DOCTOR SLEEP

DOCTOR SLEEP. Mike Flanagan, director, script (from the novel by Stephen King, who is also one of the exec. producers). Maher Ahmad, production design. USA/UK: Warner Bros. "presents" "An Intrepid/Vertigo Entertainment Production" (prod.) / Warner Bros. (dist. US and other major markets), 2019.[1]

Horror movie, sequel to THE SHINING (1980), with Storyline by Stephen King — at least to the novel and as of Nov. 2019 — pasted below with link to IMDb. The film is relevant here for a couple climactic brief scenes in the Overlook Hotel boiler room, which have visual quotations from the "Moloch" scenes in METROPOLIS and the power-room in FORBIDDEN PLANET. Note also that when the "True Knot" people breathe in the "steam" for their victims, the imagery is vampiric (cf. and contrast the alien creatures in Ursula K. Le Guin's 'Rocannon's World' [1966]).[2] Extra steam or mist, however, is stored in containers that look like elegant, modernist, possibly high-tech, good-size water bottles. That the containers look far more science-fictional than gothic is important, as is the film's utter silence on how the containers work: DOCTOR SLEEP will use some visuals that are like SF but remains mostly horror.

NOTE: As with King's novel, 'The Shining' (though not Stanley Kubrick's film), DOCTOR SLEEP deals usefully with alcoholism and how that disease can harm a family and individuals.

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...[3]

RDE, Initial Compiler, 10Nov19