Interviews
Mike Flanagan on How ‘Doctor Sleep’ Changes the Way We Understand Jack Torrance [Interview]
The trickiest thing about Doctor Sleep, the new motion picture sequel to The Shining, is that it’s a sequel to Stanley Kubrick’s classic movie and also Stephen King’s classic novel. The two versions are very similar, but there are distinct differences in plot and, most controversially, the portrayal of struggling alcoholic writer Jack Torrance, who goes mad over the course of an isolated winter in a haunted hotel, and tries to kill his wife, Wendy, and his son, Danny.
King’s sympathetic portrayal of Jack Torrance and Kubrick’s sinister interpretation of the character have been at odds for decades, but in the new sequel Doctor Sleep, director Mike Flanagan tries to find the connective tissue between the two vastly different interpretations of the character. And somehow, amazingly, it works.
But, as we learned in a new interview at Bloody-Disgusting, it wasn’t easy. But before we can learn how he connected the two versions of Jack Torrance, we have to look at what, in Flanagan’s mind, the real difference is between them.
“I would say the key difference is The Shining, as King wrote it, is an expression of is anxiety of what his alcoholism would do to his family if he did not get it under control. I think that is the beating heart of the book that he wrote,” Flanagan explains.
“I think the film Kubrick made is about the unending march of madness that can seize and control us, about toxic masculinity and how it can destroy a family, and how this insanity can all be exacerbated by taking three people who are meant to love each other and putting them in a space without any other contact with the outside world,” adds Flanagan.
“Both of those are chilling visions of that story, and I think in particular you if you look at what happens, they both culminate in Jack Torrance chasing his son with the intent to kill him, right? So they all come back to the same place. But the differences there are ones of optimism,” Flanagan says.
“Because when King tells that story, and Jack Torrance corners Danny, he can’t do it. He has a moment of lucidity. He can’t bring himself to harm his son. His parental love trumps all. He sacrifices himself to save his family, right?” Flanagan reminds us. “In Kubrick’s world, equally scary idea, he never looks back for a second. The only thing that stops him from killing his son is opportunity and temperature. That’s a terrifying idea. I think that they’re both scared of very different things.”
Of course, those are vastly different takes on what makes Jack Torrance work, and according to Flanagan, finding a “common ground” wasn’t necessarily on the table. As a film that uses scenes and iconography from Kubrick’s The Shining, Flanagan’s Doctor Sleep has to adhere to Kubrick’s vision… up to a point.
“Jack Torrance, I don’t know that we could find common ground. I think the challenge for me was, in doing the film the way we did it, Kubrick’s film is canon, right? So we can’t change Jack. We shouldn’t change Jack,” Flanagan says.
“The answer, though, was that some of those moments that King never got – the ones that he was very specific about missing from that adaptation – there was a chance to give them to Dan,” Flanagan says. “There was a chance for his son to have that arc that Jack never had. So that was a neat opportunity that presented itself with this.”
In Doctor Sleep, Jack Torrance’s son Danny is now played by Ewan McGregor, who like his father has succumbed to alcoholism and is struggling with his addiction. But, perhaps ironically, Dan’s own personal tragedy is what makes him finally able to connect with his father on a personal level. In the film Dan reveals as much at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, where he imagines that Jack must have once stood where he stood, trying to get his life together.
“And that humanizing his father in his own eyes, in choosing to remember that moment – which in the timeline is very close to the moment when he tried to kill him – that spoke to me when it comes to how children process trauma, especially trauma visited upon them by their parents,” Flanagan says of the AA meeting. “Part of any kind of recovery, and we’re seeing Dan at a very specific station in his recovery, [is] being able to look at his father as a person and not a monster. [It’s] pretty important.”
Doctor Sleep proposes that Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining happened, but also that King’s interpretation of Jack Torrance is still intact. The scenes from the original film, as used in Doctor Sleep, have more to do with Dan’s subjective memories of that horrifying childhood trauma, and only in growing up has he begun to see the nuance in his father that King’s novel made more explicit.
“That’s exactly right,” Flanagan confirms. “We would talk about that a lot too, the difference between what we remembered from the story of The Shining versus what Dan remembers.”
Check out Doctor Sleep in theaters to see more of how the film combines King’s and Kubrick’s visions, and decide for yourself what to believe about The Shining.
