Last week, Pennywise the Dancing Clown crawled out of the sewers and back onto the silver screen to torment a grown-up Losers' Club in IT: Chapter Two. But new Stephen King nightmares loom in the darkness. On Sunday, Warner Bros. dropped a fresh trailer for Mike Flanagan's upcoming adaptation of King's Doctor Sleep—inviting all of us to come play in the blood-soaked halls of the Overlook Hotel. Watch your step.
Based on King's 2013 sequel to The Shining, Flanagan's Doctor Sleep follows a now-grown Dan Torrance, played by Ewan McGregor, as he wrestles with his demons and faces down a new supernatural threat. While young Danny survived his father's axe-wielding rampage all those years ago, the ghosts of the Overlook and his own psychic powers still haunt him. In the trailer, the adult Dan Torrance is disheveled, troubled, and running from himself. Dan soon crosses paths with Abra Stone, played by Kyliegh Curran, a psychic young girl gifted with the shining just like him. Dan senses the strength of Abra's abilities, yet he's far from the only one who's aware of her powers.
Hunting Abra is Rose the Hat, played by Rebecca Ferguson, and Rose's gang of psychic vampires called the True Knot. The gang feeds on the shine of innocents in their pursuit of immortality, and young Abra is next on the list. Together, Dan and Abra must harness their psychic abilities and stop the True Knot from continuing their feeding frenzy. Check it out:
Whereas the first Doctor Sleep trailer leaned on atmospherics and thrilling nods to Stanley Kubrick's orange-carpeted version of The Shining, the latest Doctor Sleep trailer gives us a clearer sense of what we'll see come November. The world is a hungry and dangerous place; Rose the Hat is out for psychic blood and Dan and Abra are the only two who can stop her.
Doubly exciting for horror fans is the return to the Overlook Hotel first envisioned by Kubrick in his 1980 adaptation, a setting that appears to play a major role in Flanagan's upcoming film. Flanagan has already stated that he views Doctor Sleep as an adaptation of King's literary universe as well as a sequel to Kubrick's film. And according to this report from Slashfilm, Flanagan meticulously reconstructed the Overlook using Kubrick's original blueprints.
Related: 10 Chilling Stephen King TV Adaptations
If the new trailer is any indication, Flanagan's attention to detail paid off. As Dan Torrance throws open the doors to the long-shuttered hotel and moves through its cobwebbed corridors, the bulbs overhead light up. The glow illuminates the axe damage, the REDRUM'd door—and the eternal residents still standing at the end of the hall.
Doctor Sleep hits theaters on November 8, 2019. Until then, sleep tight.
Still from 'Doctor Sleep' via Warner Bros.
