Editorials
‘Doctor Sleep’ and the Case for Bringing Iconic Characters Back to the Screen the Old School Way
This article contains heavy Doctor Sleep spoilers.
Back in “the old days” of Hollywood, if characters needed to be represented on screen as they appeared when they were younger, younger actors would simply be brought in to fill those roles. Take The Godfather: Part II, for example, which allowed Robert De Niro to channel Marlon Brando and bring a young Vito Corleone to life. That’s just one of many examples, of course, but the advent of new technology in recent years has given filmmakers the option of taking a far different approach to restoring the youth of iconic actors or even resurrecting them entirely.
I’m of course talking about “digital de-aging” technology, which has in recent years turned back the hands of time for Arnold Schwarzenegger, Kurt Russell, Robert Downey Jr., Michael Douglas, Johnny Depp, Samuel L. Jackson, and even the child stars of Andy Muschietti’s IT. More controversially, digital technology allowed for the makers of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story to bring Peter Cushing back to life for one final performance, and upcoming movie Finding Jack is making waves with its plan to digitally resurrect the long-dead James Dean.
Even Robert De Niro, all these years later, is now playing a younger version of himself in Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman, digitally de-aged along with Al Pacino and Joe Pesci.
But there’s one recent Hollywood production that decided not to use new-fangled digital technology simply because it could: WB’s Doctor Sleep.
An adaptation of Stephen King’s same-titled novel that also serves as a sequel to Stanley Kubrick’s classic film adaptation of The Shining, Mike Flanagan‘s Doctor Sleep brings iconic characters like the Grady Twins, Dick Hallorann and the Torrance family back to the screen, each of them as they appeared in the 1980 film. But Flanagan and the team didn’t digitally resurrect the late Scatman Crothers, nor did they de-age Jack Nicholson and Shelley Duvall. Rather, the production employed old school movie magic to bring those characters back to life.
And the film makes a great case for avoiding unnecessary trips to the Uncanny Valley.
“When it came to the legacy characters for Doctor Sleep, we had robust discussions about all of the various ways to handle them,” Mike Flanagan explained to us in a chat this week. “I really didn’t want to go down the road of a digital actor – I wasn’t really interested in de-aging Nicholson or Duvall, and a digital Scatman Crothers seemed wildly inappropriate to me. It just felt wrong. That technology always pulls me out of movies, because I start scrutinizing the effect, and am no longer swept up in the story… I really didn’t want to go down that road.”
“Sooner or later it starts to feel like a video game, especially if I’m talking about a digital Danny Torrance on a big wheel five minutes into the movie,” Flanagan noted in a separate interview conducted by William Bibbiani for BD earlier this month.
Flanagan continued in our chat, “I settled on the idea that we needed new actors who reminded me of the legacy actors, but would still give their own performance. I wanted to be reminded of Shelly Duvall, but needed to make sure that we were casting Wendy Torrance as a character, and that this character needed to do things and go places that the original performer never had to.”
Enter Starry Eyes actress Alex Essoe, who pitch-perfectly fills the role of a young Wendy Torrance in Doctor Sleep. As Flanagan explained to us, it was Essoe who set the tone.
“The first person we cast under this philosophy was Alex Essoe. Her audition for Wendy was revelatory,” Flanagan told us. “She loves The Shining with a true passion, and seemed to be both channeling and homaging Shelly Duvall’s performance, while making it her own…that set the tone for everything else.”
Up next was veteran actor Carl Lumbly, brought in to fill the shoes of Scatman Crothers. Dick Hallorann was killed off in Kubrick’s version of The Shining, but he appears to Dan Torrance throughout Doctor Sleep as a sort of guiding light.
Flanagan recalled, “We cast Carl Lumbly next, also based on an audition. I was familiar with his work already, and knew him as a fine actor, but he also accomplished exactly what we were hoping – he would occasionally throw in a very Scatman moment, but otherwise was playing the part his way. It felt right – it became clearer and clearer that this was the way to go.”
While Ewan McGregor plays the adult Dan Torrance in Doctor Sleep, Flanagan also needed to cast a child actor to play young Danny Torrance for various flashback scenes that take us back to the character’s childhood. One key scene at the start of the movie revisits a moment from The Shining from Danny’s perspective while others take place after the events of the 1980 film, so simply re-using scenes from Kubrick’s masterpiece was out of the question.
