Interviews
Room 217 or Room 237? Mike Flanagan on the Difficult Choices He Had to Make for ‘Doctor Sleep’ [Interview]
Most sequels only have to worry about being faithful to the movie that came before it, but that’s not the case for Doctor Sleep (read my review). The new film from Mike Flanagan (The Haunting of Hill House) is a canonical sequel to Stanley Kubrick’s horror classic The Shining but also strives to remain as faithful as possible to Stephen King’s original novel, which Kubrick changed in many ways.
This meant that, for example, a character who survived the novel of The Shining didn’t necessarily make it out of Kubrick’s film. It also meant that certain set pieces or scares were dramatically different between the book and the movie, which forced Mike Flanagan to make some difficult choices over the course of the production.
In a recent interview with Bloody-Disgusting, we asked Flanagan about some of those discrepancies. Like, for instance, the fact that in the book Jack Torrance tried to kill his family with a croquet mallet, while in the movie he tried to kill his family with an axe.
“I think the mallet’s more upsetting,” Flanagan says. “Yeah, it’s the blunt trauma of it. It’s the idea that a skull is just going to pop like a grape if that thing hits you. It’s so blunt and awkward an instrument.”
“But the axe,” Flanagan says, boiling the whole decision down, “is iconic.”
Flanagan also says that choosing between the Kubrick’s creepy hedge maze and King’s haunted topiary animals was another relatively easy decision to make.
“The hedge maze I always found to be more cinematic,” Flanagan says. “Topiary animals, from a cinema point of view, they have to be digital, or you’re doing this kind of stop-go thing. I didn’t want to get mired down in the CG. I love the hedge maze. In the book the topiary animals in my mind, that red light-green light of them, was awesome. But they’re very impractical to shoot.”
But perhaps the biggest discrepancy, and the one that created a major problem for Flanagan, wasn’t an instrument of death or a fearsome piece of foliage.
It was a number on a door.
As fans of The Shining may already know, the most haunted room in the Overlook Hotel was, in the book, “Room 217.” But when Kubrick adapted the novel into a movie, there was a problem: the Timberline Lodge, where they filmed the exteriors of the hotel, actually had a “Room 217,” and the proprietors didn’t want it associated with all that death and carnage.
But they didn’t have a “Room 237,” so that’s what Kubrick used instead. It may seem like a small change but, to hear Flanagan tell it, he practically bent over backward to make King’s original room number fit in with Kubrick’s slightly altered vision.
“OH MY GOD was that a big problem for us!” Flanagan exclaims.
“So my initial thing was I thought I found a way through without having to commit, which was the Overlook is condemned, [so] what if the middle letter fell off over the decades and it was just 2-space-7, and it could be a Rorschach test. Whatever you wanted it to be, that was the answer. And I felt like that was genius and I had skirted the whole issue… except we had to do the flashbacks, and that made it clear that we absolutely had to pick a side.”
“So because Kubrick’s film was canon, it had to be 237,” Flanagan explains.
But he didn’t let it go, and in an unexpected way, the filmmaker was able to fit “Room 217” into the film version of Doctor Sleep after all.
“217, though, is the room Dan goes into in the hospice with the first patient. So I could get a shot of Ewan McGregor in front of those numbers,” Flanagan reveals.
“And whenever I go to The Stanley [the hotel in Colorado that helped inspire King’s novel, where he stayed in Room217], I’ve been lucky enough to go there three times now, the room I try to stay in, the room I wrote Hush in?” Flanagan asks.
“217,” he reveals. “So yeah, it’s a tough one.”
Interviews
Paul Tremblay on Fighting AI with Horror in New Novel ‘Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep’
Paul Tremblay didn’t start his writing career believing he’d be battling machines over the sanctity of his job, but like so many writers of his generation, the battle found him. In the years since Large Language Models (LLMs) and neural networks started gaining traction as an advertised shortcut to creativity, Tremblay has been active in lawsuits to prevent the use of his works in training AI models, and he’s found that, with each new project, he has to consider the possibility that some LLM, somewhere, is going to latch on to what he’s creating.
“Now I feel like I’m thinking about, ‘Man, how am I going to write things that would be really hard or impossible for an AI to replicate?’,” Tremblay told me, speaking by Zoom from his home in Massachusetts. “Maybe some of that is ego. I’m sure every writer thinks, ‘Oh, an AI could never write what I write.’ Yes, I’d be lying if I said that wasn’t part of the thought process.”
While that’s something Tremblay might consider with any new work at this point in his career, the Bram Stoker Award-winning author of A Head Full of Ghosts, The Cabin at the End of the World, and many other novels and short stories tackled it in a more direct way with his latest book. Inspired by Philip K. Dick, Harlan Ellison, and the quirky humor of the Coen Brothers, Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep is Tremblay’s attempt at a sci-fi-horror mash-up that’s both darkly funny and existentially nightmarish. It’s also, in his own words, a screed against the movement by AI companies to supplant human artists.
