Your Guide to the Trailer for the Shining Sequel
A few years ago Stephen King wrote a sequel to "The Shining" called "Doctor Sleep." Now, it’s being adapted into a movie and I can vouch that, if it stays at all true to the book, some of the stuff is going to be freaky-deaky.
First, here’s the trailer that dropped this week:
So, what’s going on here? It should be noted that what follows are only “spoilers” in the sense that I read the book and some of what I’m about to say may or may not be in the movie. So…potential spoilers ahead, I guess?
Ewan McGregor plays a grown up Danny Torrance aka Jack Nicholson’s kid from the first movie who rides his Big Wheel through a creepy hotel and sees a weird ghost/man/dog doing oral stuff to another ghost/man…among other things.
Danny still has “The Shining”, the psychic ability to see and interact with ghosts and other similarly gifted people. This will be McGregor’s first role playing a powerful psychic since he was Obi-wan Kenobi in Revenge of the Sith so maybe THIS time he’ll be able to save the younglings.
Danny is a kind of drifter who ends up working at a hospice. He gets the nickname “Doctor Sleep” because of his ability to sense when a patient is nearing death (the fact that they’re in hospice care should be a hint but, no, it’s The Shining!) and his ability to ease the dying patient’s transition.
Meanwhile, there’s another child who is very powerful in The Force…er, I mean The Shining…and Obi-Dan has to reach her before the traveling cadre of R.V. vampires gets to her. That’s right! There’s a group of psychic vampires who travel from KOA campground to KOA campground in their RV’s and to remain immortal they must regularly feed on psychic children by…and this is a big plot point…slowly torturing the children to death!! Like I said, freaky-deaky.
What’s going to be really interesting, though, is how they’ll do the big climactic scene. In the King book the Overlook burns to the ground and the final showdown between Danny and the vampires takes place on the site where the hotel once stood. In the movie version, though, the hotel doesn’t burn down and it looks like this is the version the new movie will go with. Either that or the scenes from the trailer of the hallway of blood, the creepy little girls AND the weird man-dog-ghost-b.j. creature are all memories and flashbacks. I personally am hoping the Overlook is still standing if for no other reason than maybe a return visit will turn up more evidence that Stanley Kubrick faked the moon landing.
Also, there’s a cameo by Jack Nicholson.
That is to say, in the book the ghost of Jack Torrance shows up to help his son battle the evil happy-camping vampires. How are they going to handle that? An actual Nicholson cameo doesn’t make sense because, just like the party-goers in the hotel photographs, ghosts don’t age. Do they get another actor? Age-regress the real Jack like Sam Jackson in Captain Marvel? For that matter, are we going to get a new actor to play the Scatman Crothers role (he’s also in the book)? If so, it’ll probably be Donald Glover. That guy is KILLING it right now.