Doctor Sleep: The one moment which convinced Stephen King to make the movie

Doctor Sleep is a film about Dan Torrance (played by Ewan McGregor) after the events of The Shining. Danny was traumatised after his father attacked him and his mother, as well as by the ghouls in the Overlook Hotel which only he could see. Doctor Sleep follows his journey through alcoholism as he tries to battle his demons – as well as real life demons threatening to wreak havoc.

**Warning: Doctor Sleep spoilers**

After Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of The Shining, author Stephen King wrote and produced a miniseries to right the wrongs he felt had been committed.

While many of King’s books have been adapted into feature films, filmmakers must gain the blessing of the great author before they put their plans into motion.

For director Mike Flanagan and his production team, their pitch to Stephen King to make Doctor Sleep was incredibly important – especially as the wounds of The Shining may still run deep.

According to Flanagan, who spoke at a Q&A in London, there was one scene which was the only way to convince Stephen King they could ‘right the wrongs.’

He said: “The pitch that we made kind of hinged on one scene… towards the end of the film there’s a scene at a bar and that was the pitch we made that turned him round.”

That scene is after the adult Dan returns to The Overlook Hotel after years away from it, bringing young Abra Stone (Kyliegh Curran) there to protect her.

Abra is another person with the ‘shining,’ but she is being hunted by the evil Rose The Hat (Rebecca Ferguson) who is hellbent on kidnapping the girl and keeping her for her ‘steam,’ which would mean a slow, agonising death for Abra.

Dan knows the only place which could keep Rose away is The Overlook, so he takes Abra there in the hope the demons he tried to escape will come to his aid.

He arrives at the hotel and tries to ‘wake it up,’ while Abra keeps watch outside.

Dan walks the corridors and into rooms we all know and remember from Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, after the team behind Doctor Sleep painstakingly recreated the whole place.

As Dan enters the ballroom, he goes to sit at the bar, which was once occupied by a lone barman.

The barman here is someone quite different – his father, Jack Torrance.

The pair have a conversation about drinking, about “taking your medicine” and it is revealed while Jack Torrance may be dead, his spirit lives on as one of the frightening presences of The Overlook.

Their conversation, it seems, must cover some of the aspects of The Shining which King was upset to see dropped from the film – especially as the original novel of The Shining is told from the perspective of the adult Dan.

Flanagan said he was able to heave a “sigh of relief” after both King and the family of Kubrick said they enjoyed Doctor Sleep.

He said: “Now that those two voices have spoken we can go retreat into the shadows.”

Producer Trevor Macy added: “We’re keen for audiences to see it having ticked those two boxes.”

Speaking of how he convinced King to allow them to make Doctor Sleep, Flanagan said: “The argument was, ‘What I’d like to do is treat Kubrick’s film as canon.

“‘We’d like to make this a direct follow up to that film,’ but within that I wanted to give him [King] a chance to see some of the elements of the novel The Shining which Kubrick had jettisoned.

“That’s one of the things about his complaints about The Shining.

“He’s been very specific about what upset him and that gave us a lot to work with.

“We knew exactly why he didn’t like that adaptation so I was also able to go in and say, ‘Look, I think we should celebrate the contributions Stanley Kubrick made to genre cinema forever by making The Shining, and in the course of that celebration, what if you [King] also get some of these elements which were taken away from your story when he made the film.

“I really believed those two things could co-exist but that was the pitch and it was a nerve-wracking proposal – but if he hadn’t given us his blessing of that we wouldn’t have made the film.”

Doctor Sleep is in cinemas from October 31