Director Mike Flanagan has released the teaser poster and first official trailer for his adaptation of Stephen King’s acclaimed novel, Doctor Sleep.
Released in 2013, Doctor Sleep is the sequel to King’s 1977 horror novel, The Shining. The story follows Danny, Jack Torrance’s son, into adulthood where he works as a hospice assistant and guides the dying as they “cross over”. He’s also battling his own inner demons, including his alcoholism and memories of his traumatizing stay at the Overlook Hotel.
Danny meets and develops a psychic connection with a young girl named Abra Stone who has the shining herself and he must save her from a group of soul-sucking gypsies known as The True Knot.
For a while, there was speculation as to whether or not the Doctor Sleep adaptation would be developed as a sequel to The Shining the novel, or Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 film adaptation starring Jack Nicholson. Based on the trailer, it looks like there are a lot of throwbacks to Kubrick’s movie, although we will have Dick Halloran, played by Carl Lumbly, in the film, which perhaps implies that Flanagan is paying homage to Kubrick while staying on course with the ending of King’s novel.
Ewan McGregor will play adult Danny Torrance, with Kyliegh Curran as Abra Stone and Rebecca Ferguson as The True Knot’s villainous leader, Rose the Hat.
Plot Synopsis:
The now middle-aged Dan Torrance (the boy protagonist of The Shining) and the very special twelve-year-old girl he must save from a tribe of murderous paranormals.
On highways across America, a tribe of people called The True Knot travel in search of sustenance. They look harmless—mostly old, lots of polyester, and married to their RVs. But as Dan Torrance knows, and spunky twelve-year-old Abra Stone learns, The True Knot are quasi-immortal, living off the “steam” that children with the “shining” produce when they are slowly tortured to death.
Haunted by the inhabitants of the Overlook Hotel where he spent one horrific childhood year, Dan has been drifting for decades, desperate to shed his father’s legacy of despair, alcoholism, and violence. Finally, he settles in a New Hampshire town, an AA community that sustains him, and a job at a nursing home where his remnant “shining” power provides the crucial final comfort to the dying. Aided by a prescient cat, he becomes “Doctor Sleep.”
Then Dan meets the evanescent Abra Stone, and it is her spectacular gift, the brightest shining ever seen, that reignites Dan’s own demons.
Doctor Sleep will be released on November 8, 2019.
I, for one, am really excited about this! I enjoyed Flanagan’s interpretation of Gerald’s Game, and McGregor looks great as adult Danny. Thoughts, Wasteoids?
