The vast majority of people not named Stephen King appreciate that Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining is an all-time classic of both the horror and thriller genres, but the author wasn’t best pleased that the filmmaker took such liberties with the source material, so much so that he’s gone on record naming the 1997 miniseries as his preferred version. On the plus side, he was fully on board with Doctor Sleep.
Quality was virtually guaranteed seeing as the long-awaited legacy follow-up hailed from genre auteur Mike Flanagan, and it remains the last feature film he directed before focusing his energies into delivering a string of acclaimed Netflix originals. Doctor Sleep was initially intended to get a successor of its own, too, but it never happened after the acclaimed supernatural chiller tanked at the box office.
In the four years since its release, the story of Ewan McGregor’s Danny Torrance reconciling with his traumatic past while getting drawn into an all-new spooky adventure has continued to get more and more popular, with a Reddit thread from a first-time viewer once again opening the doors to enthusiastic praise and admiration for Flanagan somehow conspiring to deliver a worthy continuation to a certifiable cinematic great.
It truly is a crying shame that Doctor Sleep marked the end of the line for the filmmaker’s vision, especially when Warner Bros. had already commissioned him to start working on the script to companion piece prequel Hallorann before it flopped, but we’ll just have to continue ruing it as the one that got away.