Gerald’s Game director Mike Flanagan has been lined up to direct the sequel to Stephen King’s The Shining over at Warner Brothers Pictures. The film is titled Doctor Sleep and is based on the 2013 King novel of the same name, one which revolves around the now 40-year-old Danny Torrance who is struggling with the same demons of anger and alcoholism that plagued his father.
Here’s more from the source material.
The instantly riveting Doctor Sleep picks up the story of the now middle-aged Dan, working at a hospice in rural New Hampshire, and the very special twelve-year-old girl he must save from a tribe of murderous paranormals.
On highways across America, a tribe of people called The True Knot travel in search of sustenance. They look harmless – mostly old, lots of polyester, and married to their RVs. But as Dan Torrance knows, and tween Abra Stone learns, The True Knot are quasi-immortal, living off the ‘steam’ that children with the ‘shining’ produce when they are slowly tortured to death.
Haunted by the inhabitants of the Overlook Hotel where he spent one horrific childhood year, Dan has been drifting for decades, desperate to shed his father’s legacy of despair, alcoholism, and violence. Finally, he settles in a New Hampshire town, an AA community that sustains him and a job at a nursing home where his remnant ‘shining’ power provides the crucial final comfort to the dying. Aided by a prescient cat, he becomes ‘Doctor Sleep.’
Then Dan meets the evanescent Abra Stone, and it is her spectacular gift, the brightest shining ever seen, that reignites Dan’s own demons and summons him to a battle for Abra’s soul and survival . . .
Flanagan is rewriting the adaptation, originally scripted by Akiva Goldsman. The film is expected to follow the adaptation of Shirley Jackson’s “The Haunting of Hill House” over at Netflix which Flanagan is currently in-production on.
