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The Shining is a resource that keeps on giving. It has generated a whole “universe” of creative, critical and fan activity.1 Stanley Kubrick adapted The Shining once in 1980 and never looked back, un like Stephen King, who has returned to The Shining materials again, and again. King was  famously unhappy with Kubrick’s adaptation.2 He made his own execrable readaptation (Stephen King’s The Shining, Mick Garris, 1997) and wrote a reparative novel: Doctor Sleep.3 There is more than a touch of revenge in these manoeuvres, as King sought to reassert authority over his story. Doctor Sleep was, in its turn, adapted in 2019 by Mike Flanagan and marketed as “Stephen King’s Doctor Sleep.” Despite this marketing, this film samples the visual and narrative strategies of Kubrick’s The Shining liberally and without apparent irony, deploying the cultural cachet and style of Kubrick’s film in ways that are simultaneously exploitative and reverential. This article examines this latest act of adaptation and reappropriation to discuss how King’s ongoing public war with Kubrick, waged indirectly through Flanagan as his adapter, “keeps the wounds of revenge green” (to paraphrase Francis Bacon) and continuously revivifies the cultural property generated by The Shining.4 Unlike King, Flanagan is not motivated by revenge, but he goes further than reappropriating Kubrick’s work: he “Hijacking” it, turning it to his, and King’s, purposes.5 This becomes particularly clear through the conception of family, where King reveals himself a sentimental humanist. This sentimentality is, of course, what makes King so amenable to adaptation Hollywood, but Kubrick lanced it like a boil. Flanagan seems to be a sentimental humanist as well, which means in this sense he reads Kubrick through the lens of King. This is the double valence of Doctor Sleep: narratively, stylistically, Flanagan gives the edge to Kubrick, but the tonal, ideological edge goes to King. The result is a misprision of the cult object that is Kubrick’s The Shining. Doctor Sleep translates it what it means back into the language of King from which it was translated in the first place.

Doctor Sleep is hard to categorise: it is a sequel that is simultaneously an adaptation of King’s novels The Shining and Doctor Sleep, an homage to Kubrick’s The Shining and a remaking of it.6 Like all adaptations, and some remakes, it is a “bastard,” and difficult to love.7 Remaking, adaptation and appropriation are, of course, relationships of mutual dependency. As Justin Chang points out, “King’s and Kubrick’s sensibilities may seem perilously at odds, (but) their entwined legacies have undoubtedly nurtured one another over the years, each one sending scores of fans old and new in the other’s direction.”8

Reviewer reception of Flanagan’s Doctor Sleep has been mixed. Fans of Kubrick’s The Shining may approach the new film with morbid fascination, but the experience is unlikely to be satisfying. As Alison Foreman observes, “if you want to watch The Shining, then watch The Shining. That’s the best advice I can give any prospective Doctor Sleep goer attempting a return to the Overlook Hotel.”9 This paraphrases Brian McFarlane’s advice to those disappointed by adaptations: “If you want the same experience (…)  that you had in reading the novel, why not simply reread the novel? It’s much more likely to produce the desired effect.”10 That is, if you think encountering a work for the second time will produce the same experience as the first. This is unlikely, as Dennis Cutchins and Kathryn Meeks point out, because we remake ourselves every time we consume an adaptation in a continuous process of “self-creation”.[11 Dennis Cutchins, and Kathryn Meeks, “Adaptation, Fidelity and Reception” in Adaptation, Fidelity and Reception, Dennis Cutchins, Katya Krebs and Eckart Voigts, eds. (London: Routledge, 2018), p. 305.] Adapters, too, remake themselves through their work.11 I focus on how Flanagan remakes himself from fan to auteur in remaking Kubrick.

Julie Sanders takes a positive approach to the processes of adaptation and appropriation, highlighting their creative potential. She specifically decries any effort at evaluative judgment.12 Writing about remakes, Con Verevis similarly warns about approaching remaking as a “one-way process: a movement from authenticity to imitation, from the superior self-identity of the original to the debased resemblance of the copy,” calling such strategies “reductive”.13 These critics, then, would shy away from declaring an adaptation or a remake “good” or “bad”. Jeremi Szaniawski would beg to differ when it comes to appropriations of Kubrick material. He acknowledges that postmodern play has “an empowering, liberating side–a sense that nothing is sacred (so that Kubrick) belongs to all of us, for better or for worse.” However, there is a danger, “oft-encountered …(in) works by lesser craftsmen,” that they will be “overshadowed or dwarfed by the direct comparison that quoting (or trying to quote) Kubrick’s films entails, a clumsy exercise bringing Kubrick to a terrain he most definitely abhorred: the middlebrow.”14 Overall, I tend to agree with Szaniawski that exercising some critical judgment is appropriate. Accordingly, I evaluate Flanagan’s deployment of his intertexts. Specifically, I consider whether Doctor Sleep is a GLADaptation–one that repurposes and reuses its source texts constructively–or a BADaptation “one that does not suit its new environment or changed conditions.”15. While Flanagan’s Doctor Sleep may be a “GLADaptation” of King’s novel, it is a “BADaptation” of Kubrick’s film.

