Format: DVD from Cortland Public Library on basement television.
One of the problems with sequels is that there are a lot of expectations with them. John Carpenter wanted to turn the Halloween franchise into an anthology, with a completely different story every year. He tried with Halloween III and got buried for it, even though now, decades later, it’s considered a pretty good horror movie. Often, a sequel happens after a movie gets a great deal of acclaim, and the sequel is frequently a disappointment because of those expectations. So how do you do a sequel after 40 years? Well, they did it with Halloween from 2018, and did it pretty well. Doctor Sleep attempts to do the same thing with The Shining.
Before we dive head-first into Doctor Sleep, I want to discuss this idea of sequels and what Doctor Sleep does right in that respect. A sequel to what is widely considered one of the greatest horror movies ever made 40 years after the fact is, honestly, a big ask. What we expect, of course, is that we’ll spend the movie at The Overlook dealing with the unquiet ghosts of the past. The truth is that we do get there eventually, but not until the third act. Doctor Sleep wants us to earn that return to Room 237. So, we’re going to deal with something entirely different that is going to lead us back to that doomed hotel. By the time we get there, we’ve had an entirely new story to get us there.
