Doctor Sleep Actress Teases The Story Of The Shining Sequel

Though Stephen King’s 2013 novel Doctor Sleep serves as a follow-up to 1977’s The Shining, you can imagine that there are a lot of horror fans out there who are familiar with the story of the latter but not the former. But with a film adaptation of the sequel scheduled for release later this year, actress Emily Alyn Lind has offered a helpful synopsis of the sinister events to come.

As you may be aware, director Stanley Kubrick brought The Shining to the big screen back in 1980 with a movie starring Danny Lloyd as as a psychic young boy named Danny Torrance. For Mike Flanagan’s Doctor Sleep, the role will be filled by Ewan McGregor, and in a recent episode of The Direct Message Network’s Now What?! podcast, Lind teased what’s become of little Danny:

“So, basically, it picks up from when Danny – played by Ewan McGregor – is going down the wrong path, a lot like his dad, who’s played by Jack Nicholson in the original movie. He decides when he is younger, right after the Overlook Hotel has been destroyed, that he is going to turn off his powers,”

Jump a few decades later, and Danny is approached by a young girl with similar abilities, played by Kyliegh Curran:

“This little girl named Abra Stone reaches out to him, and he hasn’t had his powers – his shining – on for twenty something years since he was a little boy. And this little girl Abra Stone reaches out to him somehow and needs his help because she has the most powerful shining out of everyone in the world.”

It’s here that Lind’s character Snakebite Andi comes into the story as a member of a mysterious cult that wishes to feed off Abra’s essence:

 “So, she’s reaching out to Danny to try and help her because this cult called the True Knot, which I’m a part of, is trying to capture her because what they do is kill children and eat the shining out of them, and that makes them almost immortal. So they are trying to find her because if they eat her, they will be set for years and years and years and be very healthy. It’s sort of like – the movie is really cool because you have two different storylines going on – you see the whole Aubra-Danny storyline and the True Knot storyline and they’re kind of coming together until the end when they emerge into one.”

Evidently, this isn’t just a rehash of The Shining that we’re getting here, though director Mike Flanagan also told Bloody Disgusting last year that he intended for the movie to at least acknowledge the Kubrick classic.

In any case, Flanagan’s film comes to us in a busy year for King adaptations. Though a lot of horror fans are already feeling pretty pumped for the release of It: Chapter 2 this September, we’ll first be getting the new Pet Sematary in April, which has already earned King’s endorsement. Once those two are out, it’s just a short wait until Doctor Sleep hits theaters on November 8th, 2019.