'Doctor Sleep' Will Reunite Jacob Tremblay With Director Mike Flanagan

Room's Jacob Tremblay is the latest addition to Mike Flanagan's Doctor Sleep cast. This marks a reunion for the two – Tremblay appeared in Flanagan's horror film Before I Wake. The film is an adaptation of Stephen King's sequel to The Shining, focusing on an adult Danny Torrance (played by Ewan McGregor). Tremblay's role is unknown at this time – could he be playing the younger Danny in flashbacks? Maybe!

Will we soon be hearing Jacob Tremblay croaking "Redrum!"? That's my guess. TMZ says the young actor has joined the Doctor Sleep cast in an unknown role, and as most of the parts for the film have already been cast, there's a good chance Tremblay is playing the younger Danny Torrance. While Doctor Sleep primarily focuses on Danny as an adult, there are flashbacks to the younger Danny we met in The Shining. Doctor Sleep has already begun filming, so Tremblay coming onto the project this late definitely suggests his part is small. With all this in mind, I think it's safe to assume he's playing the young Danny. Of course, that could always turn out to be wrong.

In Doctor Sleep, Danny Torrance becomes the protector of a young girl who has the same "shining" powers as he did as a child. The girl is being stalked by a nomadic cult of "psychic vampires" who want to feed on the girl's abilities. Kyliegh Curran is Abra, the girl in dange. Rebecca Ferguson is portraying Rose, the leader of the cult. Other cast members include Carl Lumbly, Alex Essoe, Zahn McClarnon and Bruce Greenwood, another actor who has worked with Flanagan before.

Flanagan is coming off of the success of Netflix's The Haunting of Hill House, and while I'm not a big fan of Doctor Sleep (despite being a big fan of Stephen King), I have faith the filmmaker will turn it into something worth watching.

Here's the lengthy synopsis of the Doctor Sleep novel:

On highways across America, a tribe of people called the True Knot travel in search of sustenance. They look harmless—mostly old, lots of polyester, and married to their RVs. But as Dan Torrance knows, and spunky twelve-year-old Abra Stone learns, the True Knot are quasi-immortal, living off the steam that children with the shining produce when they are slowly tortured to death.

Haunted by the inhabitants of the Overlook Hotel, where he spent one horrific childhood year, Dan has been drifting for decades, desperate to shed his father's legacy of despair, alcoholism, and violence. Finally, he settles in a New Hampshire town, an AA community that sustains him, and a job at a nursing home where his remnant shining power provides the crucial final comfort to the dying. Aided by a prescient cat, he becomes "Doctor Sleep."

Then Dan meets the evanescent Abra Stone, and it is her spectacular gift, the brightest shining ever seen, that reignites Dan's own demons and summons him to a battle for Abra's soul and survival. This is an epic war between good and evil, glorious story that will thrill the millions of devoted readers of The Shining and satisfy anyone new to this icon in the Stephen King canon.

Doctor Sleep opens on January 24, 2020.