“I didn’t want to make it too didactic, but no, I playfully described this book as an anti-AI screed,” he said. “This book, in particular, was driven by anger and frustration, for sure. Not every book is going to be driven that way.“
Despite the emotions that fueled it, Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep does not read like a screed. Instead, wielding offbeat humor and tech concepts that feel both lived-in and frighteningly tactile, the book lays out tandem narratives all building to the same conclusion, each of them exploring our relationship to machine learning in a different way. One of these narratives belongs to Julia, a former gaming streamer looking for a new challenge in life, who gets a call from a California tech company with an interesting offer.
Paul Tremblay in documentary series “First Word on Horror”
The company has, it seems, implanted some new technology in a brain-dead middle-aged man which will, in theory, allow them to pilot the man’s body through a rudimentary, still-developing system of controls. Julia, with her gaming background, would be the pilot, in her own way just as much a test subject as the human vegetable she’s controlling.
Julia is a Gen Z streamer with an omnivorous pop culture appetite, inspired by Tremblay’s own adult children, who riffs on The Big Lebowski constantly and calls her strange new meat puppet “Bernie” in reference to Weekend at Bernie’s. Her wide frame of reference, and her interest in art and stories far beyond video games, is in part informed by Tremblay’s own experiences with Gen Z, and in part a response to AI companies who scrape art and culture as a means of consuming it for reference without really experiencing a story.
“I know that one of the arguments that OpenAI and other tech companies are trying to make is like, ‘Hey, you writers, you artists, you take pop culture, you take your influences, and you create something. That’s just the same thing that the bots are doing.’ And it’s just not,” Tremblay said. “I wanted to have Julia have her outlook informed by all this pop culture, and I wanted to make that feel really human as a way to show how inhuman the AI is.”
The other side of the story belongs to “Bernie,” who’s addressed in his point-of-view chapters as “You.” In these chapters, the technology in Bernie’s body starts to flicker images through his seemingly dead brain, delivering half-remembered imagery and perspective in a nod to the “hallucinations” of an AI model groping for understanding it can never reach. These chapters in particular show off Tremblay’s flair for formalist shake-ups, and echo the kind of hyperstimulated writing that Dick and Ellison made so influential.
“I think it was more just the general Philip K. Dick feeling of ‘The world is so strange,'” Tremblay said. “He’s a lot funnier, I think, than maybe a lot of people credit him. That’s definitely what I was thinking of when writing the book.“
Bernie’s chapters embody the strangeness of Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep, presenting imagery that’s at times puzzling, at times eerily filmic, and always unnerving. They also mirror Julia’s own journey in fascinating ways as the odd couple – the Gen Z gamer and the middle-aged vegetable – traverse the United States, and the tech in Bernie’s body wakes up to the possibilities of using his flesh for its own purposes. It’s a compelling narrative technique, but it presented some new writing challenges for Tremblay.
“I quickly realized I couldn’t write this book the same way I have in the past,” he said. “By that, I mean all my other novels I had written in the order in which it was presented, even things that are nonlinear, which is most of them. I knew I couldn’t do that in this book. It’s not a spoiler, but hopefully the readers figure out pretty early that the Bernie chapters are a little bit of a preview of the next chapter from Julia, what’s actually happening with Julia. It’s all refracted from him.”
Mary Roach’s Stiff
Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep began with a simple image, inspired by Tremblay’s reading of Mary Roach‘s book chronicling the history of our treatment of corpses, Stiff. As he read, Tremblay imagined a body sitting on an airplane, remote-controlled by someone else. At the time, it was a “silly what-if” concept, filed away in his head. Years later, when he became an author suing a tech company to keep AI from scraping his work for ideas, it started to feel frighteningly plausible, taking the “silly what-if” into the territory of a high-concept horror show about what happens when we try to exploit and commodify uniquely human aspects of consciousness.
“It stuck with me,” Tremblay said of that what-if imagery. “And then a few years later, when I was a part of the case suing OpenAI on behalf of writers, that what-if suddenly didn’t seem as silly. The more I learned about how that corporation operates and without really any sort of ethical thought to anything, I was like, ‘Oh, I’m going to play with that. That’s actually happening.”
So, what if someone actually in favor of generative AI picks up Tremblay’s self-described “anti-AI screed?” He hopes that, at the very least, he’s made the ride enjoyable in a distinctly human way that might begin to reshape the conversation.
“I think that was another reason why I wanted to have the humor,” Tremblay said. “If people are reading this book who aren’t on the side of like, ‘Hey, LLMs taking authors’ books is bad,’ maybe if they read something that’s cut with some humor, that maybe they’ll be more easily swayed.”
Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep is now in bookstores everywhere.
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