Revenge permeates King’s Doctor Sleep. With the signal exception of Memento (Christopher Nolan, 2000), revenge, like the enjoyment of an act of adaptation or appropriation, depends on memory.16 Revenge keeps the memory of the original insult alive. This certainly seems to be true for King, who has become one of the Kubrick film’s “legion of obsessives”.17 As late as his 2018 novel The Outsider, he has a character remark adversely in Kubrick’s The Shining, revealing that he is still unable to let go of 1970s resentments.18 Perversely, in adopting this vengeful attitude, King himself is contributing to Kubrick’s enduring legacy. I concern myself, then, with how King and Flanagan “remember” Kubrick’s The Shining through Flanagan’s Doctor Sleep.

These themes of memory, revenge and reappropriation are now here clearer than in the interview in which Flanagan reveals how he sold King on his approach. He outlined a scene which recreated Kubrick’s film, but with a twist.19 In Kubrick’s film, this scene involves Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) encountering Lloyd (Joe Turkel); in Flanagan’s film, it is Dan (Ewan McGregor) encountering “the bartender,” an otherwise unnamed character played by Henry Thomas (the ambivalent father figure of several previous Flanagan works). Thomas eerily resembles Jack Nicholson but not quite: we have definitely entered the uncanny valley here. He simultaneously channels aspects of Kubrick’s characters Jack, Lloyd, and Delbert Grady, as well as Jack and Jack’s father from King’s 1977 novel. Flanagan is doubly hubristic in taking on not only Kubrick, but also Nicholson, and it doesn’t pay off, although he doubtless means well. This moment, in which Dan refuses to drink his medicine (whiskey), is a reparative gift Flanagan gives King. Dan’s addiction recovery enables him “to look at his father as a person and not a monster.”20 William Bibbiani describes the balancing act Flanagan achieves: “Doctor Sleep proposes that Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining happened, but also that King’s interpretation of Jack Torrance is still intact.”21 Flanagan wrests Kubrick’s material away from him to restore King’s insistence that Jack was a flawed man of good heart, horribly misled.

Flanagan doesn’t simply appropriate Kubrick’s work, he “hijacks” it, to coin a term Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns uses in his analysis of how Flanagan’s 2018 adaptation of Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House acts triply as an adaptation of her novel, his own earlier film Oculus (2013), and his still earlier short film (Oculus: Chapter 3–the Man with a Plan 2006).22 Flanagan approaches Doctor Sleep in a similar “palimpsestuous” fashion.23 He simultaneously adapts King’s Doctor Sleep and The Shining while reappropriating The Shining from Kubrick. He goes beyond homage to compete with Kubrick, whose film was restored for 4K and screened at Cannes in 2019.24 Further, Flanagan battens of Kubrick: both movies are now sold as a set by iTunes. Flanagan laminates his King and Kubrick intertexts with memories of his own previous film and television work. In addition to The Haunting of Hill House and Oculus, these works include Absentia (2011), Before I Wake (2016), Ouija, Origin of Evil (2016) and his other Stephen King adaptation Gerald’s Game (2017). Flanagan has repeatedly returned to themes of death and dying, haunted houses that absorb people, familial violence, ambivalent and untrustworthy parental figures who visit trauma on their children, madness, addiction and recovery–all of which resonate either King’s The Shining and Doctor Sleep or Kubrick’s The Shining. Flanagan has actually been appropriating elements of Kubrick’s The Shining for years, with elements turning up throughout his oeuvre. Michael Roffman says that The Haunting of Hill House was “a pseudo-exercise for (Doctor Sleep).”25. In fact, the title sequence features an architectural image that recalls the hedge maze from Kubrick’s The Shining.

