The movie sequel to Stephen King’s The Shining does something impressive and fixes one of Stanley Kubrick’s film’s most significant problems. The Shining is a polarizing movie, with many fans considering it a masterpiece of horror cinema and others hating it for what it changed from King’s original novel. Doctor Sleep tried to fix those changes.

Stephen King himself hates The Shining movie for several reasons. One of the reasons is that Jack Nicholson plays Jack Torrance as an unhinged, dangerous man from the start. When the Overlook H๏τel tempts him, he too easily succumbs to its curse. This makes Jack the bad guy, and it leaves the H๏τel mostly unscathed. Doctor Sleep fixes that.

Doctor Sleep Allows Danny To Do What Jack Should Have Done In The Shining

Since Jack Torrance is the villain of The Shining, and he tries to kill his family, Stanley Kubrick had him defeated in the end. This happens when Danny escapes the H๏τel and runs into the snowy maze. Jack, wielding his axe, chases his son, planning to kill him. However, thanks to the shining, Danny escapes, and his dad dies.

This didn’t happen in Stephen King’s novel because while Jack Torrance wasn’t a great man, he wasn’t the main villain. The Overlook H๏τel was the villain. It corrupted and possessed Jack, sending him to kill his family. In The Shining novel’s ending, Jack destroys the H๏τel by blowing up the boiler, thereby eliminating the evil.

Jack saved his family by sacrificing himself and destroying the Overlook H๏τel, making him a sort of hero of the novel in the end, although he was still possessed when he died. Stanley Kubrick ruined that moment by making Jack a remorseless villain. Mike Flanagan fixed this in Doctor Sleep, albeit with a different sacrifice.

Flanagan aimed to create a sequel that would satisfy both fans of Stanley Kubrick’s movie and Stephen King’s book, and he largely achieved this goal. In King’s Doctor Sleep novel and Flanagan’s movie, Danny had to return to the Overlook. In the book, it was the grounds where it once stood. In the film, it was the H๏τel.

Danny had to battle through the evil spirits and even had a chance to cross paths with Jack’s spirit. Danny then got Rose the Hat in the H๏τel, and when the spirits converged on her to end her evil rampage, Danny went down, smashed the boiler, and sacrificed himself to destroy the H๏τel, something his dad should have done before.

Doctor Sleep Masterfully Patched The Shining Movie & Books Together

When Danny died in Doctor Sleep and eliminated the evil spirits haunting the Overlook H๏τel’s halls while freeing his father’s spirit, he defeated the H๏τel. While Stanley Kubrick never cared about a haunted house story, King wrote one with The Shining, and Mike Flanagan honored it in Doctor Sleep, returning to the proper ending.

That isn’t all that Flanagan did to connect the movies. In The Shining, Jack killed Dick Hallorann when he returned to help Danny. This didn’t happen in the book, and Dick returned in the sequel novel. Flanagan fixed this by using Dick’s spirit to speak to Danny, allowing both versions to remain loyal and consistent.

Even Stephen King complimented Mike Flanagan on the Doctor Sleep movie ending, saying it fixed most of the problems with Stanley Kubrick’s film. While King still has complaints about how Wendy was portrayed, at least Flanagan patched the movie and book together and returned to the proper ending that King originally envisioned.

The Shining Remains A Masterpiece (Even With The Disappointing Ending)

While Stephen King hates the movie version of The Shining, and many King aficionados remain disappointed in it, the Stanley Kubrick horror film it still a masterpiece. The Shining is a masterwork of terror, with Jack Torrance losing his sanity and putting his wife and child in great danger, all in the secluded Overlook H๏τel.

The entire film is meticulously sH๏τ. There are moments where Jack speaks to a ghostly spirit, and the ghosts are always sH๏τ with an otherworldly bright white light behind them, whether at the bar or in the bathroom. Kubrick ensures that every sH๏τ in his film means something and adds to the story and the themes.

While this is not the haunted H๏τel story that Stephen King told, it works as a tale of terror. Both have Jack Torrance trying to kill his family, albeit for slightly different reasons, and both have the sight of a young child trying to survive to carry it to the eventual ending where Danny and Wendy live, and Jack dies.

It is disappointing to see the movie focus solely on Jack as the villain, but that worked perfectly for that version. While the haunted H๏τel was not the main villain, at least fans have Doctor Sleep to tell that story, and The Shining can remain its own story, one of the best in horror history.