'Doctor Sleep' Trailer Easter Eggs Connect to Kubrick's 'The Shining'

Here’s Johnny! Warner Bros. caught us by surprise on Thursday with the first trailer for Doctor Sleep, a new horror movie from director Mike Flanagan (Netflix’s The Haunting of Hill House) based on Stephen King’s sequel to The Shining.

The original The Shining movie famously diverged from the book in a number of key ways, with director Stanley Kubrick adding some of the story’s most iconic scenes along with major changes to the plot. Doctor Sleep will apparently stick more closely to King’s words, but as the trailer makes clear, it will also reference the famous horror film.

One of the most notable changes in Kubrick’s The Shining is that iconic hallway scene where Danny Torrance encounters the ghosts of twin girls while riding his tricycle through the haunted hotel. That never happened in the book, but here it is in a flashback sequence from the Doctor Sleep trailer.

For reference, here are the Grady twins in Kubrick’s The Shining.

Spooky stuff!

Here’s one more fun reference to the Kubrick movie. In the book, the Danny is warned not to go into room 217. However, in the movie that’s changed to 237 after the hotel where Kubrick filmed requested they use a fake room number to avoid scaring future guests. (This discrepancy also sparked a wacky theory that Kubrick filmed the moon landing.)

Anyway, here’s that same hotel room in Doctor Sleep:

Doctor Sleep is still expected to stick a lot closer to King’s sequel than Kubrick did the The Shining, but these not-so-subtle Easter eggs will make it easy for fans of the movie to enjoy this one too, even if they never read the original books.

Doctor Sleep stars Ewan McGregor as a grown-up Danny who encounters a group that feeds off the energy of others that share his “shine” abilities. Here’s the official synopsis:

Doctor Sleep continues the story of Danny Torrance, 40 years after his terrifying stay at the Overlook Hotel in The Shining. Ewan McGregor, Rebecca Ferguson and newcomer Kyliegh Curran star in the supernatural thriller, directed by Mike Flanagan, from his own screenplay based upon the novel by Stephen King.

Still irrevocably scarred by the trauma he endured as a child at the Overlook, Dan Torrance has fought to find some semblance of peace. But that peace is shattered when he encounters Abra, a courageous teenager with her own powerful extrasensory gift, known as the “shine.” Instinctively recognizing that Dan shares her power, Abra has sought him out, desperate for his help against the merciless Rose the Hat and her followers, The True Knot, who feed off the shine of innocents in their quest for immortality.

Forming an unlikely alliance, Dan and Abra engage in a brutal life-or-death battle with Rose. Abra’s innocence and fearless embrace of her shine compel Dan to call upon his own powers as never before—at once facing his fears and reawakening the ghosts of the past.

Doctor Sleep hits theaters on November 8.