Is Jack back? 5 burning questions about Stephen King's 'The Shining' sequel 'Doctor Sleep'

It’s deadly business being a kid in a Stephen King book (or one of his many movie adaptations), dealing with demonic clowns, killer dogs and baddies who want to suck children's psychic powers from their souls.

Danny Torrance, the boy from Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 film “The Shining” who survived his father Jack trying to kill him and his mom in a nightmarish hotel, is at the center of the follow-up “Doctor Sleep” (in theaters Friday) and still trying to get over the experience. After abusing drugs and alcohol most of his adult life to suppress his extrasensory powers (what he calls “shine”), grown-up Dan (Ewan McGregor) is now sober but has to help another youngster with abilities, Abra Stone (Kyliegh Curran), when she’s hunted by villains who consume children’s psychic essences to remain immortal.

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King’s “Shining” book and Kubrick’s movie are both horror classics, so “Doctor Sleep” is a highly anticipated next chapter for scary-film fans. Writer/director Mike Flanagan and his cast tackle the most burning questions about the sequel:

What’s little Danny been up to all this time?

The beginning of “Doctor Sleep” continues the “Shining” story, with Danny and mom Wendy hightailing it to Florida after their horrifying experience at the snowy Overlook Hotel. Danny is still haunted by the ghastly phantoms of the Overlook wanting to possess him, though the ghost of his friend Dick (Carl Lumbly) teaches Danny a way to keep them locked up in his mind.

Years later, the nightmares haven’t subsided “and he tries very hard to keep everything at bay by being drunk all the time,” McGregor says. After hitting rock bottom, he sobers up and gets a job at a New Hampshire hospice, using his shine to help terminal patients die peacefully. After suppressing his “psychic life,” McGregor adds, Dan’s now “accepting that it’s there and starting to use it for good.”

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Who’s the major antagonist this time around?

The True Knot is a band of psychic vampires led by the cool, charismatic and seriously murderous Rose the Hat (Rebecca Ferguson). She’s definitely bad news but only for those outside her family – Rose is maternal when it comes to the True Knot, who kill kids for their psychic “steam." Otherwise, “they will die. They have to work against time – they have to work with deadlines,” says Ferguson.

“Asking someone to have sympathy for the devil is one of the most powerful kind of narrative tools you can lean into,” Flanagan adds. But Rose thinks she's the good guy. “The monsters of the movie for her are Dan and Abra, who show up and try to kill her people. She's charming in a way that the best villains are, in the way that cult leaders are. You like her, you just hate what she does (and) that rationalization is what makes her so chilling.”

But wait, King disliked Kubrick’s 'The Shining.' How does that play out?

The horror author famously disagreed with the many changes Kubrick made – for example, the Overlook goes up in flames at the end of the book but is left standing in the movie’s finale – so much so that King wrote a 1997 “Shining” TV miniseries himself. The new movie satisfies both camps, McGregor says, “making slight changes to Stephen King's novel with his blessing."

Flanagan calls King “my hero” and grew up loving the “Shining” film, and making peace with both “is what kept me up every night throughout the whole process,” the director says. The first step for him was admitting to himself he's not Kubrick. "So if I can try to anticipate the things that I would criticize about someone else if they were making the film, then I thought maybe that was the only way through the woods.”

Are we all going back to the Overlook?

You bet! And all the same creepers are back, from old naked Mrs. Massey in the tub to the spooky Grady twins. “In the way that these ghosts live in these boxes in Dan's mind, they live in our minds, too. Being able to stare at your own nightmares, who gets a chance to do that? It's really pretty awesome,” says Flanagan, who used Kubrick’s blueprint to re-create his Overlook’s architecture and environment. “The typewriter, the paper, the ax, the corridor, they're all characters in themselves and you feel that you have to be quite respectful towards them,” Ferguson adds.

There was also fun to be had – Flanagan brought an adult big wheel tricycle to the set like little Danny rode in the movie – though McGregor acknowledges that he tried not to look through open doors and spoil things for himself. “When we walked on there, it was really stunning. It really felt like Jack Nicholson might just have walked off set to go to his trailer quickly and he'd be back any minute.”

So, is Jack Nicholson in it?

While the original “Shining” actor doesn't show up in “Doctor Sleep,” there are shades of his character Jack Torrance in his adult son. Plus, Dan's still coming to grips with what happened so many years ago. “Can you imagine living through that and then losing your father at such an early age and so horribly violently?” McGregor says. “Obviously Jack's character at the beginning of ‘The Shining’ is an alcoholic and he broke his son's arm in a drunken moment. That's when he goes to get the job at the Overlook Hotel, he's trying to get sober, he's trying to get clean."

McGregor admits that Dan is “probably scared that he’ll become his dad,” though “he’s already lost that battle because he is living the life of full-blown alcoholism. But through his recovery, he's looking for his dad's love.”

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: 'Doctor Sleep': