Coming off raves for his adaptation of “Gerald’s Game” for Netflix, filmmaker Mike Flanagan has two other Stephen King projects he says he’d love to tackle – King’s 2013 “The Shining” semi-sequel novel “Doctor Sleep,” and his 2006 novel “Lisey’s Story”.
Flanagan revealed the list of adaptations he’d be most interested in doing whilst speaking with the King-centric site Lilja’s Library, saying: “[T]he ones I’d want to do the most are Doctor Sleep and Lisey’s Story. In both cases, it’s because I identify with the protagonists so much. Lisey’s Story is a stunning piece of work, a beautiful exploration of marriage. And who wouldn’t want to venture back into the world of Danny Torrance?”
“Doctor Sleep” follows a now adult Danny Torrance, the boy who survived the Overlook Hotel, who became an angry alcoholic drifter. Opting to settle down and ditch the bottle, his suppressed psychic powers re-emerge to provide comfort to dying patients. He’s soon contacted by a young girl with a stronger ‘shining’ than him and who is being hunted by a cult of quasi-immortals keen kidnap and feed off her psychic energy.
“Lisey’s Story” follows a woman named Lisey who lost her novelist husband Scott after a twenty-five-year marriage of profound and sometimes frightening intimacy. Scott would visit Boo’ya Moon,’ a place that both terrified and healed him. Two years after Scott’s death, she goes there and ends up in a nearly fatal journey into the darkness he inhabited.
Flanagan is presently at work on Netflix’s event series adaptation of Shirley Jackson’s classic haunted house novel “The Haunting of Hill House”.
