“I need to wake it up” Dan says, in regards to the familiar looking estate - and what a terrifying, twisted treat it is to creep once again through those pulsating halls of hell.

His idea is to attract these cultists to the snowy Colorado Rockies, where the ghosts of the Overlook might give True Knot a taste of its own lethal medicine. It’s only when the cult sets its eye on Abra that Dan rouses himself to action and possible redemption. John (Bruce Greenwood) steer him to a sympathetic sponsor (Cliff Curtis) and a job at a hospice where he can ease patients gently into that good night. There’s a lot of foot-dragging across several states before Danny, now Dan, ends up in New Hampshire. As played with wavering, sad-eyed resilience by the excellent Ewan McGregor, Danny is now a fortysomething washout trying to drown away his haunted-hotel PTSD in booze, sex, barroom brawls and a series of jobs he can’t keep. Remember Danny Torrance, the kid who once biked through the halls of the Overlook, banging into those eerie, Arbus-eyed twins in their party dresses and the naked old bat rotting in her bathtub in Room 237? Well, he not a kid any more. And yet his take has its fair share of chills, albeit one undercut by lazy character development and a punishing running time of 151 minutes. How’s the rest of the movie? Well, King is pleased. Because the dazzlingly detailed recreation of The Shining‘s big, bad getaway steals every scene it’s in.

King resisted, then finally relented - and that’s a good thing. Flannagan, emboldened by his success with The Haunting of Hill House on Netflix, wanted to bring back the Overlook just as the late, great Kubrick indelibly imagined it, with the ghostly resort being an essential ingredient in his screen adaptation. Besides, readers of the novel may remember the author burned down the Overlook Hotel, the scary place that compelled caretaker Jack Torrance to try to kill his wife and young son. Stephen King legendarily hated the classic 1980 film Stanley Kubrick made of The Shining - a fact that made it hard for writer-director Mike Flanagan to get King’s seal of approval to film Doctor Sleep, the bestselling 2013 sequel to his haunted-hotel magnum opus.

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