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'Doctor Sleep' a sequel to both novel and Kubrick's film: Mike Flanagan

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Press Trust of India Los Angeles

Director Mike Flanagan says "Doctor Sleep" will serve as the sequel to the screen adaptation of Stephen King's book and Stanley Kubrick's 1980 movie "The Shining".

Published in 2013, "Doctor Sleep" is the sequel to King's "The Shining", which was adapted Kubrick for a film starring Jack Nicholson and Shelley Duvall.

The trailer of the film, which dropped last week, confirmed the film adaptation will also use some of Kubrick's most iconic shots from his "Shining" movie.

Flanagan of Netflix's "Haunting of the Hill House" fame revealed they are simply the recreations, not a redux of footage from "The Shining". The only image taken directly from Kubrick's work is the shot of the bloody elevators.

 

"Everything else is us. Everything else is our recreation. So I don't want to spoil to what extent and what specific, outside of what you already got to see, what we have kind of been able to revisit form Kubrick's world.

"But I can say that everything that we decided to use, our intention was always to detail and reverence, and making sure that we were doing it properly, with the hope that even the most rabid cinephiles might not be able to tell the difference with some of our frames and some of his," he told BloodyDisgusting.

Flanagan said his adaptation of "Doctor Sleep" had "full support of the Kubrick estate, who were willing to provide us with his designs".

In the original movie Nicholson starred as Jack Torrance, a writer who agrees to become the caretaker of the Overlook Hotel in Colorado during its off season. Duvall played his wife Wendy. Danny Lloyd played young Danny Torrance, Jack and Wendy's son.

"Doctor Sleep" will follow an adult Danny Torrance (played by Ewan McGregor), who is battling alcoholism and dealing with the trauma of what happened to him as a child in the hotel.

Flangan said getting rid of the horror genre's dependence on jump scares was a priority for him.

"We used a lot of the lessons that Kubrick taught us about how to do a psychological thriller, a supernatural thriller, in a way that is more about suffocating atmosphere and tension than it ever is about the kind of traditional scares as we understand them today."

"Doctor Sleep" is slated to hit the screens on November 8.

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First Published: Jun 17 2019 | 4:40 PM IST

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