Horror master Stephen King is known for his sprawling multiverse. Though his stories usually stand alone, there are always hints and easter eggs to his other tales. Doctor Sleep is no exception. Being a sequel to King's seminal novel The Shining makes that clear enough, but the author makes reference toward his other stories as well.
Mike Flanagan's film adaptation carries over this tradition, with many nods to King's "Constant Readers." The filmmaker even got some fun out of the differences between the novel version of The Shining and Stanley Kubrick's famed adaptation. So here are the best hidden connections from both the movie and book of Doctor Sleep.
Charlie Manx
Stephen King doesn't just reference his own work in Doctor Sleep. He references his son Joe Hill's as well. In the novel, Dick Halloran tells Danny Torrance that his grandfather was friends with Charlie Manx, the vampiric villain of Hill's book NOS4A2.
In turn, Manx refers to Doctor Sleep's villains, The True Knot, in his book. He says they have similar habits (hunting down children with powers) and have agreed to stay out of each others' way. It seems King's legacy of tales are in good hands.
Children Who Shine
Longtime King fans will find the True Knot's M.O. of kidnapping psychic children to be familiar. It's a plot point in several of King's stories. The can-toi from The Dark Tower had a huge operation of abducting psychics going, turning them into "Breakers" to bring down the titular tower.
There's also Firestarter's The Shop, a government agency that both created and recruited psychics for military use. The author returned to this theme again this year with The Institute. You know, with all these different groups out kidnapping, it's surprising there any shining kids left.
Misery
In the novel of Doctor Sleep, it's mentioned that the True Knot maintain several campgrounds and bases in towns across America. King names a few, but the big one is Sidewinder, Colorado. Because not only is Sidewinder the town the Overlook Hotel was located outside of, it's also the setting for King's story Misery.
Main character Paul Sheldon (James Caan in the movie) owns a private cabin in Sidewinder and is trapped by Annie Wilkes outside of town for the length of the story. Sidewinder also makes an appearance in King's unrelated comic series American Vampire.
Salem's Lot
Another of the small towns the True Knot have hideaways in is Jerusalem's Lot, Maine. Often shortened to Salem's Lot, King's Constant Readers know this as the cursed town from his book of the same name.
Over the course of that story, the town was overrun by vampires and ultimately abandoned by its few surviving residents. What's odd is that Salem's Lot has been mentioned as being uninhabited several times since. Perhaps the True Knot likes being close to their vampiric cousins.
Joe Collins And Pennywise
One of the deeper cut King easter eggs in the Doctor Sleep movie can be found in its opening. Outside the movie theater where Rose the Hat meets Snakebite Andi, you can just make out a poster for comedian Joe Collins in the background. Collins is a character in the last book of The Dark Tower series, the human disguise of a creature called Dandelo.
It's hinted that Dandelo is a relative of It's Pennywise, another shapeshifting creature that feeds on human emotion. Though Dandelo fed on laughter, not fear. And much like Pennywise is really a giant spider, he was a giant cockroach.
The Stand
At the end of the movie, Danny tells Abra that to counter things like the Overlook and the True Knot, there needs to be people like them. In his words, "People that will take a stand." Now this could be a stretch, but we can't help but think this is a reference to King's first epic novel The Stand.
The plot of that doorstopper follows a group of people brought together after an apocalyptic plague to defeat the rising power of Randall Flagg, a malevolent psychic not unlike the True Knot. Incidentally, a CBS All-Access adaptation of The Stand is in the works.
The Dark Tower
There are a few homages to The Dark Tower throughout Doctor Sleep, but the more easy to catch ones are the names of background companies. These are explicit references to King's magnum opus. The first is the name of the bus company that Dan Torrance rides into Frazier, Tet Transit.
Tet is a concept in The Dark Tower meaning group and the company of the same name is one of the major powers preventing the tower's fall. Another can be found at the factory where the True Knot eat Bradley Trevor. A sign says it's owned by LaMerk Industries, another company from The Dark Tower that builds killer robots.
Gerald's Game
Doctor Sleep is not the first Stephen King adaptation that Mike Flanagan has helmed. Before, he directed the Netflix adaptation of Gerald's Game. That story followed a married couple experimenting with bondage, only for the husband to suffer a fatal heart attack after handcuffing the wife to the bed.
She only manages to escape by pulling her hand through the cuff, skinning it in the process. Flanagan paid homage to himself in Doctor Sleep by having Rose The Hat mangle her right hand the same way during her escape from Abra's mind. He even said in an interview he'll take any chance to mess up a hand.
The Ending Of The Shining
The biggest difference between the book and movie versions of The Shining is the ending. In the book's ending, the Overlook is destroyed by an overheating boiler. In the movie, Wendy and Danny escape and the hotel is abandoned. Mike Flanagan took advantage of his film being both a sequel to the Shining movie and an adaptation of the Doctor Sleep book to redress this issue.
How?
He gave his movie the Shining book's ending. Dan Torrance sets the boiler to overheat, burning the Overlook down. It's a big change, but one that honors both King and Kubrick's interpretation of the material.
The Number 19
Aside from horror, Stephen King is also known for his huge love of baseball. It's no surprise then that Bradley Trevor, one of the True Knot's victims, is a ball player. But his player number, 19, is yet another King reference. 19 is number with huge significance in The Dark Tower, and it pops up all over the place, usually in the number of letters in a person's name.
That would be enough, but 19 is also the number of a different Stephen King baseball player. It's the number of William "Blockade Billy" Blakely, the focus of King's novella Blockade Billy about a Major League player wiped from history because of a dark secret.