“Young Danny Torrance was going to be our first character seen, and in a lot of ways would set the tone for the whole movie. This is where we’d show our cards to the audience,” Flanagan explained to us. “I wanted to try to recreate the tracking shot of Young Danny on the trike, stopping at room 237, as exactly as we possibly could… knowing that once he turned around, that would be the moment. We’d see a different kid, one who looked a lot like Danny Lloyd (we hoped), but who was also clearly someone else.”
He continued, “We auditioned a lot of young actors, trying to find someone who would remind us of Danny Lloyd, but then had to give a performance that was very much new. Roger Dale Floyd auditioned, and I loved his tape. His performance was heartbreaking. But more than any other character, he was going to set the tone. If the audience rejected Young Danny, they wouldn’t ever come back. This was rough because we knew right away that there’d be a pretty major change. Roger had brown eyes, and Danny Lloyd had brown eyes… but Ewan McGregor has blue eyes. And unless Danny’s eyes magically changed color, we’d need to introduce a blue-eyed Young Danny in his first scene.”
As for the many ghosts that fill out the Overlook Hotel, nearly all of the most memorable ones from Kubrick’s film made their way into Doctor Sleep – save for one notable exception.
“We had a blast finding our Mrs. Massey, our Grady twins, our Delbert Grady, our Horace Derwent… and yes, we discussed the man in the bear costume, but for the life of me I couldn’t think of where he could fit in our story without being a really strange distraction… he’s the embodiment of WTF, and I just couldn’t crack how to get him into this movie without knocking people out,” Flanagan admits.
And then there’s Jack Torrance, which Flanagan admits was the “most intimidating element” of all. How do you bring one of Jack Nicholson’s most iconic characters back to the screen…without Jack Nicholson? Well, Flanagan figured out a clever approach that allowed him to get creative with Jack’s appearance in the film, casting a highly unexpected actor.
“Nicholson is retired, and I had heard a rumor that Spielberg had reached out to him about Ready Player One. It brought me back to the initial problem – I really didn’t want to do a digital double,” Flanagan noted. “And if we were considering that for Jack, it would be completely inconsistent with our approach to Wendy, Hallorann, and Young Danny. So we had to be consistent, and live by the rules we’d made… which seemed like the right thing to do, more and more.”
Flanagan explained his moment of inspiration, “Henry Thomas is a dear friend, and one of my favorite people to work with. We’ve worked together on Ouija 2, Gerald’s Game and Hill House… he was one of the first names to pop into my head. We kicked around a pile of ideas, from huge movie stars to professional impersonators. It was a decision we took very seriously and agonized over for weeks, in constant communication with the studio.”
“It’s amazing how thin the acceptable width of the performance is, because you go one eyebrow raise too many, or one little inflection too much, and it’s a bad Nicholson impression.”
“Finally, it came down to the insistence that we were looking for someone to play Jack Torrance… not Jack Nicholson. And more than that – Stanley Kubrick had actually given us a gift in how he handled Delbert Grady in The Shining. Grady is just part of the staff, he’s just a waiter. He claims to have memory of his true identity. That was how I approached the scene in the script, knowing it would help us enormously. We did some mock-ups to show what Henry would look like in wardrobe, and decided to style him in a way that reminded us of Nicholson’s iconic look (consistent with how we approached the others.) We circulated that with the studio, slept on it, slept on it again, panicked, slept on it, panicked again, and finally I called Henry and asked him if he would do it. Then it was his turn to panic, and he had to sleep on it too.”
“Ultimately he called back and said, ‘You’re stepping into Kubrick’s shadow, so I might as well step into Jack’s, and we can live or die together at least.’ I was so relieved and grateful. He was stepping into a role that would be scrutinized like crazy, in a movie that would be scrutinized like crazy. I’m always grateful to have him in my corner, and to be in his. Henry is one of my favorite collaborators and I expect we’ll work together for a long, long time.”
Looking back now that the film is in wide release for all to see, Flanagan feels he made the right choice by bringing characters back the same way he did the Overlook: practically.
“There are a lot of discussions out there about the ethics of digital technology, in so much as it allows us to drastically alter or even resurrect an actor. The technology improves all the time, and we are learning we can do things that would have sounded impossible even a few years ago. The conversation about whether we should is an important one,” Flanagan believes.
“I feel very strongly that we made the right decision for this project. It was the most respectful way we could have proceeded. This movie was always fraught with insecurity, uncertainty, and second-guessing… but not about this. I don’t lose a moment of sleep looking back at these decisions,” Flanagan confidently asserted as we wrapped up our conversation.
