Tag Archives: Stephen King

6 Trailers For Halloween

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Happy Halloween!

Well, the big day is finally here and that means that it’s time for a special Halloween edition of Lisa Marie’s Favorite Grindhouse Trailers!  Below you’ll find the trailers for some of my favorite horror films!  Let’s take a look!

  1. Suspiria (1977)

That I picked this trailer to start off this special edition should come as a surprise to no one.  While I don’t think the trailer really does the film justice, Suspiria is still one of my favorite movies of all time.  Don’t talk to me about the remake and we’ll get along just fine.

2. Zombi 2 (1979)

Also known as Zombie Flesh Eaters!  This is the Lucio Fulci-directed classic that launched the Italian zombie boom!

3. The Beyond (1981)

And, as long as we’re talking about Fulci, there’s no way that I could possibly leave The Beyond‘s trailer out of this post.

4. Martin (1978)

Some people, undoubtedly, will say, “Martin but no Night of the Living Dead?”  Well, we’ll be featuring Night of the Living Dead later today.  Martin is one of George Romero’s best films and it’s still criminally unknown.  Check out the trailer but definitely be sure to track down the film as well.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNIGTSdKPl0

5. Halloween (1978)

Naturally.

6. The Shining (1980)

Stephen King might not like it but Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining remains one of the best horror films ever made.  It’s one of the few films that continues to scare me after multiple viewings.  (It’s those two little girls in the hallway.  They freak me out every time!)

Happy Halloween!

The Mangler, Story Review by Case Wright

Posted on by casewright

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Sometimes you just can’t win! You need to make a few bucks and you take a job at a cleaners, but the laundry press is possessed by a demon and starts killing everyone and the Christmas party is BYOB. This is the premise of The Mangler.  This laundry press gets exposed to a bunch of different bloods – animal and virgin human, which summons a demon to possess the laundry press. The laundry machine goes a killing spree, but my collars have never looked crisper!  I always liked this story because it’s so awesomely bad. It’s really corny and silly, but unintentionally so.  It would be great as a Rifftrax.

As I was reading, I couldn’t help thinking, Self, it really is EASY to summon demons in Maine.  It makes you wonder why anyone visits or lives there?  Sure, the fall foliage is nice, but you’re always knee deep in clowns, werewolves, vampires, large rats, ghosts, creepy college students, aliens, more ghosts, the devil (kinda), cultists, creepy rednecks, slime beasts, and pederasts.  I’ve been to A LOT of Maine and I will attest that the above villains are truly a nuisance and they are all close talkers!

The Mangler is a fun read because it turns into a quick-paced detective story.  The cops Hunton and Jackson become ghost busters and try to get the demon out of the machine. I know it’s a short story, but they really embrace the whole – it’s a demon laundry machine really fast.  There’s no time where people are like, What? This is stupid! Really stupid!  It starts getting really goofy when the machine chases its victims down a gnaws them to death.

At the end, I know it’s not supposed to be a comedy, but it chases the cops around and eats one of them.  It’s just kinda silly.  Of course, this story is really needed as unintentional comic relief because some of the other stories are just so depressing in Night Shift like “The Last Rung on the Ladder” ….ughhh- best cure for a happy thought.  Really, if you think you’re a bad sibling, read “The Last Rung on the Ladder” and you’ll feel waaaaay better about yourself.

The Mangler is not his best story- it’s actually really dumb, but it reads like a fun bad movie.  It’s the Sharknado 1 of Stephen King if not ALL literature. In short, it IS entertaining. You have a big iron up to no good and two incompetent policemen trying to save the day.  It needs a SYFY run desperately! Happy Horrorthon!

“I Am The Doorway”, Story Review by Case Wright

Posted on by casewright

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How free are we?  “I am the doorway” by Stephen King is an early work. It was published in 1971, when he was just 24. For context, we’d just gotten back from the moon 2 years prior.  The stories in Night Shift were gathered from this time period.  “I am the doorway” was published by Cavalier (see above).  I always thought that was odd not that Stephen King was getting published, but Cavalier?  Cavalier was a “Men’s” magazine.  I always thought that was strange and must be unique to the 1960s and early 1970s where people paired their Men’s magazines with literature and poetry.  Shel Silverstein wrote poetry for Playboy.  I guess that’s where The Sidewalk really ended?

The stories in Night Shift, and “I am the doorway” revolve around free will and how free we actually are by outside influence.   The occult is present of course, but that’s tangential.  The real meat of Stephen’s stories are always about the people living with the monsters.  In these early stories, it’s the people who are the monsters.  Either people are pulling their strings, life is pulling their strings, or monsters because this was his life.  He was newly married, he had kids on the way, and he was working jobs from substitute teaching and doing laundry to meet the bills.  Very few of us are free and if you think you are one of the Select, stop paying your credit card or student loan for a couple of cycles and get back to me.

The will once given up can’t be retrieved, you’re trapped like Richard in Quitters Inc..  Blood called to blood in Jerusalem’s Lot from generations forward, poking free will right in the eye. In Salem’s Lot, Ben Mears described his oddly fortuitous meeting of Susan Norton – Ben Mears’ love interest- as if the “universe were making some sort of cosmic bread.” When the will is taken away, it can be retrieved with a cost like in Jerusalem’s Lot or in this story “I am the Doorway”. The main point is that if we give into the darkness like the teenagers did in Night Surf, we are gone for good.  The will itself is like origami beautiful, fragile, and unique to the individual.  The will is cajoled, stolen, sold, and bought back.  The will for King appears to be akin to the soul.  Perhaps that’s why giving up one’s will to a higher power is so challenging and difficult to do?

“I am the doorway” is told as a first person narrative by Arthur who was an astronaut to Venus.  He gets exposed to alien cooties and starts to morph…grossly.  He develops eyes on his hands, which allows the aliens from Venus to see into our world.  Although he is disabled, when he falls asleep, the Venusians hijack his body and make him kill with lightning bolt powers.  The first victim is a child.  He understands that the Venutians will invade using him as a portal somehow.  Maybe he could try Atkins and get really small? To stop the invasion, he tries to burn the eyes off of his hands with Kerosene, but 7 years later, eyes open on his chest or as Stephen King would write “Sometimes They Come Back”.

Arthur can get his will back and stop the murders and the invasion, but the price will be the highest he can pay.  Like Arthur, we have these external forces in our lives.  Whether we are really free or not, I don’t really think so.  However, I know that some will is meant to be abdicated.  You give some freedom for the best moments in your life: marriage and children.  Both take up time and limit your freedom (no spur of the moment Vegas Trips and getting out the door can be interminable), but they complete a part of yourself that was missing and desperately needed to be found and they kinda look you and act like you, or the UPS man. Maybe giving up some of our will is the only way we can grow? Perhaps the doorway for us is to wisdom.

Quitters Inc, Story Review, by Case Wright

Posted on by casewright

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Smoking is a nasty habit.  I did smoke for 10 years and quit.  I didn’t do it any other way than to stop altogether.  To this day, when I smell one, I want one- except for Dorals because they’re gross.  Don’t let anyone tell you different; it is an addiction.  Richard Morrison, the protagonist, is a advertising man who shared my addiction.  Richard is in nadir of his life.  His son is severely mentally disabled and lives at an inpatient school, his wife nags him constantly, his overweight, and Rick smokes.

He smokes until he meets Jimmy McCann who tells him about Quitters Inc.  It’s strictly word of mouth and free.  Richard attends Quitters Inc.  Once you commit, you can’t leave.  It’s free because the founder, a mobster, bequeathed his fortune to get people to stop smoking the way the mob does they threaten you, your family, harm you, harm your family, or all or some of the above.

Richard learns that he will be under surveillance and if he smokes they will beat his wife. If he smokes again, they will beat his son and do escalating harm to his family and himself.  They even go beyond smoking and threaten to cut off his wife’s finger if he doesn’t lose weight.  Quitters Inc. runs life choices.

This is one of Stephen King’s early works and it’s written very tight. There’s no extra words or passages.  It reads like it went through many edits to purposefully ratchet up the tension.  You feel for Richard because he’s trying to succeed, but like all of us, he comes close to failure.  Every time Richard fails, you feel it in the pit of your stomach because you know the retribution is coming for his family.

The odd part of the story is that his life improves when Quitter’s Inc takes over.  You wonder if maybe free will is not for everyone.  In Richard’s case, free will destroyed his health and free will got him to accept unknown entity into his life that harms his family.  Freedom isn’t free, but giving up free will isn’t free either.

