Stephen King Claims Both The Shining and Shawshank Redemption Fans Will Like Doctor Sleep

The follow-up to Stephen King‘s The Shining, the much-anticipated Doctor Sleep, is hitting theaters in just a few weeks, but if any movie fans are on the fence about going to see it, King has nothing but good things to say about the Ewan McGregor-starring film. He’s been pretty vocal about how he feels about the film and now he’s making sure that fans of all spectrums of his work know that they’ll find something to enjoy in the film, stating that fans of both The Shining and Shawshank Redemption will enjoy Doctor Sleep.

On Wednesday, King took to Twitter to let fans know that fans of both will like Doctor Sleep and described the film as “immersive” as well as praised the film’s director not just for his directorial work, but as a storyteller as well.

“DOCTOR SLEEP: Mike Flanagan is a talented director, but he’s also an excellent storyteller,” King wrote. “The movie is a good thing. You’ll like this if you liked THE SHINING, but you’ll also like it if you liked SHAWSHANK. It’s immersive.”

King has had good things to say about Doctor Sleep for a while. Back in June when the trailer for the film arrived, King shared Flanagan’s own tweet of it and added commentary as to what fans might expect — especially in the wake of IT CHAPTER 2.

“This movie is going to blow your mind,” King said. “If you have any left after IT CHAPTER 2”.

Doctor Sleep is something of an interesting sort of adaptation of King’s work. It’s the follow-up to The Shining, which had a few differences from page to screen. On top of that, King famously disliked Kubrick’s The Shining, something that inspired him to help develop a miniseries adaptation of the novel in the 1990s. Flanagan, for Doctor Sleep, had the unique challenge of honoring the Kubrick film while also working with King’s original vision.

“When it came to trying to craft the adaptation, I went back to the book first and the big conversation that we had to have was about whether or not we could still do a faithful adaptation of the novel as King had laid it out, while inhabiting the universe that Kubrick had created,” Flanagan shared with press at a Q&A event. “And that was a conversation that we had to have with Stephen King, to kick the whole thing off. If that conversation hadn’t gone the way it went, we wouldn’t have done the film.”

He added, “As a lot of you know – I imagine all of you know – Stephen King’s opinions about the Kubrick adaptation are famous and complicated. And complicated to the point that if you’ve read [Doctor Sleep] you know that he actively and intentionally ignored everything that Kubrick had changed about his novel, and defiantly said, ‘Nope, this exists completely outside of the Kubrick universe.’”

Doctor Sleep hits theaters on November 8th.