You can reunite with the Torrance family, Dick Hallorann and the ghosts of the Overlook Hotel by going to see Doctor Sleep on the big screen, now playing in theaters everywhere.
Soon after the New Hollywood generation took over the entertainment industry, they started having children. And more than any filmmakers that came before—they were terrified. Rosemary’s Baby (1968), The Exorcist (1973), The Omen (1976), Eraserhead (1977), The Brood (1979), The Shining (1980), Possession (1981), and many others all deal, at least in part, with the fears of becoming or being a parent. What if my child turns out to be a monster? is corrupted by some evil force? or turns out to be the fucking Antichrist? What if I screw them up somehow, or can’t help them, or even go insane and try to kill them? Horror has always been at its best when exploring relatable fears through extreme circumstances. A prime example of this is Larry Cohen’s 1974 monster-baby movie It’s Alive, which explores the not only the rollercoaster of emotions that any parent experiences when confronted with the difficulties of raising a child, but long-standing questions of who or what is at fault when something goes horribly wrong.
Cohen begins making his underlying points early in the film as Frank Davis (John P. Ryan) discusses the state of the world with a group of expectant fathers in a hospital waiting room. They discuss the “overabundance of lead” in foods and the environment, smog, and pesticides that only serve to produce roaches that are “bigger, stronger, and harder to kill.” Frank comments that this is “quite a world to bring a kid into.” This has long been a discussion point among people when trying to decide whether to have kids or not. I’ve had many conversations with friends who have said they feel it’s irresponsible to bring children into such a violent, broken, and dangerous world, and I certainly don’t begrudge them this. My wife and I did decide to have children but that doesn’t mean that it’s been easy.
Immediately following this scene comes It’s Alive’s most famous sequence in which Frank’s wife Lenore (Sharon Farrell) is the only person left alive in her delivery room, the doctors clawed and bitten to death by her mutant baby, which has escaped. “What does my baby look like!? What’s wrong with my baby!?” she screams as nurses wheel her frantically into a recovery room. The evening that had begun with such joy and excitement at the birth of their second child turned into a nightmare. This is tough for me to write, but on some level, I can relate to this whiplash of emotion. When my second child was born, they came about five weeks early. I’ll use the pronouns “they/them” for privacy reasons when referring to my kids. Our oldest was still very young and went to stay with my parents and we sped off to the hospital where my wife was taken into an operating room for an emergency c-section. I was able to carry our newborn into the NICU (natal intensive care unit) where I was assured that this was routine for all premature births. The nurses assured me there was nothing to worry about and the baby looked big and healthy. I headed to where my wife was taken to recover to grab a few winks assuming that everything was fine. Well, when I awoke, I headed back over to the NICU to find that my child was not where I left them. The nurse found me and told me that the baby’s lungs were underdeveloped, and they had to put them in a special room connected to oxygen tubes and wires to monitor their vitals.
It’s difficult to express the fear that overwhelmed me in those moments. Everything turned out okay, but it took a while and I’m convinced to this day that their anxiety struggles spring from these first weeks of life. As our children grew, we learned that two of the three were on the spectrum and that anxiety, depression, ADHD, and OCD were also playing a part in their lives. Parents, at least speaking for myself, can’t help but blame themselves for the struggles their children face. The “if only” questions creep in and easily overcome the voices that assure us that it really has nothing to do with us. In the film, Lenore says, “maybe it’s all the pills I’ve been taking that brought this on.” Frank muses aloud about how he used to think that Frankenstein was the monster, but when he got older realized he was the one that made the monster. The aptly named Frank is wondering if his baby’s mutation is his fault, if he created the monster that is terrorizing Los Angeles. I have made plenty of “if only” statements about myself over the years. “If only I hadn’t had to work so much, if only I had been around more when they were little.” Mothers may ask themselves, “did I have a drink, too much coffee, or a cigarette before I knew I was pregnant? Was I too stressed out during the pregnancy?” In other words, most parents can’t help but wonder if it’s all their fault.