Jerusalem’s Lot, Book Review, By Case Wright

Posted on by casewright

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Jerusalem’s Lot is a short story by Stephen King that is a prequel to Salem’s Lot. Salem Lot was reviewed by Lisa! Lisa’s Salem Lot Review is Right Here! REALLY!  I want to make another thing clear: I didn’t read the story this time. I listened to the Audiobook … again. The performance is by John Glover and it’s really like a radio show.  John brings it! It’s a one-man-show with different voices and gravitas.  John Glover is truly a national treasure!!!

The story takes place in Jerusalem’s Lot, Maine in 1850 and is told as a series of journal entries by Charles Boone and few by Boone’s manservant/pal Calvin McCann.  Boone inherits his ancestral home in Chapelwaite, Maine just two miles from the eponymous Jerusalem’s Lot. After he moves in, he starts to hear what he believes are large rats crawling in the walls. It turns out they’re not rats, but ghosts of the damned!  The longer that Boone is in the house, the stronger the ghosts become.  People acting as a doorway to evil is common in Stephen King’s early works.  In “The Shining”, Danny Torrence’s ESP abilities acted as a battery that charged up the ghosts of the Overlook Hotel so that they could interface with our reality.  It was weird that the ghosts wanted to kill Danny; they surmised that his death would give them permanent entry into our world; so, why kill Danny? Wouldn’t Danny’s Death remove the energy production?

As Charles stays, the Ghosts leave him and Calvin maps and notes guiding them to the nearby town of Jerusalem’s Lot.  It is revealed that Jerusalem’s Lot was a town founded by Charles’ distant ancestor John Boone who became a devil worshiping sex pervert.  I used to visit Maine a lot in my younger days and sure there isn’t always a lot to do, but who knew that these Maine residents were only a missed Red Sox game away from creating an inbred demonic sex cult?!  Sex cults are in now check out Lisa’s NXIVM Lifetime movie  HERE!

John’s demonic sex cult set out to manifest a gigantic intergalactic demon worm to the Jerusalem Lot Chapel by reading from an evil book called “Mysteries of the Worm” by Nicolas Sparks, then have red punch, and Bundt cake. They were apparently successful because the town is deserted. Boone discovers that Boone’s descendants act as a doorway for the inbred demonic sex cult to return because blood calls to blood! Bwhahaha.  You can inherit the evil deeds of your ancestors. Oh well, as an Italian, Sorry Celts… Whoopsie.

Charles sets out to destroy the book because he doesn’t want the world to end or have a “Notebook” sequel in circulation.  Does Boone save the day? Buy the audiobook!

Night Shift as a whole is a brilliant collection of short stories from a time when Stephen King had just been able to support himself and his family with his writing.  His stories are leaner and heavily edited, making them a lot of fun to read because there’s no extraneous elements.  I will likely review many more short stories from this book and this period because they are some of his best work.  Happy Horrorthon!

“In The Tall Grass” Review by Case Wright

Posted on by casewright

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Happy Horrorthon! With all the streaming services that I review, you’d think one of them would comp me for a month! Feel bad for me… What do you get when you mix: Religious ferver, sacrifice, cannabalism, a soon to be baby daddy, a really skinny dirty kid/oracle, a dog, alien influenced grass, and A LOT of REALLY stupid choices? Yep, you get “In the Tall Grass”.  This sounds really convoluted, but the tall grass is just that, but it’s also evil or controlled by an alien spaceship.  I’m guessing spaceship.  The story is basically Tommyknockers, but without any inventions and far less math.

Let me explain, Becky is unmarried, pregnant by a musician of sorts, and on her way to give up her baby to a family in San Diego.  Cal, her brother, is driving her cross country to do it. Why are they driving and not flying?  I don’t really know because the adoptive family would’ve definitely paid for a flight, but the adoptive parents make remote bad choices like everyone else in this story.  Let’s call this Bad Decision #1.  They decide to stop and they hear a boy yelling for help who is purportedly lost in the tall grass and needs emergency services.  Becky and Cal do not have EMS training, supplies, or even a compass- so they decide to enter the tall grass because they are stupid..really.  This is Bad Decision #2.  Really what did they think that they would do other than get lost?  They didn’t even think to call the police first! The police by the way would’ve said DON’T GO IN THE GRASS or pay a lot for that muffler.  The two of them rapidly realize that they are lost and not really in normal grass.

