If you want to know how one location from Stephen King's 1977 novel, The Shining made
a little cameo in Doctor Sleep, then stick around to the end of this video.
This video is brought to you by Privacy.com.
Privacy.com lets you buy things online using virtual cards instead of real ones, just like
how Danny and Abra fake their location from Rose and her gang in Doctor Sleep.
Privacy has rolled out a few new product options, so keep watching to learn more.
And as a special treat for my Things You Missed viewers, you'll get $5 to spend on your first
purchase - that’s free money that you can use to purchase anything online!
Go privacy.com/CZsWorld to sign up now.”
[INTRO]
The Shining is my favorite movie of all time, and it came out 39 years ago in May of 1980.
The prologue of Doctor Sleep, where Rose and her cult eat the steam of the little girl,
Violet, takes place in Florida in 1980, which is where Halloran was during the Overlook
Hotel's off-season in the Shining.
"Dick!
How you doing?
How's the weather down there?"
"I'm not in Florida, Larry.
I'm calling from the Stapleton Airport."
"What the hell you doing down there?"
"Well I just got in from Miami and I gotta get up to the Overlook today."
Rose and her gang have the ability to sense the biggest shiners in the country and go
after them.
Is it possible that they came to Florida to get Halloran, when they heard him trying to
reach Danny at the Overlook Hotel, but missed him and took Violet as a consolation prize?
Another homage to the year 1980 is seen during the exterior of Abra's house, the street number
is 1980.
Doctor Sleep features a musical score that is very similar to that of The Shining, where
director Stanley Kubrick used almost all Classical Music.
From the eerie haunting build of Bela Bartok's "Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta"
used when Danny and Jack have the one on one talk in the hotel room being referenced in
the music that we hear early on in the trailer community,
(Music)
...to the big pulsating tribal drums that echoed through the massive empty rooms of
the Overlook following Danny to Florida, New Jersey, to the middle of nowhere and back
Colorado.
But the Shining also features a couple of Jazz pieces, which can be heard when the hotel
is showing off events of days past, like Henry Hall's Home which celebrates Jack Torrance's
homecoming to the Gold Ballroom, and Al Bowlly and Ray Noble's "It's All Forgotten Now",
which plays while Grady tries to get Jack to remember his role at the Overlook, to correct
his family to protect the hotel.
"But I... corrected... them sir.
And when my wife tried to prevent me from doing my duty, I... corrected... her."
These songs can be heard in Doctor Sleep on the nomads' radio while they camp out and
try to tune into the mind of a Shiner with a lot of steam for them to capture next, which
reminded me of the line from Abra's mom where she says, "I know that head of yours is like
a radio."
So perhaps Rose and her gang are also picking up on some evil signals broadcasted from The
Overlook.
It's during these Dream hunting sequences, that Doctor Sleep also references a concept
seen elsewhere in the writings of Stephen King.
Rose invades the mind of Abra while she is asleep and sees a wall covered in filing cabinets
with memories and important facts about her life.
King's 2001 novel Dreamcatcher gives us a look into the mind of the character Jonesy,
who similarly files his memories away to a warehouse, resembling a building in Derry
called Tracker Bros shipping, and it too becomes the victim of an invasion, but Abra's mind
in Doctor Sleep is far more prepared to defend itself.
Of course, most of the connections to King’s writing in this movie are going to be connections
to the source material, Doctor Sleep and it’s prequel, The Shining.
For many movie fans, when they think of the most cursed room at The Overlook, they think
of Room 237, but the infamous room number was changed from Room 217 in the novel.
This is because of a request made by the hotel where the exteriors were filmed, The Timberline
Lodge.
The hotel, in perhaps one of the worst marketing blunders of all time, feared that people would
be too scared to stay in Room 217.
Doctor Sleep makes a little homage to the original room number when Danny Torrance first
starts working at the hospice in New Jersey.
He sees the cat, Azzy, wander into the room of a dying patient, the first instance of
him earning his nickname, Doctor Sleep, and the room number on the door is 217.
There’s also the fact that Danny, like his father Jack before him, has become an alcoholic.
Jack’s alcoholism is present in Kubrick’s adaptation, but is focused on much more in
the novel, where Jack has a catch phrase associated with his drunken beatings of Danny,
“Come on and take your medicine!
Take it like a man!”
Now despite this line never appearing in the 1980 film, it does make a comeback at the end of
Doctor Sleep, where Danny comes face to face one more time with his father at the bar in
the Gold Room.
Uhh… they do know that Jack Nicholson is still alive right?
He also pours a glass of Jack Daniels, which is symbolic of the fact that both Jack and
Dan resorted to alcoholism at some point.
But the Overlook itself would not be the only major connection to Stanley Kubrick’s psychological
horror masterpiece, when we return, I’ll have even more hidden connections featured
in Doctor Sleep.
One scene I found particularly interesting in Doctor Sleep was right after Rose went
into Abra’s mind and saw the inside of her room.
Abra decides to rearrange her furniture and make it look like a different room to protect
her privacy.
That got me thinking, anytime we buy things online, we’re opening up our windows for
merchants and their data partners to see our personal information without our consent.
That’s where Privacy.com can protect you.
They make it super easy to protect your financial life online by generating virtual card numbers
that hide your real bank information, so you never have to worry about strangers seeing
the info attached to your account.