At one point in the film, Frank goes to the elementary school where his baby has been sighted and is escorted through the halls by police. He overhears someone comment about “screwed up genes,” which brings about age-old questions of nature vs. nurture. Despite the voices around him from doctors and detectives that say, “we know this isn’t your fault,” Frank can’t help but think it is, and that the people who try to tell him it isn’t really think it’s his fault too. There is no doubt that there is a hereditary element to the kinds of mental illness struggles that my children and I deal with. But, and it’s a bit but, good parenting goes a long way in helping children deal with these struggles. Kids need to know they’re not alone, a good parent can provide that, perhaps especially parents that can relate to the same kinds of struggles. The question of nature vs. nurture will likely never be entirely answered but I think there’s more than a good chance that “both/and” is the case. Around the midpoint of the film, Frank agrees to disown the child and sign it over for medical experimentation if caught or killed. Lenore and the older son Chris (Daniel Holzman) seek to nurture and teach the baby, feeling that it is not a monster, but a member of the family.
It’s Alive takes these ideas to an even greater degree in the fact that the Davis Baby really is a monster, a mutant with claws and fangs that murders and eats people. The late ’60s and early ’70s also saw the rise in mass murderers and serial killers which heightened the nature vs. nurture debate. Obviously, these people were not literal monsters but human beings that came from human parents, but something had gone horribly wrong. Often the upbringing of these killers clearly led in part to their antisocial behavior, but this isn’t always the case. It’s Alive asks “what if a ‘monster’ comes from a good home?” In this case is it society, environmental factors, or is it the lead, smog, and pesticides? It is almost impossible to know, but the ending of the film underscores an uncomfortable truth—even monsters have parents.
As the film enters its third act, Frank joins the hunt for his child through the Los Angeles sewers and into the L.A. River. He is armed with a rifle and ready to kill on sight, having divorced himself from any relationship to the child. Then Frank finds his baby crying in the sewers and his fatherly instincts take over. With tears in his eyes, he speaks words of comfort and wraps his son in his coat. He holds him close, pats and rocks him, and whispers that everything is going to be okay. People often wonder how the parents of those who perform heinous acts can sit in court, shed tears, and defend them. I think it’s a complex issue. I’m sure that these parents know that their child has done something evil, but that doesn’t change the fact that they are still their baby. Your child is a piece of yourself formed into a whole new human being. Disowning them would be like cutting off a limb, no matter what they may have done. It doesn’t erase an evil act, far from it, but I can understand the pain of a parent in that situation. I think It’s Alive does an exceptional job placing its audience in that situation.
Despite the serious issues and ideas being examined in the film, It’s Alive is far from a dour affair. At heart, it is still a monster movie and filled with a sense of fun and a great deal of pitch-black humor. In one of its more memorable moments, a milkman is sucked into the rear compartment of his truck as red blood mingles with the white milk from smashed bottles leaking out the back of the truck and streaming down the street. Just after Frank agrees to join the hunt for his baby, the film cuts to the back of an ice cream truck with the words “STOP CHILDREN” emblazoned on it. It’s a movie filled with great kills, a mutant baby—created by make-up effects master Rick Baker early in his career, and plenty of action—and all in a PG rated movie! I’m telling you, the ’70s were wild. It just also happens to have some thoughtful ideas behind it as well.
Which was Larry Cohen’s specialty. Cohen made all kinds of movies, but his most enduring have been his horror films and all of them tackle the social issues and fears of the time they were made. God Told Me To (1976), Q: The Winged Serpent (1982), and The Stuff (1985) are all great examples of his socially aware, low-budget, exploitation filmmaking with a brain and It’s Alive certainly fits right in with that group. Cohen would go on to write and direct two sequels, It Lives Again (aka It’s Alive 2) in 1978 and It’s Alive III: Island of the Alive in 1987 and is credited as a co-writer on the 2008 remake. All these films explore the ideas of parental responsibility in light of the various concerns of the times they were made including abortion rights and AIDS.
Fifty years after It’s Alive was initially released, it has only become more relevant in the ensuing years. Fears surrounding parenthood have been with us since the beginning of time but as the years pass the reasons for these fears only seem to become more and more profound. In today’s world the conversation of the fathers in the waiting room could be expanded to hormones and genetic modifications in food, terrorism, climate change, school and other mass shootings, and other threats that were unknown or at least less of a concern fifty years ago. Perhaps the fearmongering conspiracy theories about chemtrails and vaccines would be mentioned as well, though in a more satirical fashion, as fears some expectant parents encounter while endlessly doomscrolling Facebook or Twitter. Speaking for myself, despite the struggles, the fears, and the sadness that sometimes comes with having children, it’s been worth it. The joys ultimately outweigh all of that, but I understand the terror too. Becoming a parent is no easy choice, nor should it be. But as I look back, I can say that I’m glad we made the choice we did.
I wonder if Frank and Lenore can say the same thing.
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