Later, the soon to be Baby Daddy- Travis- shows up at the cornfield.  He finds his girlfriend’s abandoned car.  It’s been there a while.  Does he call the police? Nope.  Now, I get some folks want to be their own first-responder and that’s respectable if you are basically competent.  Travis is not call police – Bad Decision #3. Travis then decides to also trounce around in the grass …. and gets lost. Bad Decision #4.

Travis finds Tobin the boy that called Becky into the grass and he knows A LOT about everyone: Travis, Becky, Cal, and all the other people in the grass. Yes, there is another family in there, BUT the dad in the family has gone full on EVIL.  That man is Ross (Patrick Wilson).  Ross was a normal person until he went into the grass and touched the monolith rock at the grass maze’s center.  The rock tells you to do things like how to get out of the grass, how to smash your wife’s skull – yep that happened, and whether or not Keto is just plain bullshit.

I’d like to take a second to write about Patrick Wilson’s performance. I liked it. Granted, I’m a fan of his work, but it was fun to see him play a villain. He had the phony real estate thing down and he could really turn up the rage. Also, his character was the only one not to make stupid choices.

The story shifts into a cat and mouse game of Ross hunting Becky and the rest of the people down to kill them over and over again.  Over and over again? Yes, there’s a time loop created by the rock.  So, you get lost in the grass a lot and killed a lot by Ross.  Bummer.  Their only hope is to kill Ross and stop the cycle. Will they kill Ross? Will they remain in the tall grass? Will I get up to benching 315Lbs (142 Kg)?

Is this movie worth watching? Well…the constant bad decisions really make it hard to sympathize with the characters.  I feel like the grass could’ve been more choosy or maybe the grass is a rescuer alien entity likes chaos like ALL of my ex-girlfriends.  The movie also really reminded me of Cube and it turns out it was written by Vincenzo Natali – the writer and director of Cube. Well, it basically was Cube meets evil Field of Dreams.  What is old is new again and again and again…wait I just wondered into some grass. No…wait, it’s just the kitchen. Do you want anything as long as I’m up?

For all you Stephen King nerds there were some Easter eggs In The Tall Grass, See Below:

 

Horror Film Review: Firestarter (dir by Mark L. Lester)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Adapted from Stephen King novel, 1984’s Firestarter is a film about a girl with a very special power.

Back in the day, a bunch of college students needed weed money so they took part in a government experiment.  Half of them were told that they were being given a placebo.  The other half were told that we would be given a low-grade hallucinogen.

Surprise!  The government lied!  It turns out that everyone was given the experimental drug!  Some of the students ended up going crazy.  One unfortunate hippie clawed his eyes out.  Meanwhile, Vicky (Heather Locklear) gained the ability to read minds.  She also fell in love with Andy McGee (David Keith), a goofy fellow who gained the ability to mentally control people’s actions.  They married and had a daughter named Charlie (played by a very young Drew Barrymore).  Charlie, it turns out, can set things on fire!  She’s a firestarter!

Well, of course, the government can’t just leave the McGees out there, controlling minds and setting things on fire.  Soon, the McGees are being pursued by the standard collection of men in dark suits.  Vicky is killed off-screen, leaving Charlie and Andy to try to find some place where they’ll be safe.

Good luck with that!  This is the government that we’re talking about.  The thing with films like this is that the government can do practically anything but it never occurs to them to not all dress in dark suits.  I mean, it just seems like it would be easier for all of these secret agents to operate if they weren’t automatically identifiable as being secret agents.  Anyway, Andy and Charlie are eventually captured and taken to The Farm, a really nice country estate where Andy and Charlie are kept separate from each other and everyone keeps talking about national security.

Running the Farm is Capt. Hollister and we know that he’s a bad guy because he wears a suit and he’s played by Martin Sheen.  Working with Hollister is John Rainbird (George C. Scott), a CIA assassin who kills people with a karate chop across the nose.  When Charlie refuses to show off her firemaking abilities unless she’s allowed to talk to her father, Rainbird disguises himself as a custodial engineer and proceeds to befriend Charlie.  Of course, Rainbird’s plan is to kill Charlie once she’s displayed the extent of her powers….

Stephen King has written that he considers this film to be one of the worst adaptations of one of his novels but, to be honest, I think the movie is actually a bit of an improvement on the source material.  Firestarter is probably the least interesting of Stephen King’s early novels.  Supposedly, Charlie was based on King’s youngest daughter and, reading the book, it’s obvious that everyone’s fear of Charlie is mostly a metaphor for a father trying to figure out how to raise a daughter.  Unfortunately, instead of concentrating on those primal fears, the book gets bogged down in boomer paranoia about MK-ULTRA experiments.

