Mike Flanagan has never made it a secret that he’s a huge fan of Stephen King, and the respect between the director and the prolific author appears to be mutual. For one, Flanagan has already adapted King’s supposedly unfilmable novel Gerald’s Game for Netflix, delivering a mighty impressive outing, with the result being a suspenseful and stomach-churning contained thriller that continued to solidify his reputation as one of the horror genre’s premiere talents.
The director’s next movie was another King adaptation, and an altogether more ambitious one. Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining is lauded as one of the greatest horrors ever made, and it takes someone very confident in their abilities to tackle a direct sequel. Doctor Sleep may have suffered the misfortune of bombing at the box office, but has already found a second life as a cult favorite, even if the writer of the source material thought it was a little too gruesome.
Flanagan has another project in the pipeline based on King’s work, too, but he also managed to sneak a reference to The Shining into The Haunting of Bly Manor, the second installment in the massively popular anthology series that’s been dominating Netflix’s Top 10 most-watched list and leaving subscribers so freaked out that they’ve been unable to sleep.
In the first episode, Victoria Pedretti’s Dani is seen staying in room 217 in a London hotel. In The Shining novel, that’s the haunted room in the Overlook Hotel, one that was changed to 237 for the movie version after the owners of the establishment used for exterior shots didn’t want to put guests off from booking one of their suites.
Of course, The Haunting of Bly Manor is packed with Easter Eggs, but the King reference is one of the more subtle ones that’s easily… overlooked.