Of all the places to find a coven of witches, the attic above a Christian youth camp is probably the last place you’d think to look. But that’s just what we find in Camp, a surrealist nightmare of feminist empowerment from Canadian filmmaker Avalon Fast.
Emily (Zola Grimmer) is still reckoning with her involvement in a horrific tragedy when she accidentally contributes to the death of her best friend, Charlie (Giselle Morison). Unable to move on, the traumatized teen takes a job at a rural summer camp, hoping to forget her own sorrows by looking after at-risk kids. She quickly connects with a counselor named Clara (Alice Wordsworth) and finds comfort in her close-knit group of female friends. But a mysterious whisper from deep in the woods warns that they may be leading her down a darker path.
Fast burst onto the scene in 2022 with Honeycomb, a psychological horror film that follows a burgeoning matriarchy. Known for their focus on “Girl Horror” stories, the talented young filmmaker tackles similar themes in Camp as Emily leaves the modern world behind to embrace a dark vision of self-discovery through magic.
Ahead of the film’s U.S. release on June 26, Bloody Disgusting sat down with Fast to chat about the nebulous nature of good vs. evil and the intoxicating power of female-driven horror.
Bloody Disgusting: What inspired this unique story? Did you go to religious summer camps when you were young?
Avalon Fast: I did. I went to lots of different summer camps, but all of them were primarily Bible camps. The memory I have of camp is kind of strange. I was very homesick as a kid, and I didn’t necessarily enjoy all my time there. I definitely remember meeting some interesting girls at camp and having that presence of religion hovering around the whole experience.
BD: I really love the film’s gorgeous natural setting. Camp is the kind of surrealist nightmare that you don’t just watch. You feel it too. How did you approach creating this world?
AF: Well, a huge part of it was working with my cinematographer Eily Sprungman, who’s a very close friend. We spent years prepping, shot listing, storyboarding, and mood boarding. She’d had a similar experience to mine. We grew up around the same place, and so we understood each other’s visions from the get-go. But there are so many other pieces that came together. The costuming, the art, and the animated sequences were done by Sofiya Iurkevych. One of our producers, Taylor Nodrick, was obsessed with shooting on Super 8 film. I’ve always wanted to as well, so all the memory sequences were shot on Super 8. It was just a lot of people with an understanding and a vision for what this project was. I’m really happy with the way it turned out.
To the extent that you’re comfortable sharing, what’s your relationship to witchcraft, and what does Camp have to say about modern witches?
Well, that’s the question of Camp. It’s not that I don’t resonate with any of these things, but I specifically wanted Camp to be a little bit ambiguous around what witchcraft looks like. Is this witchcraft? Are these girls witches? Emily explicitly asks if that’s what’s happening here, and the answer isn’t yes. The film isn’t going to answer that question for you. My relationship to magic and witchcraft? It’s tough. I feel like there’s so much magic, connection, and spirituality that comes from these friendships, the closeness of these women, and what’s happening around them. A lot of what Camp is trying to say or show is just that magic can come out of friendship.
I loved watching these female friendships develop. And you’re right. No one ever says the word “coven,” but you can feel that connection, and you can see a change in Emily as those relationships grow. I’m also really fascinated with the way Camp plays with the idea of good and evil. At one point, Clara says, “Maybe God drew us to the devil,” which stopped me in my tracks. How do you view witchcraft or the magic these girls are experiencing in regard to good and evil?
That was such a huge part of the script’s construction. The story is really trying to keep a balance between those two things. I like asking people if they think these girls are good or bad, because I feel like a lot of people come out of the film thinking one or the other. They’ll say things like “thank God Emily found her people” or “God, I really wish she’d gone home.” I just don’t think there’s ever an answer. I wanted to explore the idea of going down the wrong path, especially coming out of grief. What makes you a bad person, and does healing mean you’re looking to become a better person? I don’t have an answer, but I do feel like that’s a huge part of what Camp is asking. What is good? What is bad? Why did God bring me to the devil?
Yes, because this is all happening at “God camp” in Emily’s words. So how can both of those things exist at the same time? Along those lines, I’m also fascinated by the voice Emily hears in the woods. Without spoiling too much, what is this voice asking, and what is required in return?
Emily comes to camp with a shout into the void, asking can anyone hear me? Does anyone want to? And it’s answered so clearly by these girls, specifically responding only with love, care, support, and trust. It’s like her prayers were answered. It doesn’t mean that everything is going to be alright, but Emily is looking for peace. She’s looking for a moment where she feels pure good. And I think, even at its surface level, she does get that experience.
