Doctor Sleep: More Suspense than Horror

When director Mike Flanagan decided to turn Stephen King’s novel Doctor Sleep into a movie, he had a bit of a problem. The book is a sequel to the Shining book. The movie would, of course, be viewed as a sequel to Shining the movie. The problem with this setup is that the movie and book versions of the Shining are famously different from one another, much to the chagrin of Stephen King himself.

The end results leave different landscapes in preparation for the sequel. In the Shining book, Jack Torrance died in a boiler explosion in the hotel which left the hotel burned to the ground. In the movie, though, the famous hedge maze scene is how Jack died. The Overlook Hotel was left intact. This means the Doctor Sleep movie had to be a bit different than the book to qualify as the movie sequel to 1980’s The Shining.

The new movie catches audiences up with Dan Torrance, the young boy from the first film, as he’s grown up haunted by his memories, alcohol, and the ghosts from the hotel that still follow him. Ewan Mcgregor, who during his scenes battling with alcoholism hasn’t looked this bad on screen since the first Trainspotting, plays the adult Dan. While he’s a tragic character trying to get his life back on track, it’s easy to understand how he lost his way since he has literal ghosts hiding around every corner. The plot shows viewers that there are a number of people with the “shine”, King’s name for the “sixth sense” or “third eye”. The impetus of the movie is that there are people that, vampire-like, kill children with the shine and eat their souls, or “steam”. These people, collectively known as “The True Knot”, look like regular people, but the steam eating makes them live seemingly forever. They have their own abilities that are shine-esque but use them to find kids that they can hunt, kill, and eat.

Since these villains, led by Rebecca Ferguson, look like regular people and track other people down and murder them, Doctor Sleep often feels more like a thriller with a tinge of the supernatural rather than a horror movie. Casting aside the horror seems like an odd choice for Stephen King when diving back into one of his earliest horror successes. The movie, though, is good as a thriller.

A boy with the shine gets killed by the True Knot group, but his murder is “overheard” by a young girl named Abra with very powerful shine abilities. Her looking in on the group’s villainous ways does not go unnoticed by the group’s leader though. Naturally, the True Knot begins seeking her out. After all, the greater the shine, the greater the feast. Luckily for Abra, she’s also connected with Dan.

The climactic battle between the vampire-like villains of the movie and Dan Torrance in the book happens on the land where the Overlook Hotel once stood. Since the hotel is still standing in the movie realm, the battle happens in the hotel. I’ve read the books and watched the movies, this call back to the creepy hotel felt truer to the story and was more exciting than simply going to the grounds where it once stood. Having loved the first movie, it was splendidly nostalgic to return to those halls, the carpet pattern, the ghosts we all remember like the evil twins, and room 237.

The differences of the stories don’t end there. Abra’s extended family isn’t shown or discussed. In the book, readers find out that Jack was Abra’s grandfather, meaning Dan is Abra’s uncle. Instead, in the movie, she equates him as her uncle due to the fact they both have the shine. Then there’s Dan’s fate, which is greatly changed from book to movie. In the book, he lives through the fight and returns home. In the movie, to destroy Rebecca Ferguson, Dan releases the hotel ghosts he’s trapped within his mind over the years. Then, to destroy the ghosts and the hotel once and for all, he blows up the hotel’s boiler. The hotel burns to the ground with Dan, sadly, still in it. This is kind of kismet, as the movies have now left the hotel how it was left in the novels. If King writes a third novel starring Dan, though, the director of the third film will have much more of a problem!