Doctor Sleep
Short description
Doctor Sleep continues the story of Danny Torrance, the boy who survived the terrifying events at the Overlook Hotel in The Shining. Now an adult, Dan is still haunted by that childhood trauma and has spent years struggling with alcoholism and anger, much as his father Jack once did. His fragile stability is disturbed when he makes contact with Abra Stone, a courageous teenager who shares his extrasensory gift, known as the shine. Abra has drawn the attention of the True Knot, a group led by the ruthless Rose the Hat, who hunt children with such abilities and feed on them in pursuit of immortality. Reluctantly, Dan agrees to help Abra, and their alliance forces him to confront his fears and the ghosts of his past.
Mike Flanagan directed and wrote the screenplay, following his earlier work on Absentia, Oculus, Hush, Before I Wake, Ouija: Origin of Evil and Gerald's Game. Ewan McGregor plays Dan, with Rebecca Ferguson as Rose the Hat, Kyliegh Curran as Abra, Cliff Curtis as Billy Freeman, and Zahn McClarnon and Emily Alyn Lind among the credited cast of sixty.
The film was released in October 2019 and runs 152 minutes. Made for a budget of 45 million dollars, it earned about 72 million dollars worldwide. On IMDb it holds 7.3 out of 10 from roughly 244,000 votes, while on TMDB it sits at 7.1 from about 5,000 votes. A critics' rating of 7.1 from 341 reviews places it close to both audience scores.
What's left behind the scenes
- The house number of the Abris is 1980. This is the year "The Shining" was released.
- To better capture the image of Jack Torrance, Henry Thomas rewatched scenes with Jack Nicholson from 'The Shining' (Stanley Kubrick, 1980) several hundred times, memorizing his body language.
- Danny Lloyd, who played Danny Torrance in "The Shining," plays a cameo role as a spectator in a blue cap during a baseball game.
- The cat in the film is based on a cat named Oscar who lived in a nursing home in Rhode Island. Oscar was able to predict the death of terminally ill patients, spending his last few hours with them at their bedsides. After an article about him was published in 2007, Oscar had witnessed the deaths of over 100 patients. In 2013, he briefly died due to an allergy, but veterinarians were able to revive him. The cat playing him here belongs to the film's composers.
- Dr. John Dalton's office is identical to Stuart Ullman's office from "The Shining."
- The filming was preceded by a long period of negotiations. Despite his own dislike of Kubrick's film, Flanagan had to convince King that audiences were more familiar with this film version than the 1997 miniseries, and that they preferred it. And that the film should be a sequel to Kubrick's classic, not the miniseries.
- The film used footage directly from Kubrick's film in only three instances – shots from above the water and the island, and two shots of a car driving along a mountain road. All of these shots were cleaned up, restored, and color-corrected, and some of them had a layer of snow digitally added. All other elements from Kubrick's 'The Shining' were recreated using stand-ins.
- In the scene where the hospital cat Azzi jumps on the table, Dan is looking at a magazine. It is the same January 1978 issue of Playgirl Magazine that Jack Torrance reads in the Overlook Hotel lobby on the day of its closing in "The Shining."
- Like the character he plays here, Ewan McGregor is a recovering alcoholic.
- Nine doors were made for the famous axe scene, but only two were used during filming.
- The idea for 'Doctor Sleep' came to Stephen King in 1998 when he was signing copies of his book, and a reader asked what happened to Danny Torrance from his novel 'The Shining' (1977). King had repeatedly asked himself the same question, as well as what would have happened to Jack Torrance if he had attended 'Alcoholics Anonymous' meetings.
- According to director Mike Flanagan, Jacob Tremblay played his own death so vividly and convincingly in the first take of the scene that he frightened the other actors, including Rebecca Ferguson, who began to stutter to the point where she was temporarily unable to deliver her lines.
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