Doctor Sleep

Check back into the haunted hallways of the Overlook Hotel in horror auteur Mike Flanagan’s weird, reverent sequel to The Shining.

Decades after the horrors of his childhood stay at the Overlook Hotel, a middle-aged Dan Torrance (Ewan McGregor) has carved out a quiet life in recovery, working as a hospice nurse in small-town New Hampshire. His peace collapses when a roaming caravan of psychic vampires, feeding on the energy of those who “shine”, target Abra (Kyliegh Curran) – a young girl whose gift mirrors Dan’s own.

To protect her, Dan must confront his buried trauma and the otherworldly forces that have haunted him since childhood.

Who would dare make a sequel to The Shining? Universally revered as one of the greatest horror films of all time, Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece has at least one famously vocal detractor: Stephen King. As one of King’s most trusted screen interpreters, director Mike Flanagan faced the unenviable task of adapting the author’s late-career sequel Doctor Sleep in a way that shows fealty to Kubrick’s totemic film while also staying true to King’s books.

Released in 2019, the result achieves the near-impossible – reconciling two cultural titans’ conflicting visions into a single, yet totally distinctive, whole.