So Flanagan is serving three masters: King, Kubrick and himself. In terms of casting, he is faithful to Kubrick. Flanagan’s Danny (Roger Dayle Floyd) resembles Kubrick’s Danny Lloyd, whom Flanagan recruited to play a cameo; Flanagan’s Wendy (Alex Essoe) resembles Shelley Duvall (albeit more conventionally pretty) and his Hallorann (Carl Lumbly) resembles Scatman Crothers.26 In the title sequence, we flashback to Kubrick’s Overlook as Danny has a bad dream, but after that the first two acts of Flanagan’s Doctor Sleep are faithful to King’s novel. There are three intertwined plots. First, there is the road movie narrative involving the True Knot, a loose “family” of vampires who live on the psychic energy–the “steam”–of “shining” children whom they torture and murder. This section is punctuated by Kubrick moments chiefly through fragments of music snatched from the Gold Room, which are played on the old-fashioned radio sets in the True Knot’s camps. This nostalgic touch serves not only to reprise Kubrick, but to emphasise the ancient nature of the evil they represent. Led by the luminously sexy Rose the Hat (Rebecca Ferguson) and Snakebite Andi (Emily Alyn Lind), the True Knot are in pursuit of a preternaturally gifted child named Abra (Kyliegh Curran), who psychically reaches out to Dan Torrance for help. He is fighting his own demons on two fronts: addiction and haunting. Like his father before him, he has turned to the bottle. Ewan McGregor reprises his role in the gritty territory of Trainspotting in the early scenes of Dan’s debauchery (Danny Boyle, 1996). Unlike his father, Dan drinks in an effort to quell his shine, to escape the demons of the Overlook, who are still after him. He finds AA, comes clean, is employed at a hospice. His interview for that position reproduces the mise-en-scene of Ullman’s office Kubrick’s The Shining. However, Dan is respectful of his admirable employer, and does not reprise Jack’s seething contempt for Ullman, barely veiled beneath civility. This particular pastiche makes very little sense: to replay a scene full of disquieting overtones and horror as a friendly get-together bankrupts the valency of Kubrick’s film.

Possibly the most interesting feature of this portion of the narrative relates to the cinematic architecture of the characters’ psyches. In Dan’s case, he locks the ghosts of the Overlook in series of boxes which he stores in the snow-covered hedge maze from which Danny fled Jack at the end of Kubrick’s The Shining. The mind-as-maze recalls the scene in which Jack “overlooks” the model, when, as Lovisato says Danny and Wendy are revealed to be “simultaneously in the real labyrinth and in Jack’s mind.”27 Meanwhile, Abra stores her memories in stacked file boxes (a detail adapted from King’s text); Rose in index files in a gothic library which, as she says, resembles a cathedral. This intersects with Flanagan’s signature use of boxes as inadequate containers for undying secrets in Before I Wake and The Haunting of Hill House. What interests me about all of these representations is the way they reference Stanley Kubrick’s own archival activities as they are documented in Stanley Kubrick’s Boxes, begging the question: where did King get this idea?28 One has to wonder whether King was already appropriating aspects of the Kubrick legend in writing Doctor Sleep. Flanagan is clearly channelling a number of obsessions here, and it is not at all clear that the direction of influence is all one way, from King to Kubrick.

Brian Tallerico says of the first two thirds of Doctor Sleep that it has more in common with The Haunting of Hill House than with Kubrick’s The Shining. Further, he asserts that “Flanagan’s (…) work (…) is often at its best when (he) is allowed to flourish and play away from both the source material and the Kubrick film.”29 Certainly, his fidelity to King’s novel is sometimes problematic. The novel is rather bloated, and Flanagan’s film is, accordingly, perilously long, with the theatrical version coming in at 152 minutes (rated MA+ in Australia). A Director’s Cut Blu Ray edition brings that total up to 180 minutes (rated R). This length is a pitfall: Peter Bradshaw damns Doctor Sleep as “boring.”30 Whereas Kubrick uses the tedium of the family’s isolation to ratchet up tension, Flanagan does not manage a similar feat.

In the third act, Flanagan turns to Kubrick, partially leaving King behind, but only partially. King’s Doctor Sleep proceeds as if Kubrick’s The Shining never happened: the Overlook Hotel has been burned down and built over. In Flanagan’s adaptation, by contrast, the Overlook is still standing, as it remains at the end of Kubrick’s film. In this, Doctor Sleep comes down emphatically on the side of its being a sequel to the film. It is as if we are obliged to read King through the lens of Kubrick, to the point that significant formal features have to be preserved intact from the unfaithful film to keep the two divergent universes in contact, where Kubrick always gets the last word, at least stylistically. As Dan and Abra travel toward the hotel, Flanagan’s cinematographer Michael Fimognari reconstructs Kubrick’s overhead shots of the Torrance family’s car crawling up the mountain road, but this time shoots it at night, as if we are seeing the negative image of Kubrick’s film, literally a “dimming of the original.”31 Flanagan’s previous collaborators the Newton Brothers (Andy Grush and Taylor Stewart) rework Kubrick’s familiar soundtrack, sampling its cadences and amplifying the refrain of the heartbeat that permeates dramatic scenes.32

