Octoberfest: Doctor Sleep (Director's Cut)

Author's Note: Hey, all. Sorry for the brief time away, but I had a paying gig out of town house-sitting, and the owner was a luddite, which is a fancy way of saying, they don't do computers. As such, I didn't have access to the internet for a hot minute there. There was an internet cafe fairly nearby, but I'm not trying to get Corona by going into small spaces with a lot of people, sorry. But I did need the money, so it was worth it. 

Anyway, as you know, it's that time of year again, though Lord knows it's seemed like a lifetime since last Halloween. As my loyal readers know, I've already covered the Halloween series in full- you can get a complete list of links to those articles here- and last year, I simply covered as many horror movies set on or around Halloween as I could, which is basically what I'm going to be doing this year.

However, there is one caveat: I'm also going to be doing a few reviews of films and shows that aren't set on or around Halloween, starting with this one. The reason being that, as some of you might recall, I watched a lot of stinkers last year while I was searching for that elusive diamond in the rough. Ultimately, I did find a few- notably Hellions, Mischief Night, The American Scream and the Houses That October Built series- but I had to wade through a whole lot of crap to get there. Turns out there's a good reason some of these movies are obscure, lol. 😜

To that end, I'm going to review a few ringers here and there- movies I already know are going to be good, or have good reason to think they might be, if only to keep myself from going crazy. I'm also going to be doing a franchise review that isn't the one I had initially planned to do- I'll postpone that latter one until November, which actually seems more appropriate, in light of recent events. (You'll see why when we get there.) 

Instead, I'm going to review the cult classic favorite Night of the Demons and its various sequels and offshoots, like the pseudo-remake from 2009- four movies in all, for those keeping score at home, so it's a relatively minor investment of my time, compared to what I'll be doing next. 

I will probably also do a Movie Round-Up soon, just to recap the films I watched while out of town. Those won't be horror-oriented at all, unless you want to count Maleficent: Queen of Evil, which I'd call more of a dark fantasy at best.

Last but not least, I may or may not do a Cronenberg Chronicles installment here and there. It all depends on how much I can get done. It's not that I don't have spare time on my hands, it's that it's hard to get myself to write at all these days, with all that's going on, what with the world being a dumpster fire right about now. But I promise to try a bit harder than I have as of late. 🙏 

After all, all play and no work make Mark a dull boy...or is it the other way around? 😉

Now on with the show, with a look at the Director's Cut of...

I've probably told this story before, so I'll try to keep it short. When I was a kid, my parents got a divorce and my mom used what she'd call her "fuck you" money to take me to California, where I went to Disneyland for the first time, and fell in love with the Haunted Mansion dark ride. That proved to be my "gateway drug" into the horror genre, as I then proceeded to read everything I could get my hands on about ghosts and haunted houses. 

One day, I saw a piece on an old In Search Of... re-run about the Amityville murders and subsequent hauntings, and that led me to my first "adult" horror novel, The Amityville Horror. Shortly thereafter, I saw an ad on either HBO or Cinemax- probably the former- for The Shining and was immediately taken with it. It was the notorious one with the elevator filled with blood that opens and spills it out on the floor towards the viewer, which is as effective a bit of advertising as I've ever seen for a horror movie.

I immediately marked the date to watch the movie (HBO had guides that showed what was on all month back then), and asked around about it, finding out it was based on a book by Stephen King, who I was just starting to become aware of, but hadn't read anything by as of yet. 

I believe this was around the late 80's or early 90's at the latest. I was certainly in my single digits, probably around 8 or 9. I asked my mom to pick up the paperback of the book, which she subsequently did, and I devoured it in a couple of sittings. To this day, it's one of my all-time faves, and I've read it who knows how many times. 

My fellow readers probably know what's coming next. Though I didn't hate the film adaptation by Stanley Kubrick, it did feel a lot like he read the synopsis on the back, tossed the book in the trash and basically just did whatever he wanted to do with the material. Perhaps needless to say, I was a bit disappointed with the end result. But there was something about it that stuck with me, and I eventually became a big fan. As with the book, it went on to become one of my all-time favorites. 

Interestingly, contrary to what you've heard about King's dislike of the film, I recently saw an interview with him, then-future collaborators Peter Straub and George Romero, and the excellent horror author Ira Levin, of Rosemary's Baby and The Stepford Wives fame on the old Dick Cavett Show from the 80's, where he espoused a decidedly different opinion. I had seen Cavett on Seth Meyers' show and found him interesting, so when I went scrolling through the Tubi channel on my Roku and saw Cavett's show pop up, I took a closer look (see what I did there?) and spotted that legendary line-up and couldn't resist taking a peek. 

