The evil building that facilitated Jack Torrance's infamous axe wielding burned down at the conclusion of Stephen King's 1977 novel The Shining, only to get another mention (this time as an absence rather than a presence) in the 2013 sequel Doctor Sleep.Īnd now, eight years later, it's back again. The Overlook Hotel may be gone, but its monstrous legacy lives on. The filmmaker succeeded by coming up with a new ending of “Doctor Sleep” that bridged the gap between Kubrick’s movie and King’s “The Shining” novel.Warning: Contains mild spoilers for Stephen King's novel, Billy Summers. And his initial reaction was, ‘No.’ He was not interested in that.” “The Shining” Warner Bros.īefore giving up on the project entirely, Flanagan worked to change King’s mind. So I said, if we’re going back there, if we want to bring the Overlook back into the story - and I desperately did - the only way to do it was through the canon of Kubrick’s film.”įlanagan refused to write and direct “Doctor Sleep” without King’s blessing. “My initial pitch to him was that I’d like to do as faithful an adaptation of ‘Doctor Sleep’ as I can,” the director said, “but I’d like to bring back the Overlook - and specifically, I’d like to bring back the Overlook as Kubrick imagined it. I knew the visual language of the Overlook Hotel, at least for me, was definitively Kubrick’s. “I loved the story of Dan and Abra and the True Knot, but I had this hunger, at the end, when they had their final confrontation on the grounds which used to be The Overlook in the book - I was like, but what if it was in the Overlook? Oh my God, that would be cool. “That was the first major decision, and the crux of my pitch on it,” Flanagan said. ‘Children of the Corn’ Review: This Agricultural Horror Reboot Belongs in the Compost Bin Kubrick’s film preserves the Overlook, so Flanagan had to make a choice about which artist to follow. In King’s original “Shining” novel, the Overlook burns to the ground at the end and is thus not standing when the “Doctor Sleep” book returns to its grounds.

In a new interview with The Daily Beast, Flanagan reveals that his pitch for “Doctor Sleep” was to faithfully adapt King’s novel but change the ending somewhat so that Kubrick’s version of the infamous Overlook Hotel could be featured in the movie. The final result is a “Doctor Sleep” movie that pays tribute to both King and Kubrick’s different visions, but King almost prevented Kubrick from seeping into the film. King’s “Doctor Sleep” novel has nothing to do with Kubrick’s vision, but Flanagan knew when adapting “Doctor Sleep” for the big screen that Kubrick’s “The Shining” was too iconic to ignore. King famously hates Kubrick’s 1980 film adaptation of “The Shining,” which made drastic changes to his 1977 book. Filmmaker Mike Flanagan has been quite vocal about his “ Doctor Sleep” being both a sequel to Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining” and an adaptation of Stephen King’s 2013 novel of the same name.

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