We find the hotel already snowbound: we have arrived simultaneously at the climax of Kubrick’s film and of Flanagan’s. Flanagan slavishly reconstructs elements of Kubrick’s Overlook set, although the hotel is sadly aged. Abra and Dan arrive at night; the lighting is muted, the textures grainy and dim. Flanagan populates the hotel with versions of Kubrick’s ghouls, including the Grady girls (Sadie and Kk Heim) and Delbert Grady (Michael Monks), and even samples the bloody elevators from Kubrick’s original film.33 Flanagan reproduces the graphology of Redrum, but reverses its revelation, so it appears first in a mirror in Doctor Sleep before the “positive” image “murder” is discovered to be etched straightforwardly into a wall. This gesture resembles one Thomas Leitch describes in discussing how Gus Van Sant’s shot-for-shot remake of Hitchcock’s Psycho reverses images, so we see the film as if in a mirror.[Thomas Leitch, “The Ethics of Infidelity,” in Adaptation Studies: New Approaches, edited by Chrsta Albrecht-Crane and Dennis Cutchins (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2010), pp. 61-77.] Gender roles are reversed, too. The final showdown between Rose, Dan and Abra occurs in the Colorado Lounge around the Adler typewriter, with Rose taking over Jack’s role as the aggressor and walking Dan backwards up the stairs, goading him, as Jack once goaded Wendy. As Justin Chang writes, “the details are uncanny and instantly transporting (…) For a moment it’s as though nothing has changed, even though something clearly has.” However, as he goes on to say, it is in the Overlook that “the movie begins to lose a bit of (ahem) steam. (Doctor Sleep) taps into the minutiae of Kubrick’s masterwork without fully teasing out its mystery.”34 There is nothing here that approaches what Szaniawski says is the “most ambitious way of drawing on Kubrick:” nothing that expands “cinematic grammar,” or delimits “new narrative and stylistic spaces.” Flanagan reveals himself, then, as one of Kubrick’s “lesser acolytes.”35

One of the things that Flanagan does not reproduce is Kubrick’s uncanny dilation of time. In the 1980 film, despite the title cards that announce the days, time becomes increasingly meaningless, so that when Grady (Philip Stone) asserts that Jack has “always been the caretaker,” we have already become temporally unmoored, preparing us for the final photo that returns Jack to 1921.36 The theatrical print of Flanagan’s film is relatively temporally simple. The Blu Ray DVD is more complex, in that Flanagan introduces chapter title cards, with headings derived from King’s novel. He also foreshadows the scene in which Dan confronts the bartender with an apparently unmotivated shot of a lone whisky glass waiting for a drinker in an empty Gold Room. However, this is still not as intricate as the “Bent-Neck Lady” narrative of The Haunting of Hill House. His one nod to this signature is the interleaving of the Danny/Dan stories towards the end of the film, but this is not as involved as his earlier work. His auteur flourishes appear to be confined to his vertiginous reorientations of the frame from horizontal to vertical and vice versa, which occur when Rose astral travels, and when Dan “shines” to throw his consciousness into Abra’s body.