Lo and behold, King had nothing but good things to say about the film back then. Go figure. (You can see part one of the interview here.) Of course, the interview was from 1980, so it was still pretty newly in theatres, so you can see where he'd want to tow the party line at the time, if only for the success of the film, but he genuinely seems okay with it. I guess over time he learned to hate it, just as, over time, I learned to love it. 

Kubrick may have jettisoned a lot of what was great about the book, but, at the very least, he nailed the tone. The film is a virtual masterclass in how to sustain an uneasy mood for well over two hours, by virtue of putting the viewer off his guard and keeping them there, using shrewd planning, pioneering use of the then-new Steadicam technology, cleverly executed settings that were illogical in retrospect, but decidedly on purpose; and an overall sense of impending doom and incredibly sustained dread. It's a bona fide classic. 

However, King wasn't the only one with issues with the film, which was borderline pilloried by the critics at the time of its release and underperformed at the box office. (Though, to be fair, it did open the same week as a little movie called The Empire Strikes Back.)Gene Siskel, of Siskel & Ebert fame, called it a "crushing disappointment," for instance, and Variety said that it "destroy(ed) all that was so terrifying about King's bestseller." King himself found the movie "cold" and "lacking in heart." So, it's safe to say the film was a grower, not a shower, and one that only gained its reputation as one of the scariest movies ever made over time.  

As such, it also took a long time to get a sequel in the works. King himself oversaw a TV miniseries adaptation that was far more faithful to the book, particularly in the characterization department- in Kubrick's film, Nicholson goes from zero to crazy in record time, whereas it's more of a slow burn in the book, and Wendy is much more of an active presence, rather than a passive one; qualities that are both restored in the miniseries- but it lacked the atmosphere and genuine chills of the original film. There was also a promising idea for a TV series or movie prequel called Overlook, which may still come to fruition in time. 

However, King ultimately beat everyone to the punch with Doctor Sleep, the first direct sequel to anything he's ever done, the epic, ongoing saga of The Dark Tower notwithstanding, which is more of a series than something King sequel-ized. Granted, as fans know, there is a throughline going through a lot of his books- for instance, the Castle Rock stories, which all have the connective tissue of the town holding them together, but that's not quite the same thing as a direct sequel, either. 

I devoured the book version upon its release, and was very taken with it. It's a different kind of book, to be sure. As King puts it in the various bonus documentaries included with the Blu-Ray of Doctor Sleep, if The Shining was about someone in the throes of alcoholism, then the follow-up is about someone's path to recovery, in this case, an all-grown-up Danny, played by an excellent Ewan McGregor.

The story is basically this: many years after the events of The Shining, Danny is a struggling addict that has turned to booze and drugs to deaden the pain he still feels after his experiences at the Overlook and the loss of his father, and later, his mother. To that end, he has also learned, with a little help from Dick Hallorann (Carl Lumbly, Alias, Supergirl), to put his Overlook memories and the ghosts themselves into a sort of mental "lockbox" to keep them from haunting him, as the spirits continued to pursue him even after leaving the hotel. 

So, the booze and drugs keep the pain at bay, while the lockboxes keep the ghosts from bothering him, either. Unfortunately, after a particularly unpleasant one-night stand finds Danny hitting rock-bottom in a major way, he decides to flee to another part of the country, specifically a small town in New Hampshire. There, he gets clean and starts leading a more admirable life, first working at the local park, then eventually as an orderly at a hospice, where he finds he has an affinity for helping ease his elderly patients whose time has come into death, which earns him the nickname "Doctor Sleep," hence the title. 

Years go by without incident until he wakes up one day and finds a message on the chalkboard in his room. It turns out that a little girl who lives nearby, Abra (an excellent newcomer, Kyliegh Curran) also has the "Shining," which is to say, she can read minds and has the ability to communicate telepathically with her own kind. Now that Danny is sober, he can hear her. It's all fun and games until someone like her gets hurt, which Abra alerts Danny to.

Danny at first tells her to stay out of it, noting that, if these people are actively seeking out people like them, which is to say, people with the Shining, then they are highly dangerous, and they need to keep their heads down, lest they end up on their radar, too. Naturally, the headstrong Abra can't leave well enough alone, and decides to investigate. She discovers a group called the "True Knot," led by the evil-but-beautiful Rose "The Hat" (Rebecca Ferguson, the Mission Impossible films, The Girl on the Train), who "feed" on the "steam" that is released from someone with the Shining when they are tortured and/or killed. 