Personally, I don’t really think people are good or bad. I think we all exist somewhere in the middle. Camp centers traditionally villainized characters, but that’s where Emily seems to find her peace, however you choose to define it.
I also wanted to show the experience of having decided that you are a bad person, you’ve made mistakes, and you feel cursed. Then when you meet other people who have done things that you would consider worse, you can actually feel good in their presence. You feel like less of a bad person. I think that’s a huge part of the story as well. Emily’s finding her version of other fucked up people, and she feels less fucked up around them. I’ve found that in my own life. It’s a cool thing. I don’t think it’s bad.
I don’t think it’s bad either. It’s finding your home, your people. We meet Emily in the aftermath of unthinkable trauma. Is this a story about mental health and healing?
Witnessing it myself. witnessing other people experience tragedy and then move through grief, you hear a lot of talk about healing or coming out the other side. There’s so much conversation around what that looks like, with self-care and showing up for yourself. I always felt really averse to it. It annoyed me. I think the beginning of the film speaks to that. The therapeutic version of what getting help looks like is obviously very different from what Camp is showing. And again, I don’t have an answer for what you’re supposed to do. But I think that’s another question I was asking: how do you heal? Do you heal at all? Is that the end goal, or are we just trying to get better? It’s something I experienced in my own grief. And the answer, for me, at least now, is just that I’m not looking to get better. So I felt like I hadn’t. I found it hard to find people to have those conversations with. And I think that’s what I ultimately wanted to make a film about.
I love that unanswered question. In my own experience, I’ve had to reframe what healing actually looks like. There’s not really an endpoint. It’s just finding a way to keep going. There’s also an element of sacrifice in this story, particularly regarding another counselor named Jo (Sophie Bawks-Smith). What role does she play in Emily’s journey?
For me, Jo is this human embodiment of Charlie, Emily’s friend. As Jo, she had a life at this camp before meeting Emily, and then was kind of taken over by Charlie’s spirit. I think a lot of people view Emily’s final choice as horrendous and tragic. In a way it is, but for me, if Jo becomes her angel, it’s almost like a self-sacrifice. Jo knows that by sacrificing herself, she’ll be giving Emily power to move forward. In the original script, the girls were supposed to bring out another counselor, JB (Aidan Laudersmith), and burn his body. But I just thought, there’s no way sacrificing this guy could give the girls enough power. There’s just no way, right? Logically, that just didn’t line up for me.
I’m glad you mentioned JB, because he has his own tragic arc. How do men factor into the world of Camp?
The way men factor into my world is so bizarre. I have such little respect for them in my films, which is something I’ve been called on. I think I have to challenge myself in the future to make a movie about a boy because, these boys … It’s not that the men in my films aren’t redeemable, but there’s no depth to these characters. They’re just treated with such disrespect. I don’t know why I do that, actually. That’s something for me to look into. It was the same with Honeycomb. They’re just such peripheral characters. I’ve had people ask about Kayne (Henri Gillespi), the scary guy at the fire, what happens to him? I just think, I don’t know. I don’t care. That’s not the point of the story.
Well, I can say after a lifetime of watching women on the periphery of the story, the course correction feels nice. In a similar vein, I’m in love with your homepage, avalonfast.com. There’s an image of girls on a film set and then a still from Honeycomb in which a blood-covered girl is screaming at the sky. And in the middle, it just says Girl Horror. It’s a really powerful statement that gives me chills. How do you define Girl Horror, and what draws you to these types of stories?
I was obsessed with the term when I started making my movies. It was something I’d come up with to kind of brand myself and describe what I was doing. Then I went through a period where I felt like it was a bit gender exclusive and didn’t interest me as much. But now I’ve come full circle on the term. I think it’s a bit of a commentary on youth and the horror of growing up female. But I think everybody can relate to that experience. I don’t want it to feel like this exclusive thing, that I make movies exclusively for girls, because I don’t think I do. I’m interested in exploring what Girl Horror means. Originally, it was just a title, something I came up with, and now it’s become something that resonates with people. You said it gave you chills. That’s cool for me to hear because there’s obviously some depth there.
Are you working on anything new?
Yes. I am actually making a movie about a boy. That’s the next thing.
That’s exciting! The more I think about feminism, the more I end up coming back to men and boys, because they have a place in the world of Girl Horror too.
Absolutely. It’s all just part of being human.
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