Flanagan’s hijacking is most conspicuous when it comes to the theme of family. Kubrick acknowledged ambivalence about family, and his skepticism about patriarchal power is imprinted all over his Shining. 37. King is contradictory: he evidences fixations with incest and child endangerment in dysfunctional families in The Shining and Doctor Sleep. These are ideas Flanagan cuts, along with a coincidental surprise revelation that Dan is Abra’s literal uncle thanks to Jack Torrance’s drunken philandering, so Flanagan tempers King’s excesses, possibly with an eye to ratings. At the same time, King infuses the idea of family with a mawkish sentimentality, insisting on the potential benevolence of the father. Kubrick, to King’s fury, excised the intergenerational component of The Shining, cutting Jack’s abusive father and reducing the influence of the Overlook’s ghosts so that Jack becomes solely responsible for his own actions.38 Kubrick also modified the end of King’s The Shining, stripping from Jack a redemptive moment in which he remembers he is Danny’s loving father, and relents in his murderous pursuit. King returns to this point in Doctor Sleep: “Dan’s father had had only one notable success: when the moment finally came (…) he had refused to kill his little boy. If there was a fitting epitaph for him, it would be (…) ‘My father tried,’ he said. ‘That’s the best I can say for him.’”39 Flanagan restores the ending of King’s The Shining: there is a moment when Dan threatens to cleave Abra’s head in two, but she stops him. He briefly overcomes the hotel’s possession. Ewan McGregor’s make-up here perilously recalls that of Jack (Steven Weber) in Garris’ unfortunate adaptation, as does the blocking of the scene. However, Flanagan does not reproduce the ending of King’s Doctor Sleep, in which Dan and the ghost of Jack combine forces to defeat the True Knot, and Dan survives. Instead, Flanagan has Dan shuffle off to the boiler room, where he sacrifices himself to save Abra, and all like her, from the Overlook’s undying ghosts by allowing the boiler and the hotel to go up in flames. Flanagan says of Doctor Sleep’s ending: “Jack’s parental love overcomes the madness and he sacrifices himself to save Wendy and Danny. Kubrick got rid of all of that, so I wanted to go back and give Stephen King fans, and King himself, some of the ending that Kubrick never gave him. That seemed like an amazing gift.”40 Flanagan restores the sentimentalized father of King’s The Shining, revealing himself closer to King’s sensibility than to Kubrick’s. Perhaps Rose the Hat is an allegory for Kubrick—seductive but ruthless, preying on innocent little children of King, and finally devoured by them, in a revenge act.

Flanagan also changes the gender of the parent with whom Dan reconciles, in a way that recalls King’s The Shining rather his Doctor Sleep. In King’s Doctor Sleep, Dan reconciles with Jack’s ghost, now benign. In Flanagan’s Doctor Sleep, Dan’s dying moments are spent in the arms of Wendy, to whom he returns as if he were again a child. In this mother and child reunion Flanagan restores the coda of King’s The Shining. Kubrick cut a parallel, but more ambiguous, coda from the theatrical version of his film–a hospital scene in which Ullman visits Wendy and Danny, simultaneously reassuring Wendy about the normalcy of the Overlook, and handing Danny the uncanny ball, concrete proof of the haunting. Having departed from King’s Doctor Sleep in killing Dan, Flanagan brings him back to Abra as a friendly and reassuring ghost in a cheesy postscript. He will only depart so far from what he describes as King’s optimism, his themes of “redemption and sacrifice,” which he contrasts with Kubrick’s “doom” and “annihilation”.41 So in the closure of his Doctor Sleep, Flanagan havers between King and Kubrick, simplifying and sentimentalizing both their concepts of family, and producing a satisfactory synthesis of neither.

But perhaps that was impossible. As Chang points out, Flanagan is, like Danny, a child “caught between two quarrelling parents, and attempting to stage a reconciliation.”42 Certainly, he had a personal investment in the project:

I’ve always had this ache in my heart about what happened between the Kubrick Shining and the King Shining, and that gulf of space that exists between them. (…) As I’m reading this quintessential Stephen King story (Doctor Sleep) (…) all the images in my head were Kubrick. (…)  I felt someday someone was going to make that movie (and) what a cool opportunity that would be to pull all that back together43

The alternative to revenge is, of course, forgiveness. Ironically, while evincing an unforgiving attitude to Kubrick, it is forgiveness that Flanagan says King seeks:

Stephen King, I think, desperately wanted the redemption because he needed it for himself (…). When that wasn’t included in (Kubrick’s movie), I think he took that personally.(…) To finally (…) be able to give him back in this story. That was the hope.44

Ultimately, Flanagan succeeded in a one-sided reconciliation, with King saying that Flanagan’s film “redeems” Kubrick’s45

So from the perspective of King, Flanagan’s Doctor Sleep is a GLADaptation. From other perspectives, however, it is maladaptive, a BADaptation. Commercially, it misfired. Doctor Sleep’s initial box office takings were disappointing, which has led industry analysts to speculate that Kubrick’s film is now too old to appeal to younger consumers.46 As other articles in this edition will attest, the continuing relevance of Kubrick’s The Shining is not in doubt. Rather, the question is whether Flanagan’s Doctor Sleep successfully triangulates its sources in ways that are sufficiently transformative to be interesting, to really expand The Shining universe. I conclude that he may have done so, although possibly not in the way he intended. After all, no-one makes a bad adaptation on purpose.