They also let you set limits on each virtual card to protect you from unwanted charges
going through.
Privacy.com, as always, is totally free to use.
You can create up to 12 virtual cards per month.
They’ve also just introduced two new plans.
“Pro” is $10/month, gives you everything from the free plan, plus 1% cashback on all
purchases, 36 cards/month and even more security and privacy features.
If you’re using Privacy for a team or small business, you’ll want the “Team” plan.
It’s $25/month, gives you access to everything from the Pro version plus DEDICATED account
management, 60 cards/month and transaction limits tailored to your business needs.
If you go to my link, privacy.com/czsworld, you’ll get $5 for free to spend literally
wherever you want.
So there’s no reason not to do it.
Just look for the link in the description, privacy.com/CZsWorld.
The Shining is well known, not only for it’s
genius director, but also it’s unbelievable performances from Jack Nicholson, Shelley
Duvall, Danny Lloyd and Scatman Crothers.
Doctor Sleep chose to recast these characters, even though realistic visual effects now exist,
so the characters had to recreate the performances of the actors in The Shining.
In the prologue, when Danny is talking to Dick Halloran on the bench, Wendy comes up
screaming Danny’s name, crying as if she had been looking for him in a panic is a mimic
of the penultimate scene of the Shining.
"Danny? Danny!"
"Mommy!"
"Danny! Danny!"
There’s also a facial expression that fans have dubbed The Kubrick Stare, in which a
character tilts their chin down while looking up to make them look deviously sinister on
camera.
During the ambush scene, where Danny and Billy hide out in the woods with rifles to take
down the nomads who are coming for Abra, the last one standing is Snakebite Andi who emerges
from the trailing donning the signature Kubrickian look.
One of the scenes where Jack can be seen with a creepy expression in the Shining is while
he’s staring at Wendy and Danny in the miniature hedge maze, so I took it as no coincidence that
the town adult Danny ends up in also has a miniature model version, that Danny spends
some time helping to build.
It is here where he meets Billy, who introduces him to the man he would interview with for
the job at the hospice, and that interview takes place in a room that is identical to
the room Jack interviews in for the caretaker job at the overlook.
The wall color, layout, window placement, this flag, that pen, the cup, the artwork
and even some of the camera angles used to shoot it are a direct recreation of Jack’s
interview.
For both characters, it represents a point of no return in the story.
Other parallels between Jack and Danny exist up and down the plot.
I mentioned the fact that they are both alcoholics, and Danny brings this up during one of the
AA meetings, saying he’s standing where his father once stood, and that idea comes
back when he and Rose face off in the Overlook’s Colorado Lounge and he asks her if she knows
where she’s standing.
The axe fight between Danny and Rose also goes up and down the stairs, being blocked
out exactly how the fight between Jack and Wendy went down nearly 40 years prior.
But the connections to The Shining do not end there.
During the flashback, Wendy and Danny can be seen watching a Bugs Bunny cartoon that
illustrates the current state of affairs, and connects to the shirt that Danny wore
in his first scene in the Shining.
Bugs Bunny is chosen because Bugs’ catch phrase is
“What’s Up, Doc?”
And Danny’s nickname in The Shining is Doc…
Which carries over to current times where Danny becomes known at the hospice as Doctor
Sleep.
Before we move on from Danny, one other thing I noticed was during the end credits.
Danny Lloyd, the actor who played Danny Torrance in The Shining was listed as “Spectator”.
I’m guessing he may have made his cameo at the movie theater or the little league
game.
Before Doctor Sleep, he hadn’t acted since 1982; but the spooky part is that after he
decided to quit acting he grew up and became a teacher, just as Jack Torrance was in The
Shining.
[spooky clip]
Unfortunately, one actor who could not have come back to reprise his role was Scatman
Crothers who passed away in 1986.
His character, Dick Halloran has a final conversation with Danny in Doctor Sleep, where Danny describes
each of the ghosts of the Overlook’s past that he’d locked away in Halloran’s box,
the last of which was Horace Derwent, who spat out his signature phrase, “Great party,
isn’t it?” as the box locked him away.
There are two Things You (might have) Missed here.
The guy he’s referring to seems to be this guy from The Shining.
“Great party, isn’t it?”
...who’s credited as “Injured Guest”, and who I dressed up as for Halloween in 2012.
The bald cap didn’t really work out, so I ended up being a younger version of Injured
Guest.
Doctor Sleep makes the suggestion that Injured Guest is actually Horace Derwent, a character
from the history of the Overlook in the novel.
Horace was a millionaire inventor, pilot, film producer and entrepreneur who bought
and renovated the hotel in 1945 and turned the place into an entertainment destination
as well as adding a roque court in the lawn.
The Overlook was perhaps his one unsuccessful business venture though, and he sold the property
after losing three million dollars on it.
I guess that party wasn’t so great after all.
If you have any other things you noticed in Doctor Sleep, leave them in the comments,
I’d love to hear what you all picked up on, and don’t forget to go to privacy.com/czsworld
and get your free $5.
The link will be in the description.
If you love horror, make sure you subscribe to CZsWorld for new horrors every week, ring
that deathbell for notifications and I’ll see you in the next one.
Assuming we both survive.