Scripted and directed by Mike Flanagan, “Doctor Sleep” is an American supernatural horror film. It’s a follow-up to Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. Ewan McGregor plays Danny Torrance, a psychic with a troubled past, in Doctor Sleep, which is set decades after the events of The Shining. There are also cameo appearances from Rebecca Ferguson, Kyliegh Curran, Cliff Curtis, and Carl Lumbly.
The storyline of Doctor Sleep centres on a group of outcasts who kidnap, torture, and ultimately kill children across the country because they believe they have “that shine.” They do this to drain the victims of their “steam,” or vital energy. They say “eat well, live long” because breathing in the “steam” makes them more powerful and prolongs their lives. More upsetting still is the fact that in order to get the’steam’ to its optimal purity, the torture and abuse of innocent people is necessary.
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Is Doctor Sleep Based On a True Story?
It is believed that Doctor Sleep is based on one of the very famous incident. William of Norwich is one of the most well-known examples. In 1144, a young kid from England was discovered dead in the woods; he had been stabbed. Thomas of Monmouth, William’s hagiographer, made the claim that elites from throughout the world met annually to decide which country would be responsible for the murder of a child on Easter.
The story became so popular that William was canonised as a martyr and pilgrims made pilgrimages to his hometown church to make sacrifices in his honour. It was believed that torturing the children before consuming their blood would increase its curative effects.
Allegations of this nature were commonplace across Europe and persisted until the nineteenth century, although scholars now dismiss them as baseless panic. Whether or whether it’s true, the fact that scientific research has shown that youthful blood possesses healing and regeneration powers is deeply unsettling.
In addition, adrenaline is thought to be more powerful because of a molecule it produces called adrenochrome. I say reportedly because, obviously, no one has ever been officially confirmed to have consumed adrenalized blood. However, Hunter S. Thompson claimed to have used adrenochrome in his autobiographical novel Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
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Similar Event After 7 Years
Blood libel and Doctor Sleep share another peculiar similarity: exactly seven years after the death of Violate McGraw, the cult strikes again. Democritus predicted that every seven years, a kid would be taken. Even worse is that we get to watch as they abuse the poor kid in front of our eyes.
They got him into a van and drove him out to a remote area where they crucified him and stabbed him to death. When the boy prays to God, he gets laughed at. When the woman in the top hat adds, “your pain and fear purifies the steam,” she may be referring to the stress hormone adrenochrome.
Thomas of Monmouth came across the body of William of Norwhich. In his words, “having shaved his head, they stabbed it with countless thornpoints, and made the blood come horribly from the wounds they made…. some of those present ad judged him to be fixed to a cross in mockery of the Lord’s Passion.” According to legend, William’s body was discovered in Thorpe Wood with a crown of thorns on his head.
It’s hard to believe that Bradley Trevor’s death was a mere coincidence, especially when compared to the murder of William of Norwich and the film’s central message.
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Connection of the Movie With the Shining Novel
The film Doctor Sleep is adapted from Stephen King’s 2013 horror novel of the same name. In 1980, Stanley Kubrick filmed his adaptation of the Stephen King novel The Shining. Despite his distaste for Kubrick’s film version, King wrote and executive produced a fresh adaptation for television in 1997.
Director Mike Flanagan has stated that although though Doctor Sleep is a faithful adaptation of the 2013 sequel novel, it nonetheless “acknowledges Kubrick’s The Shining in some manner.”
Flanagan said, “It is an adaptation of the novel Doctor Sleep, which is Stephen King’s sequel to his novel, The Shining. But this also exists very much in the same cinematic universe that Kubrick established in his adaptation of The Shining.” He explained working with all the sources, “Reconciling those three, at times very different, sources has been kind of the most challenging and thrilling part of this creatively for us.”
He started by reading the novel, and then he and King talked about how to incorporate all the other sources. Flanagan used reenactments of The Shining from the process in flashbacks. Like his work on The Shining, Flanagan’s Scream was devoid of the typical jump scares found in the horror genre.