Stephen King’s Doctor Sleep Trailer Released

The first trailer for The Shining sequel Doctor Sleep has now been released online! Watch it above and we’ll break it down below!

Stephen King fans were primed and ready for this Doctor Sleep trailer to arrive, after the film’s first poster dropped earlier in the day, teasing the trailer’s arrival – not to mention the positive first reactions that came out of the film’s CinemaCon previews. Now that fans are getting their first look at what director Mike Flanagan (Oculus, Haunting of Hill House) has put together, there’s going to be a lot of chatter about how Doctor Sleep lives up to both the legacy of Stephen King’s book, and The Shining movie by Stanley Kubrick, which is what most viewers will associate this sequel film with.

Doctor Sleep stars Ewan McGregor as the grown-up version of The Shining‘s child protagonist, Danny Torrance. It also stars Rebecca Ferguson (Mission: Impossible 5 & 6) as a predatory cult leader; Kyliegh Curran as girl with a power “shining”; Bruce Greenwood (Star Trek) as the girl’s doctor; Zahn McClarnon (Westworld) as the cult leader’s henchman; and Alex Essoe as Danny’s mother, Wendy Torrance.

You can check out the full synopsis for Doctor Sleep, below:

“On highways across America, a tribe of people called The True Knot travel in search of sustenance. They look harmless – mostly old, lots of polyester, and married to their RVs. But as Dan Torrance knows, and tween Abra Stone learns, The True Knot are quasi-immortal, living off the “steam” that children with the “shining” produce when they are slowly tortured to death. Haunted by the inhabitants of the Overlook Hotel where he spent one horrific childhood year, Dan has been drifting for decades, desperate to shed his father’s legacy of despair, alcoholism, and violence. Finally, he settles in a New Hampshire town, an AA community that sustains him, and a job at a nursing home where his remnant “shining” power provides the crucial final comfort to the dying. Aided by a prescient cat, he becomes “Doctor Sleep.” Then Dan meets the evanescent Abra Stone, and it is her spectacular gift, the brightest shining ever seen, that reignites Dan’s own demons and summons him to a battle for Abra’s soul…”

While it is indeed a sequel to The Shining, Doctor Sleep is also playing with a very different aesthetic and mythos than its predecessor. That vast difference has made Stephen King’s source novel a divisive read for fans, and it may be the same for viewers who come to the Doctor Sleep movie with no real knowledge of what the story is about.

Doctor Sleep hits theaters on November 8th.