5 Years Ago, Stephen King’s Most Iconic Thriller Got a Sneakily Successful Sequel

When ), with the ending of Doctor Sleep, while also giving Dan a chance to redeem himself and his father by blowing up the hotel’s boiler, indirectly restoring King’s end to The Shining. He also defeats Rose and saves Abra, although Dan survives in the novel while sacrificing himself in the film.

Flanagan’s fusion of Doctor Sleep with both versions of The Shining redeems the more ambiguous — some would say frustrating — ending of Kubrick’s film. There’s also closure for Dan Torrance, who, in Flanagan’s biggest and not quite successful gambit, interacts with the ghosts of his mother and father, played here by Alex Essoe and Henry Thomas.

The film also addresses a deep emotional component of both novels: the alcoholism that Dan seemingly inherits from his father. While given lip service in Kubrick’s film, it’s a major aspect of King’s books (King, a recovering alcoholic, based Jack Torrance’s struggle on his own) and an important element of Flanagan’s movie. Here too, Flanagan merges the literary and cinematic Shining together, retroactively deepening the tragic onscreen relationship between Dan and Jack.

One viewer in particular was pleased with the results. “[Flanagan] managed to take my novel of Doctor Sleep, the sequel, and somehow weld it seamlessly to the Kubrick version of The Shining, the movie,” Stephen King told EW. “So, yeah, I liked it a lot.” Mike Flanagan somehow managed to “reconcile that gulf of distance,” as he put it, between the two versions of The Shining in a sequel worthy of all its source material, which is a considerable triumph for a movie that involves psychic vampires.