The movie, however, is just silly enough to be kind of charming.  For example, consider the way that Andy grabs his forehead and bugs out his eyes whenever he uses his powers.  Andy’s powers may be slowly killing him but he just looks so goofy whenever he uses them that you just can’t help but be entertained.  And then you’ve got Drew Barrymore sobbing while setting people on fire and George C. Scott growling through all of his dialogue and even Martin Sheen gets a scene where he gets excited and starts jumping up and down.  (And don’t even get me started on Art Carney and Louise Fletcher as the salt-of-the-Earth farmers who try to protect Andy and Charlie….)  Some of the special effects are a bit hokey, as you might expect from a film made in 1984 but occasionally, there’s a good shot of something (or someone) burning up.  It’s all so over-the-top and relentlessly dumb that you can’t help but be entertained.  You can even forgive the fact that basically nothing happens between the first 10 and the last 15 minutes of the movie.

Firestarter‘s silly but I liked it.

Creepshow, S1 Ep 1, “Gray Matter” “The House of the Head” Review by Case Wright

Posted on by casewright

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Happy Horrorthon! We are in the thick of it and it is AWESOME! Yes, I got another streaming subscription service, but I draw the line at Disney and CBS because they’re boring.  In 1982, Creepshow was a film written, produced, and directed by horror masters, including Stephen King.  The stories were an homage to the EC Horror Comics from the 1950s and 1960s.  The show has become reincarnated on the Shudder streaming service and I will review all of the episodes as they are released.

What’s great about these shows (except for Two Sentence Horror, which is a steaming pile of garbage) is that they give talented people a chance to direct or write when they haven’t had the opportunity prior. Also, because Greg Nicotero (Executive Producer Of The Walking Dead and friend to everyone in horror) is helming it, the show has tremendous access to great stories by Stephen King and actors like Tobin Bell (Saw) and Giancarlo Esposito (Breaking Bad).

The two stories in the premiere were Gray Matter – a Stephen King short story from Night Shift, Directed by Greg Nicotero and The House of the Head was the second story and was Directed by John Harrison, written by Josh Malerman.  The two stories and direction were completely different.

Gray Matter was what I expected: an over the top story with lots of gore that would have been totally at home in a Tales From the Crypt episode.  The House of the Head, on the other hand was genuinely TERRIFYING! I had trouble watching this story because it was so intense that I really worried about the characters and the figurines- I’ll explain later.

Gray Matter is about a son who’s trying to live with his alcoholic single dad.  Everyday the Dad promises to stop drinking and everyday it ends with both of them disappointed.

One day, the father drinks some tainted beer and turns into a slime monster with a craving for beer and people.  The son who enabled his father’s drinking now enables his father’s thirst for human flesh.

This enabling dooms mankind. In essence, the disease of alcoholism consumed the alcoholic and destroyed everyone around him. Sounds about right.

At this time in the 1980s, Stephen King was in the worst period of his cocaine and alcohol addiction and many of his stories revolve around the enabling and tragedy that followed his disease.  In an interview, he described how he put cotton balls up his nose from the frequent bleeds and he kept a sugar bowl filled with cocaine next to him while he wrote.

The symbolism in the episode was not that obvious; it was much into dramatic performances and gore. The monster was a classic Tom Savini art work.

The House of the Head was amazingly unexpected.  It was tense, subtle, and had you on the edge of your seat for the entire episode.  Evie, the central protagonist in The House of the Head, is a nine year old girl whose father got her a dollhouse. Screenshot (98).png

The dollhouse is adorable with cute figurine parents and a child.

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Unfortunately, the dollhouse is also haunted by a severed head!!!! Yikes!

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The writing and direction ramps up the tension as we see that reality is being blurred by this supernatural entity.  The figurines in the dollhouse get terrorized and murdered by the severed head.  It’s real nightmare fuel.

The suspense/thriller writing and directing was also unexpected.  I thought it was going to be a Tales From the Crypt style story; instead John Harrison (Dir) and Josh Malerman (Writer) relentlessly pull the viewer into the haunted dollhouse where every shot is filled with uncertainty and terror.

