With lots of people going out to see It: Chapter Two this weekend — the Box Office Report will be posted Monday morning as usual — it makes perfect sense that Warner Bros. and New Line would put a new trailer for Doctor Sleep in front of it. After all, It helped to relaunch Hollywood’s interest in the works of Stephen King to the point where many of his other novels are being readapted.
One of King’s novels that hadn’t been adapted is his 2013 novel Doctor Sleep, which is in fact, a continuation of the story begun in his earlier 1977 novel, The Shining. Stanley Kubrick famously adapted that novel into a 1980 movie starring Jack Nickolson, Shelley Duvall, Danny Lloyd (his only movie role!) and Scatman Crothers, a movie that’s considered a horror classic as well as one of Kubrick’s landmark films.
Of course, it would be career suicide for anyone to try to attempt an actual remake of The Shining, but Doctor Sleep, which follows the adult Dan Torrance (as played by Ewan McGregor), is certainly fair game.
The new trailer, which you can watch below, also stars Rebecca Ferguson (Mission: Impossible – Fallout) as “Rose the Hat,” the film’s primary antagonist, and newcomer Kyliegh Curran as the young girl, Abra. The rest of the cast includes Carl Lumbly, Zahn McClarnon, Emily Alyn Lind, Bruce Greenwood, Jocelin Donahue, Alex Essoe and Cliff Curtis.
The movie is directed by Mike Flanagan, who previously made a movie based on King’s Gerald’s Game for Netflix, as well as directed the Netflix series The Haunting of Hill House. Other movies directed by Flanagan include the horror prequel Ouija: Origin of Evil and my personal favorite, 2013’s Oculus.
In case it wasn’t obvious from the earlier trailer, the new and final trailer makes it blatantly obvious that Doctor Sleep takes place in the same world as The Shining, as we see McGregor’s Dan Torrance returning to the famed Colorado resort where he and his mother were terrorized by his possessed father. We even get a hint that we may see the incredibly scary ghost twins from The Shining, although chances are, they didn’t grow old along with Danny yet are still just as creepy as ever.
Doctor Sleep will be released in North America on November 8, but if you live in another country, you may actually get to see it a week earlier.
