The other - it's only one day but holy shit, man, you're going to be under enormous scrutiny.” “One is Billy, the best friend, and you've played that part before.
“Talking to Henry about it I was like, look, there are really two places that I could see you really working,” Flanagan said. At first, he considered casting Thomas as Billy Freeman, Dan Torrance’s sober buddy, which Cliff Curtis ended up playing. Thomas has become a staple of Flanagan’s films and TV projects, often playing unsettling fathers, from Hill House to Gerald’s Game. Jack doesn’t.Yes - that Henry Thomas, the little boy from E.T. Basically, both men are courted by dark forces into doing some truly awful shit in exchange for purely selfish rewards.
And the ghoul patrol that is the True Knot try to convince Dan to hand them Abra with similar promises. The Overlook’s spook troop try to seduce Jack into giving them Danny by tempting him with booze and freedom from the responsibility of having a family. Related to that point, Dan and Jack are tested in essentially the same way. So, both The Shining and Doctor Sleep begin with father and son respectively being given a second chance to stop destroying themselves with liquor. When Dan decides to clean himself up and get sober, he gets a job at the hospice thanks to his friend and AA sponsor. Hallorann taught him how to trap the ghosts in a “lockbox” in his mind, but over the years Dan grew so weary of all the visions the shining would bring him that he decided to stay blind drunk to block them out. Even after escaping the Overlook, the ghosts still came after him for years, hungry for his rad psychic powers. When we first check in with Dan at the beginning of Doctor Sleep, he’s a pretty out-of-control drunk. Jack actually gets the job as the Overlook’s caretaker thanks to his AA sponsor. Jack’s doing a balancing act above booze and his anger, and the ghosts of the Overlook push him off the highwire. In The Shining, Jack is a recovering alcoholic, trying to clean up his act after dislocating Danny’s arm in a drunken outburst and losing his job as a professor after assaulting a student he catches in the act of slashing his tires. Dan was always going to have this job and help people in this way, because he was always Doctor Sleep.Īnother major connection is alcoholism. That’s ultimately how the shining works - it connects people to the past and the future, kind of like a horror version of the Force. His knack for always being around when a patient dies earns him the nickname Doctor Sleep - Doc, for short. Thanks to his abilities (and a cat who seems to know when someone in the building is about to die), Dan is able to help dying patients pass on into the next world with peace and comfort. In Doctor Sleep, grown-up Dan finds his way into working at a hospice as an orderly. Related to that is Dan’s nickname in both books - “Doc.” Danny’s parents call him Doc in The Shining, in reference to Bugs Bunny’s famous catchphrase.
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