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The dollhouse itself becomes a character and the viewer is forced to wonder if our protagonist and her parents are in fact figurines themselves with shots like this.

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The parents are laying in an doll-like manner and the furniture also looks like a dollhouse’s accessories. Is the Head pulling them into a dollhouse world? Is it pushing its way into our reality? Much like the episode itself, you never really know. Every time Evie looks from one room to another, the camera pans back and the figurines have changed and it’s rarely good.

This show was a lot of fun and it’s great to see a horror anthology story done well!

It’s not really enough to recommend this show without recommending Shudder itself. It’s not a lot of money per month and has a lot of original programming.

N. By Stephen King; Review By Case Wright

Posted on by casewright

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What if you’re not crazy?  What if you’re finally seeing the truth that everyone else is too afraid to see?  Is the revelation too much for your mind?  Could your mind be both the doorway to hell and the gate keeping the evil old ones at bay?  Most importantly, can a person’s mental illness infect another person?  Stephen King’s “N” is a hybrid of Lovecraft and Modern Psychology where we are forced to learn the answers to these questions.

The story was both a novella and adapted as a comic book/olde-timey radio-show.  Confused?  Let me explain.  N was first published as a novella, but instead of getting made into a comic book or as is typical of King’s work- a movie or miniseries, it became something else.  Marc Guggenheim adapted the work as an all dialogue webseries similar to the serials of the 1930s and 40s and presented the story as a series of hyper-detailed comic illustrations.  You can see it in its entirety below.

I have also read the novella several times.  Honestly, sometimes I’m not sure why I like a particular Stephen King story more than another, but it seems to be when the characters are so real that they could be you or your neighbor.  Yes, the monsters are spooky, but it’s the people, their story, their lives, who just happen to have to also deal with a monster or four.

The story begins with Sheila Bonsaint who is in mourning from her brother’s suicide.  She is calling her friend who is reminiscent of Anderson Cooper to look into why her brother John killed himself.  She believes it’s because of his contact with a patient named N.  The story shifts to John’s perspective describing a patient N who suffers from extreme OCD.  N believes his OCD rituals keep the portals between our world and the hell world closed.

N describes how he encountered a field with rocks similar to Stonehenge in Maine and that by viewing the structure, he caused the structure to activate and potentially release an ancient evil that will consume mankind.  He begins to do OCD rituals to keep the portal closed, but realizes that he must sacrifice his life in order to shut the gate forever.  Unfortunately, John becomes infected by N’s mental disorder and becomes overcome with the need to investigate the structure, which activates it again and causes him to spiral into the same OCD as N.

This story struck a very strong chord with me.  Last year, I began to take a long road into facing my own PTSD experiences in the Army.  When I would tell the medical professionals in the VA about what happened, one cried.  My stories had infected them and left them different afterwards.  The world was less clean, less safe, and much darker.  Now, like N, if I have to tell a person the stories, I begin by saying that I am sorry because what I will tell you, will change you.  I suppose that is what humanity does; we share our burdens and our curses.  Maybe that’s how we keep the gate to hell closed?

Here’s The Final Trailer For Doctor Sleep

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

I’m a little bit late in posting this but I’m happy to correct that oversight now.

Doctor Sleep is a film that I’m very much looking forward to seeing.  Doctor Sleep is a sequel to Stephen King’s The Shining and it’ll be interesting to see which version of The Shining that director Mike Flanagan will decide to honor with this film, King’s original novel or Stanley Kubrick’s far superior film version.  Kubrick’s film is one of the best horror movies ever made but Stephen King has always been very vocal in his dislike for it.

(Personally, I think a lot of King’s distaste for the film comes down to jealousy over the way that Kubrick improved on King’s original story.  Whereas The Shining is a good book that sometimes gets bogged down with King’s usual shtick, Kubrick’s film is a pop horror masterpiece.)

Judging from the just-released final trailer for Doctor Sleep, it looks like director Mike Flanagan will be building on Kubrick’s vision as opposed to King’s.  As you can probably already guess, that’s fine by me.  Flanagan is one of the best horror directors working right now and Ewan McGregor would appear to be perfectly cast in the role of grown-up Danny Torrance.

Doctor Sleep will be playing in theaters on November 8th.  (That’s the day before my birthday so I have a feeling I know what my free movie at the Alamo Drafthouse is going to be.)  Here’s the final trailer!