Flanagan sought to make a film that would be the grandchild of both King and Kubrick. Perhaps, as a bastard or step-child of such a famously unhappy liaison, it was never going to be easy to love. However, he may nonetheless have produced a film that is “its own thing.”47 For all that it is a flawed film, Flanagan creates a disturbed, creepy universe that is haunting in its own way. But what little genuine cinematic inspiration Flanagan has conjured up comes necessarily from Kubrick’s Overlook, rather than King’s. This reconfirms the relevance of Kubrick’s The Shining at 40. While Flanagan might have been wiser to be wary about invitations to play in the Overlook Hotel, one can’t blame him for being tempted. It is, after all, an endlessly fascinating place, to which many watchers, writers, fans and filmmakers are compelled to return forever and ever.

Endnotes:

  1. This universe includes plans for an “origin” story, which now seems unlikely to be made. Justin Kroll, “‘The Shining’ Prequel to Be Directed by Mark Romanek,” Variety, 18 July 2014, https://variety.com/2014/film/news/shining-prequel-overlook-hotel-mark-romanek-1201190266/.; Adam Chatwood, “Mark Romanek on Directing ‘Tales from the Loop’ and What Happened with ‘the Wolfman,’” Collider. 10 April, 2020, https://collider.com/tales-from-the-loop-interview-mark-romanek-the-wolfman-overlook-hotel/.
  2. Ulvieri, Filippo. “King vs. Kubrick: The origins of evil”, Senses of Cinema 95, July 2020, http://www.sensesofcinema.com/2020/the-shining-at-40/king-vs-kubrick-the-origins-of-evil/.
  3. Stephen King, Doctor Sleep (Great Britain: Hodder and Stoughton, 2013).
  4. Bacon, Francis. Essays or Counsels, Civil and Moral. Essays. Auckland: The Floating Press, 2014, p. 18.
  5. Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns, “Hijacking Jackson: Adapting Mike Flanagan’s Oculus” in The Streaming of Hill House, Essays on the Haunting Netflix Adaptation, Kevin J. Wetmore Jr., ed. (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 2020), pp. 38-47.
  6. Constantine Verevis, Film Remakes (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006); Thomas M. Leitch, “Twice-Told Tales: The Rhetoric of the Remake,” Literature/Film Quarterly 18, no. 3 (1990): pp. 138-49.
  7. Kamilla Elliott, “The Theory of BADaptation” in Adaptation, Fidelity and Reception, Dennis Cutchins, Katya Krebs and Eckart Voigts, eds. (London: Routledge, 2018), p. 21; Constantine Verevis, Film Remakes (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006), pp. 58-59
  8. Justin Chang, “Review: ‘The Shining’ Sequel ‘Doctor Sleep’ Succeeds Under the Influence of Both King and Kubrick,” Los Angeles Times, 30 October 2019, https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/movies/story/2019-10-30/doctor-sleep-review-shining-sequel.
  9. Alison Foreman, “‘Doctor Sleep’ Isn’t ‘The Shining’ and That’s the Highest Compliment,” Mashable, 7 November 2019, https://mashable.com/article/doctor-sleep-movie-review/.
  10. Brian McFarlane, “It Wasn’t Like That in the Book” in The Literature/Film Reader: Issues in Adaptation, James M. Welsh and Peter Lev, eds. (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2007), p. 6
  11. Constantine Verevis, Film Remakes (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006), p. 10.
  12. Julie Sanders, Adaptation and Appropriation, 2nd Kindle ed. (London and New York: Routledge, 2016), pp. 24-25
  13. Constantine Verevis, Film Remakes (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006), pp. 58-59
  14. Jeremi Szaniawski , “Introduction: 1999-2019, and Beyond: A Post-Kubrickian Odyssey,” in After Kubrick: A Filmmaker’s Legacy, Jeremi Szaniawski, ed. Kindle Edition. (New York, London, Oxford, New Delhi, Sydney: Bloomsbury, 2019), N. Pag.
  15. Constantine Verevis,”BADaptation: Is Candy Faithful?” in B Is for Bad Cinema: Aesthetics, Politics, and Cultural Value, Claire Perkins and Constantine Verevis, eds.(State University of New York Press, 2014), p. 216; Kamilla Elliott, “The Theory of BADaptation” in Adaptation, Fidelity and Reception, Dennis Cutchins, Katya Krebs and Eckart Voigts, eds. (London: Routledge, 2018), p. 20
  16. John Ellis, “The Literary Adaptation.” Screen 23, no. 1 (1982): pp. 3-5.
