By Ben Travis | Posted 3 Sep 2019

Mike Flanagan hasn’t made things easy for himself. The horror director behind Oculus, Hush, Gerald’s Game, and last year’s brilliant The Haunting Of Hill House Netflix series is the man tasked with bringing Stephen King’s Shining sequel Doctor Sleep to the screen. It’s a film that has to serve as a faithful King adaptation, while also incorporating elements of Stanley Kubrick’s iconic big-screen version of The Shining which King famously dislikes. A brand new exclusive image, as found in the October 2019 issue of Empire, teases some of that curious creative tension at the heart of the film.

That’s Ewan McGregor playing Dan Torrance (a grown-up version of The Shining’s Danny), and he’s face-to-face with Dick Hallorann – here played by Carl Lumbly. As Shining fans will know, Halloran (SPOILER WARNING for a near-40-year-old film) gets the axe, literally, by Jack Nicholson’s Jack Torrance in Kubrick’s film – but in King’s novel he survives, and has a part to play in the story of Doctor Sleep. For those who haven’t read the sequel novel, start your guessing now as to how Hallorann factors into this one.

Doctor Sleep follows Dan Torrance as an adult, battling alcoholism and understandably scarred by his experiences as a kid in the Overlook Hotel. Soon he meets Kyleigh Curran’s Abra, a girl who also has the ‘shine’ ability, and grows to learn about The True Knot – a predatory group led by Rebecca Ferguson’s Rose the Hat, who hunt down people that ‘shine’.

Read plenty more about how Flanagan approached his bold King-adaptation-slash-Kubrick-sequel in The Irishman issue of Empire – on sale Thursday 5 September, and available to pre-order online here. Doctor Sleep arrives in UK cinemas on 31 October.