Unfortunately, Rose also discovers her discovering them and decides that someone that powerful is someone worth pursuing, opining that, if she was as powerful as Rose thinks, they could, instead of killing her outright, hold her captive and simply torture her and drain her over a period of time. That's not creepy. So, a cat and mouse game begins, with Danny reluctantly joining the team, with a little help from a friend that helped him get sober, Billy (Cliff Curtis, Fear the Walking Dead). 

King fans will notice decided similarities between this and, in particular, his recent novel, The Outsider, which itself was adapted for a TV miniseries for HBO earlier this year. As such, I wouldn't recommend either reading that book or watching that miniseries in the general vicinity of reading or watching Doctor Sleep. I should also mention that, as I said, both revolve around someone hunting and killing and often torturing children, so if that doesn't sound like your cup of horror, you might want to skip both. 

Also, whereas The Outsider takes place after a murder of that sort, which means that it is more discussed and described than shown, Doctor Sleep shows said torture and murder in graphic detail, so fair warning there. It ain't pretty. The Director's Cut version is more graphic than the theatrical version as well, so there's that, even if you saw the original version. A list of the differences between the two versions can be found here, but I wouldn't advise reading it until after you've seen the films, as there are a lot of spoilers.

Of course, the biggest difference is the length overall. The Director's Cut runs a good thirty minutes longer than the theatrical cut, which is already a good two-and-a-half hours, just like the original. As my loyal readers know, I'm not too fond of overlong horror movies, considering 90 minutes to be the ideal length for any horror film. Of course, there are exceptions to every rule, and The Shining would certainly qualify as one of them. Doctor Sleep is a tougher call, clocking in as it does at three hours.

On the one hand, most of the interjected material is character-oriented, which means that it helps to flesh out the characters better. One of King's biggest complaints about Kubrick's version of his novel was that it casts a lot of that sort of thing almost entirely by the wayside- we barely get to know what Jack is like under normal circumstances before he goes off the deep end, for instance. Doctor Sleep, on the other hand, tremendously values such character development, which is one way in which it actually surpasses its predecessor. That is even more present in the Director's Cut. 

But, that said, I can see where some people would get antsy during some of the slow spots. It's not as bad as one might think, though, especially since, at home, one can take all the breaks one wants, or even split the film up over the course of two nights if they wanted, making it more like an ongoing binge watch than an overwhelming endeavor that has to be taken in one fell swoop. To the film's credit, I felt compelled to watch the whole thing in one sitting, albeit with copious breaks here and there, and I was never quite bored. It does help if you read the book, however. 

To that end, director Mike Flanagan- perhaps best known for Oculus, Ouija: Origin of Evil; his previous King adaptation, Gerald's Game and the stellar Netflix miniseries The Haunting of Hill House- seeks to achieve a neat trick: to reconcile the book version of The Shining with the movie version, which the book version of Doctor Sleep steadfastly avoids, picking up where the original left off and sticking with King's original source material. I'm going to try and avoid spoiler material, but suffice it to say, I'll be damned if Flanagan doesn't basically pull it off. 

It takes serious cajones to re-stage key scenes from Kubrick's original, much less with different actors, but Flanagan manages to make it work, mostly through clever recasting. I didn't even recognize Henry Thomas, of E.T. and Hill House fame, as Jack, for instance, thinking they'd done some CGI shenanigans, a la the Marvel-verse with Michael Douglas and Kurt Russell, at least until there was more of a close-up shot. And if you close your eyes and just listen to actress Alex Essoe (Starry Eyes, Midnighters), damned if she isn't a dead ringer, vocally, for Shelley Duvall.  

But, of course, the real head-spinner, is the meticulous way the set design team has recreated the Overlook set of Kubrick's original film. It's uncanny how close they come. I'd be harder pressed to tell you what was different than what was the same. Flanagan and his team certainly come within spitting distance of perfectly recreating the legendary film's massive, enveloping sets to a "T." I actually got chills in some places, such as seeing the trademark hallways with those hypnotizing patterns (as seen above), the bathroom of Room 237, and they completely nailed the Gold Room and its red-tinged bathroom. 

Overall, this is a pretty superior adaptation that even King signed off on, in spite of the various differences between his book and this movie- and believe me, there are a fair amount of things Flanagan has changed between his version and King's effort, with the ending notably being a major one. But King seems okay with it this time around. (Or maybe he's just towing that company line again...) 