  17. Daniel Fairfax, “The Anxiety of Interpretation: The Shining, Room 237 and Film Criticism,” in After Kubrick: A Filmmaker’s Legacy, Jeremi Szaniawski, ed. Kindle Edition. (New York, London, Oxford, New Delhi, Sydney: Bloomsbury, 2019), N. Pag.
  18. “(Alec Peeley) ‘I’m interrupting your evening.’
    (Holly Gibney)‘Not really. I’ve seen Paths of Glory at least a dozen times. It’s one of Mr Kubrick’s finest. Much better than The Shining and Barry Lyndon, in my opinion, but of course he was much younger when he made it. Young artists are much more likely to be risk-takers, in my opinion.’
    ‘I’m not much of a movie buff,’ Alec replied, remembering what Hodges had said: eccentric and a little obsessive-compulsive.
    ‘They brighten the world, that’s what I think.’” Stephen King, The Outsider (UK: Hodder and Stoughton, 2018) p. 286.
  19. Anthony Breznican, “Shades of The Shining: Hunting for Easter Eggs in Doctor Sleep,” Vanity Fair, 9 November 2019, https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2019/11/the-shining-easter-eggs-jack-nicholson-jack-torrance.
  20. William Bibbiani, “Mike Flanagan on How ‘Doctor Sleep’ Changes the Way We Understand Jack Torrance (Interview),” Bloody Disgusting, 10 November, 2019.https://bloody-disgusting.com/interviews/3593342/mike-flanagan-doctor-sleep-changes-way-understand-jack-torrance-interview/
  21. William Bibbiani, “Mike Flanagan on How ‘Doctor Sleep’ Changes the Way We Understand Jack Torrance (Interview),” Bloody Disgusting, 10 November, 2019.https://bloody-disgusting.com/interviews/3593342/mike-flanagan-doctor-sleep-changes-way-understand-jack-torrance-interview/
  22. Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns, “Hijacking Jackson: Adapting Mike Flanagan’s Oculus” in The Streaming of Hill House, Essays on the Haunting Netflix Adaptation, Kevin J. Wetmore Jr., ed. (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 2020), pp. 38-47.
  23. Linda Hutcheon and Siobhan O’Flynn, A Theory of Adaptation. 2nd edition. (London: Routledge, 2013), p. 6)
  24. Thomas M. Leitch, “Twice-Told Tales: The Rhetoric of the Remake,” Literature/Film Quarterly 18, no. 3 (1990): pp. 138-49; Jeremi Szaniawski , “Introduction: 1999-2019, and Beyond: A Post-Kubrickian Odyssey,” in After Kubrick: A Filmmaker’s Legacy, Jeremi Szaniawski, ed. Kindle Edition. (New York, London, Oxford, New Delhi, Sydney: Bloomsbury, 2019), N. Pag.
  25. Michael Roffman, “Film Review: Doctor Sleep Reintroduces Stephen King to Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining,” Cos, 8 November 2019,  https://consequenceofsound.net/2019/11/film-review-doctor-sleep/
  26. I use “Danny” to denote the child character; “Dan” to denote the adult.
  27. Marco Lovisato,”(Do Not) Overlook. Room 237 and the Dismemberment of The Shining.” Cinergie, no. 12 (2017): p. 128. And of course, there is Gilles Deleuze’s famous analysis of the world as brain in Kubrick’s The Shining. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema II: The Time-Image, Kindle ed. (London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), p. 212
  28. Jon Ronson, Stanley Kubrick’s Boxes, 2008
  29. Brian Tallerico, “Doctor Sleep.” RogerEbert.com, 8 November 2019, https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/doctor-sleep-movie-review-2019.
  30. Peter Bradshaw, “Doctor Sleep Review – Sedate Shining Sequel Battles a New Evil … Boredom,” The Guardian, 31 October 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/film/2019/oct/30/doctor-sleep-review-ewan-mcgregor-the-shining-sequel?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter.
  31. Peter Bradshaw, “Doctor Sleep Review – Sedate Shining Sequel Battles a New Evil … Boredom,” The Guardian, 31 October 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/film/2019/oct/30/doctor-sleep-review-ewan-mcgregor-the-shining-sequel?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter.
  32. Aaron Couch,.”‘Doctor Sleep’ Sets Newton Brothers as Composers (Exclusive),” The Hollywood Reporter, 6 December 2018, https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/heat-vision/doctor-sleep-score-be-composed-by-newton-brothers-1166878; Michael Roffman, “Film Review: Doctor Sleep Reintroduces Stephen King to Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining,” Cos, 8 November 2019,  https://consequenceofsound.net/2019/11/film-review-doctor-sleep/
