Did The Shining need a Sequel?
- Mar 3, 2022
- 4 min read
Updated: Mar 4, 2022
In 1980, Stanley Kubrick adapted Stephen Kings novella “The Shining” that scared audiences worldwide. Albeit King himself hated the adaptation and decided to make his own TV series version. Then, years later, penned the sequel to it calling it “Doctor Sleep”, which was then adapted by Mike Flanagan in 2019.
The burning question is: did “The Shining” really need a sequel? Many classic horrors: including “The Exorcist” have spawned multiple sequels, so it was a matter of time before the iconic 80s horror would get its sequel, however, did it really need to be done?
“The Shining” starring Oscar winner Jack Nicholson and Shelly Duvall is the story about a family looking after The Overlook Hotel over the winter months while its closed. Albeit Jack knows it holds a dark secret, it doesn’t take long for Danny, the young son to see the darkness of the hotel. It turns out Danny has a power to ‘shine’; meaning he can communicate without speaking and see things that have happened, which makes the spirits of the hotel very angry. Amongst all this, Jack is slowly deteriorating into insanity with the spirits, more so the butler, Grady (Phillip Stone) who tells him that his wife Wendy and son Danny need to be ‘corrected’, like he done many years before to his wife and daughters. This causes Jack to go on a spree of killing and will not stop until everyone is dead.
Then, the sequel, “Doctor Sleep” follows the story of Danny (Ewan McGregor), an adult and has become an alcoholic due to the experiences in his childhood. He becomes sober and gets on with his life by getting a job in a local hospice, where he ends up helping people to their dying breath with many of them calling him “Doctor Sleep”. While this is happening, we are introduced to the True Knot, led by Rose the Hat (played by Rebecca Ferguson). The True Knot are quasi-immortal ‘vampires’ who feed off the steam (lifeforce)of children who can ‘shine’ and are drawn to Abra (played by Kyliegh Curran) – a very gifted girl who seeks the help of Danny to help defeat them.
Both films equally smashed the box office and holds 85% and 78% approval ratings on Rotten Tomatoes respectively, which shows both critics and audiences alike enjoyed both films. Many Shining fanatics were extremely sceptical of a sequel; the thought of a classic horror being tainted with a potential poor sequel was damning for fans, but it didn’t prove to be worth the scepticism.
As much as King disapproved of Kubrick’s ‘epic’ horror, he had to agree to Flanagan’s nods to the original film to keep the fans happy. Granted, there are a lot of differences between the books to the films, Flanagan did keep it closer to the book than what Kubrick did.
What is striking is we found out that The Overlook Hotel was powered by a form of the True Knot – drawing the steam from poor Danny in a paranormal way, where in “Doctor Sleep” the True Knot were immortals, vampires if there is a better word, who are ultimately child killers – as it turns out that children have more pure steam rather than ‘polluted’ adult steam.
We were also told who the iconic ‘Tony’ was. In Danny’s words ‘Tony is a little boy who lives in my mouth’ as he explained to Halloran (played by Scatman Crothers) in “The Shining”. In “Doctor Sleep”, Danny has a ‘blackout’ to which is mentioned to him that he shouts, ‘Tony help me!’ – Tony is the name that Danny inadvertently called his ‘shine’, which ties up many loose ends that many scratched their heads over in the 1980s film.
Of course, Flanagan had to do one thing to really please the fans – take us back to the Overlook Hotel. The final section to the sequel is solely in the hotel. An accurate rebuild of the original with some flaws (such as no stairs in the Torrance’s apartment, the change in appearance to the woman in the bathtub and the iconic carpet colour changes amongst silly other elements true Shining fans would notice). There was also a huge nod to one of the most iconic scenes of “The Shining” – ‘Heeerrreeesss Johnny!’ Jack Nicholson adlibbed that scene with a real axe, to which Kubrick kept in the final edit. In “Doctor Sleep”, we see Danny lean his head into the infamous panel with a recreated flashback of the sequence – this shows Flanagan’s attention to detail to please both readers and film fans of the original.
The question is – did “The Shining” really need a sequel? Well, it depends on your overall love for the genre; “The Shining” is by far a psychological horror – what makes the film scary is the images presented to the audience with no context makes the film unique and terrifying. “Doctor Sleep” on the other hand reveals the context in a thrilling horror that might annoy the fans – sometimes no explanation is what makes a film stand out. However, there are so many fans that would rather know to piece together a completely different context that could be potentially the wrong one.
As a Shining fan, as much as I loved “Doctor Sleep”, especially the rooted undertones to the original, the mystery and psychological aspects of the 1980s classic makes the film what it is today. Let’s just hope, it is never remade.
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