danny, we’re such geeks. It was so much fun being on that little tricycle and hearing…” Here she makes a good fist of vocalising the sound of a trike rolling over wood and carpet.
On camera, things are heavier. Alcoholism ran through The Shining — even more so in the book — and Doctor Sleep deals with the familial cycle. “I knew that he would be a drunk, because his father was a drunk,” King said of Dan Torrance in 2012. Both books were influenced by King’s personal life: The Shining by his alcoholism, Doctor Sleep by his recovery. He has called Jack Torrance as close to autobiographical as he’s got, due to how much he was drinking when he wrote The Shining. The worst it got, he has said, was being asked to leave one of his son’s Little League baseball games because he was drinking a can of beer from a paper bag. As such, Doctor Sleep begins with the adult Dan Torrance at a pitifully low ebb.
Flanagan relates to the material as, he says, he has struggled with drink himself. “Big-time. My uncles, my grandparents, it’s always been a spectre within my family. Booze and drugs have reared up in really horrible ways for a lot of my relatives. It’s something I always kept half an eye on, but I felt my life at times spiralling out of control. And as I got older and had kids, it became clear that it could get really bad if I wasn’t careful.”
In some ways, his journey reflects Dan’s. “I felt a certain connection to that character. I didn’t wake up under any overpasses,” he says,
referring to Dan’s situation at the start, “but I’ve had my moments, for sure.” Diving deep into Doctor Sleep’s story encouraged him to quit alcohol. He stopped drinking in October, a couple of weeks after he started shooting the film, and has been sober since.
He was also inspired by having many sober people on the cast and crew, including Ewan Mcgregor, who has been open about his own hedonism during the 1990s. He too relates to Danny: having not had a drink since 2000, he drew on his own experience. “I’ve been sober for a long time, but I’ve never really explored that aspect of my experience in my work,” says Mcgregor. “This is the first time I’ve had the chance to do that. I hadn’t played an alcoholic whose story is about sobriety.”
When Empire asks if Mcgregor took anything at all from young Danny Lloyd’s performance as Danny Torrance in The Shining, he says he looked, actually, to his screen father. “I took more from Jack really, because he’s my dad in this story. We’re quite like our fathers, whether we choose to be or not. So I watched him in The Shining and thought about being his son.”
Flanagan has been witnessing snatches of this throughout filming. “I saw a moment earlier today when he was down on the ground — on the page it says he smiles, and for just a second his smile is his father’s. And you could see Ewan’s face transform for just that splitsecond, into the same kind of grin — he shows the top and bottom teeth that you remember from Jack.”
In footage we’re shown, it seems Mcgregor’s Dan has the same accent as Nicholson’s Jack. “Well, I wanted to sound like his son, yes,” says Mcgregor. “So I did spend a lot of time trying to sound a bit like him. Not like an impersonation of Jack, because I wasn’t playing him, but I think somehow we all have the timbre of our father’s voice. So I thought there should be a little Jack flavour to my accent.”
Dan becomes something of a father figure himself in Doctor Sleep, teaming up with Abra to take on The True Knot. Kyliegh Curran, 12 years old during filming, had appeared in one independent film (I Can I Will I Did) and played Nala in The Lion King on Broadway before landing Doctor Sleep — 900 young girls auditioned for Abra. Having won the role, she watched The Shining as prep, hiding behind her dad for most of it, and found the Doctor Sleep script terrifying. “I was shivering,” she says, “especially thinking about Rose The Hat, and what she does to children.”
A couple of times on set, Rose terrified her for real, she says. “That’s good,” says Ferguson. “Because Kyliegh is such sunlight, she jumps around, she laughs, she’s like a musical has eaten her up. She’s always smiling, so I thought, ‘How am I gonna scare that?’ So that makes me very happy.”
Ferguson, who keeps Rose’s top hat on for our interview, also watched The Shining before filming, borrowing Jack Torrance’s “gaslighting” for Rose. “I wanted to make her charming,” she says, “so that she can lure these children who have the shine to her, before she then tortures them.” To enhance this she watched interviews with psychopaths on Youtube, but despite all of her preparation, she was blindsided by the effect her character had on her on set.
“There’s a scene where Rose and The True Knot are torturing someone,” she says. “Someone asked me if it was difficult playing this character who tortures younger people and I said, ‘No, I’m acting, for God’s sake.’
But this person who we’re torturing, the performance was so incredible that I nearly broke down. I thought of my eldest son, everything just came to me. But I was playing this merciless, ruthless character, and I couldn’t fuck it up, I had to overcome it. It was so horrible! And on ‘cut’, I walked away and just cried. Tears were pouring down my cheeks. I’d never had that happen before.” This film is not trading in cheap thrills.
IN A LOS ANGELES hotel, in August 2019, Mike Flanagan is wearing another Shining T-shirt — this time a take on little Danny Torrance’s Apollo 11 jumper — as well as Overlook Hotel carpetprint socks. “I’ve got a Nicholson thong on too, but I don’t break it out in interviews,” he laughs.
A few weeks earlier, in mid-july, Flanagan and Macy went to Bangor, Maine, to watch a nearcomplete cut of Doctor Sleep with Stephen King. He’d seen an earlier version, and said he’d loved it, but here in his hometown, in a screen privately hired for the afternoon in his local cinema, he met Flanagan in the flesh for the first time.
“It was nerve-wracking,” says Flanagan. He and Macy sat on either side of King. “I spent the whole time trying not to be creepy,” says Flanagan, “paying attention to every reaction he was having.” King responded physically to the film, laughing, jumping, fist-pumping. When it was done, they all sat there talking it over for three hours. What did King think of the resurrected Overlook? “He didn’t comment much other than to say, ‘It looks like Kubrick,’” says Macy, impishly.
Despite Doctor Sleep’s two fathers, it’s set to be very much a Mike Flanagan film. “There was absolutely no upside in trying to be Kubrick,” he says, “or in trying to literally adapt King. It became clear very early that the only way this could work is if it was my movie. I know people in both of those camps are gonna sharpen those knives. But I hope they’re gonna want to see it, no matter what.”
And with the film soon out, Flanagan is ready to put The Shining to rest. Having paid tribute to it throughout his career, he’s now literally recreated bits of it. “I’ve emptied the missile silos on that,” he smiles. “But the language of The Shining will always subconsciously be part of my vocabulary.” Just like Jack Torrance, forever the Overlook’s caretaker, Flanagan has The Shining in his bones. He’s done his best to honour it.