  33. Zack Scharf, “‘Doctor Sleep’ Director on Recreating Kubrick’s Iconic ‘Shining’ Scenes and Banning Jump Scares,” IndieWire, 13 June 2019, https://www.indiewire.com/2019/06/doctor-sleep-recreates-the-shining-best-scenes-sequel-1202149746/.
  34. Justin Chang, “Review: ‘The Shining’ Sequel ‘Doctor Sleep’ Succeeds Under the Influence of Both King and Kubrick,” Los Angeles Times, 30 October 2019, https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/movies/story/2019-10-30/doctor-sleep-review-shining-sequel.
  35. Jeremi Szaniawski , “Introduction: 1999-2019, and Beyond: A Post-Kubrickian Odyssey,” in After Kubrick: A Filmmaker’s Legacy, Jeremi Szaniawski, ed. Kindle Edition. (New York, London, Oxford, New Delhi, Sydney: Bloomsbury, 2019), N. Pag.
  36. Marco Lovisato,”(Do Not) Overlook. Room 237 and the Dismemberment of The Shining.” Cinergie, no. 12 (2017): pp. 130-131; Roger Luckhurst, The Shining (London: BFI/Palgrave, 2013), p. 67
  37. Eric Nordern, “Playboy Interview: Stanley Kubrick,” in Stanley Kubrick: Interviews, Gene D. Philips, ed. (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2001), p. 67
  38. Joy McEntee, “Paternal Responsibility and Bad Conscience in Adaptations of The Shining,” Journal of Adaptation in Film and Performance 9, no. 2 (2016.): pp. 175-186; Joy McEntee, “Kubrick and Family,” in The Bloomsbury Companion to Stanley Kubrick, Nathan Abrams and I.Q. Hunter, eds. (London: Bloomsbury Academic, Forthcoming).
  39. Stephen King, Doctor Sleep (Great Britain: Hodder and Stoughton, 2013), p. 276.
  40. Kristen Lopez, “Director Mike Flanagan Discusses Returning to the Overlook for ‘Doctor Sleep’,” Forbes, 4 November 2019, https://www.forbes.com/sites/kristenlopez/2019/11/04/director-mike-flanagan-discusses-returning-to-the-overlook-for-doctor-sleep/#46cd28f448c1.
  41. Jacob Hall. “‘Doctor Sleep’ Director Mike Flanagan on Reconciling King and Kubrick, Finding Hope in Horror, and Why His Work Is Full of Hand Injuries (Interview).” SlashFilm, 8 November 2019, https://www.slashfilm.com/mike-flanagan-interview/
  42. Justin Chang, “Review: ‘The Shining’ Sequel ‘Doctor Sleep’ Succeeds Under the Influence of Both King and Kubrick,” Los Angeles Times, 30 October 2019, https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/movies/story/2019-10-30/doctor-sleep-review-shining-sequel.
  43. Kristen Lopez, “Director Mike Flanagan Discusses Returning to the Overlook for ‘Doctor Sleep’,” Forbes, 4 November 2019, https://www.forbes.com/sites/kristenlopez/2019/11/04/director-mike-flanagan-discusses-returning-to-the-overlook-for-doctor-sleep/#46cd28f448c1.
  44. Jacob Hall. “‘Doctor Sleep’ Director Mike Flanagan on Reconciling King and Kubrick, Finding Hope in Horror, and Why His Work Is Full of Hand Injuries (Interview).” SlashFilm, 8 November 2019, https://www.slashfilm.com/mike-flanagan-interview/
  45. Clark Collis, “Stephen King Says Doctor Sleep Film ‘Redeems’ Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining,” Entertainment, 5 November 2019, https://ew.com/movies/2019/11/05/stephen-king-doctor-sleep-redeems-the-shining-stanley-kubrick/.
  46. Travis Clark, “2 Reasons Why the ‘Shining’ Sequel ‘Doctor Sleep’ Flopped at the Box Office,” Business Insider Australia, 12 November 2019, https://www.businessinsider.com.au/why-doctor-sleep-flopped-at-box-office-2019-11?r=US&IR=T.
  47. Clark Collis, “Check in to See the New Trailer for Shining Sequel Doctor Sleep,” Entertainment, 8 October 2019, https://ew.com/trailers/2019/09/08/doctor-sleep-trailer-ewan-mcgregor/

About The Author

Joy McEntee SFHEA is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Adelaide. Her work focuses on American film, especially Stanley Kubrick, and literature-to-film adaptation. It has appeared in The Bloomsbury Companion to Stanley Kubrick, Camera Obscura, Screening the Past, Senses of Cinema, Adaptation, Literature/Film Quarterly and the Journal of Adaptation in Film and Performance.

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