Stephen King says Doctor Sleep redeems Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining

Last Updated on July 30, 2021

Stanley Kubrick's THE SHINING is one of my favourite films of all-time. It's still just as unsettling and spooky as it was that first time around and it seems that there's something new to discover each time. That said, one person who famously doesn't care for THE SHINING is Stephen King, who wrote the novel on which the film was based. "It’s certainly beautiful to look at: gorgeous sets, all those Steadicam shots," King told The Paris Review in a 2006 interview. "I used to call it a Cadillac with no engine in it. You can’t do anything with it except admire it as sculpture. You’ve taken away its primary purpose, which is to tell a story." When King wrote "Doctor Sleep" decades later, he obviously followed in the footsteps of his original novel and not Stanley Kubrick's movie, but it's hard to deny the impact which the Kubrick film has had on audiences, and that's something Mike Flanagan had to deal with in his big-screen adaptation of DOCTOR SLEEP.

As we know, DOCTOR SLEEP includes more than a few direct references to the Stanley Kubrick movie as well as recreating certain aspects of the Overlook Hotel, and Mike Flanagan told Entertainment Weekly that he knew he had to convince Stephen King to bring the two together.

I said, ‘Look, I’m a King fanatic, I have been since I’m a kid, you are my hero, but when I read Doctor Sleep, all the images in my head were Kubrick’s images.' The Shining is so ubiquitous and has burned itself into the collective imagination of people who love cinema in a way that so few movies have. There’s no other language to tell that story in. If you say ‘Overlook Hotel’ I see something. It lives right up in my brain because of Stanley Kubrick. You can’t pretend that isn’t the case.

Although Mike Flanagan says that Stephen King was reluctant to blend the two versions, he came around once Flanagan pitched him on the concept and at the end of the day, King said that DOCTOR SLEEP redeems Stanley Kubrick's film for him. "I read the script to this one very, very carefully," King said. "Because obviously I wanted to do a good job with the sequel, because people knew the book The Shining, and I thought, I don’t want to screw this up. Mike Flanagan, I’ve enjoyed all his movies, and I’ve worked with him before on Gerald’s Game. So, I read the script very, very carefully and I said to myself, ‘Everything that I ever disliked about the Kubrick version of The Shining is redeemed for me here." King continued, "I don’t want to get into a big argument about how great the Shining film is that Kubrick did or my feelings about it. All I can say is, Mike took my material, he created a terrific story, people who have seen this movie flip for it, and I flipped for it, too. Because he managed to take my novel of Doctor Sleep, the sequel, and somehow weld it seamlessly to the Kubrick version of The Shining, the movie."

DOCTOR SLEEP is set to hit theaters in North America on November 8th, so be sure to check out a review from our own Paul Shirey!