It doesn’t take long to realize that Mike Flanagan’s sequel to The Shining, Doctor Sleep (read my review), isn’t just a sequel. It’s also a film that revisits and recontextualizes Stanley Kubrick’s classic horror film, and the beloved Stephen King novel that preceded it. Fans of both the book and the movie can find something to love and appreciate about Doctor Sleep, but there’s another version of The Shining out there that nobody is talking about, isn’t there?
Back in 1997, Stephen King wrote a TV miniseries of his classic haunted hotel story. This new version of The Shining was directed by Mick Garris (The Stand), and starred Steven Weber (The Perfection) as Jack Torrance, the struggling alcoholic who goes mad from isolation and tries to kill his wife and son. And although it’s arguably more faithful than the Kubrick version, it’s nowhere near the most popular version of The Shining.
But, as Bloody-Disgusting learned in a recent interview with Mike Flanagan, there’s a little bit of that TV miniseries in Doctor Sleep too.
“I think there is,” Flanagan reveals. “I think you if you look at the way we staged Dan and Abra’s confrontation in the Overlook at the end, and look at the scene that Steven Webber did in the miniseries, there are moments there.”
Flanagan isn’t just being a completionist by paying homage to the 1997 version of The Shining. He’s genuinely a fan.
“I’ve probably watched the Garris [version] a half dozen times in my life. I quite love Steven Weber’s performance in that film,” Flanagan explains.
“As a King purist I would often get myself in trouble by saying it is a far more faithful adaptation, which I think would not be a controversial thing to say but you’d be amazed,” Flanagan says.
The miniseries was an important production to Stephen King, who is famously not fond of Kubrick’s interpretation of The Shining, and who wanted to spearhead an adaptation that stayed true to the book’s rendition of the story, which ends very differently and portrays Jack Torrance more sympathetically than the 1980 film.
So it’s rather impressive that, according to Flanagan, the author warmed a bit to Kubrick’s version after watching Flanagan’s Doctor Sleep, which treats both the film adaptation and the novel as equally relevant.
“You know, he [King] said something after we watched the movie with him that stuck with me, which is really interesting,” Flanagan says. “Because he’s still, as cathartic as the miniseries might or might not have been for him, he still has all those feelings about The Shining. That hasn’t softened over the years.”
“And what he said when we finished watching the film was, ‘Yeah, I love what you did with Dan. I really love the film. I’ll tell you what, I know we talked a lot about the Kubrick of it and getting all of that iconography in here. This movie warms that movie up for me,’” Flanagan recounts.
“He said to us that he liked Doctor Sleep in a way that made him feel a little better about the Kubrick film. That… I mean, that was a profound honor.”
Doctor Sleep is now playing in theaters everywhere.