However, if you're a fan of the original book and preferred King's ending to Kubrick's, get ready to have your cake and eat it, too, as there are nods to both here. Ultimately, it's done in a way that should satisfy fans of both, remarkably enough- including King himself, who even went as far as to say that Flanagan's version managed to not only reconcile his own misgivings about Kubrick's film, but to wholly redeem it in his eyes. That's not faint praise, given all the bitching King's done over the years about it.

Don't get me wrong, the film isn't without its flaws. It is long, and it certainly feels that way at times, especially in the Director's Cut version. Also, I can see where certain elements of the plot would be confusing or not make sense at all to people who haven't read the book. I think Flanagan went into it assuming that people had done just that, but that's never a safe assumption these days, especially in a world in which a certain contingent of people think that reading is for, ahem, "losers and suckers," as it were.

 

It isn't, of course, but that doesn't mean that even faithful readers have read the book, or, at the very least, that they've read it recently, as the book came out in 2013. As such, I can see where some people would be lost at times, which can lead to boredom, and, at two-and-a-half hours at best and three at worst, it might be a bit too much of an undertaking for some that are used to their horror movies with copious jump scares and constant kills or the like. This isn't that movie. At all. It's much more of a slow burn, to say the least.

Basically, it's a character study, with some horror around the fringes. But what horror there is, is genuinely unsettling, and, in a way, more terrifying than what was in the original film- after all, in the original, the ghosts were after one kid and didn't succeed; here, the bad guys do succeed in taking out one, with an implication that there were way more in the past, making the potential for them succeeding far more plausible this time around- and there are indeed some major casualties.

That said, in spite of all his considerable effort and getting so much right, Flanagan can't hope to approach the inherent and methodical genius of a Stanley Kubrick. For one thing, Warner Brothers probably wouldn't have had the patience to let him take his time like Kubrick did, although they did let him spend more money: roughly $45-55 million, versus Kubrick's $19- though, to be fair, there is inflation to think of, so nearly $20 million for a horror film isn't too shabby for that time.

What Flanagan does achieve is a sort of symbiotic synthesis with both King and Kubrick. But by attempting to reconcile both with one another, Flanagan's own unique voice gets buried in the process, and both King and Kubrick alike end up somewhat diluted. So, you end up with imitation King and Kubrick and a lack of a grounded voice for the director himself, who has proved time and again to have a solid approach of his own. 

For instance, compare and contrast the original Ouija movie with Flanagan's prequel/sequel, Ouija: Origin of Evil. The first one is strictly assembly-line entertainment, as manufactured as the board game that inspired it. The sequel is something else altogether and a genuinely solid flick that's original and fun. Flanagan also greatly improved on the godawful remake of The Haunting from the 90's with his take on it with The Haunting of Hill House for Netflix, even though, it, too, took considerable liberties with the source material.  

Here, dealing with two separate, disparate and distinctly different variations of the same source material, both of which he obviously has great love for, he ends up diminishing his own voice in the process, which is too bad. Especially if you consider the bang-up job he did with King's Gerald's Game. But, of course, he didn't have two distinct adaptations to contend with there. In the end, tackling the two proves a bit overwhelming for the director, but, at the same time, it's not like he fails miserably at it, either. In fact, I'd argue that, given the massive endeavor at hand, he did pretty darn good. The film just lacks a grounded center, as it were.

But there's certainly a lot to recommend here, especially for fans of both King and Kubrick. It's fun to see certain things restaged and expanded upon from Kubrick, and it's highly gratifying for longtime King fans to see Flanagan tip his hat to the book's original ending in a clever way. The cast is impeccable, also including cult TV/movie favorites like Carel Struycken (The Addams Family, Twin Peaks), Jocelin Donahue (House of the Devil, Insidious: Chapter 2), Zahn McClarnon (Fargo, Westworld) and Emily Alyn Lind (the Babysitter series, Lights Out).

And, like I've said many times before, it takes a lot for me to recommend a three-hour horror movie, but I'm essentially doing just that here, as the good definitely outweighs the good for me here, in spite of- and maybe even a little bit because of- that daunting length. Regardless of whether you're a fan of the books, or even Kubrick's film, I think you might just dig this one, which is also saying something. It has a different vibe from all of those sources and a different approach overall. It may not entirely feel like a Flanagan film, and it's no Haunting of Hill House, but it's definitely worth checking out. 😈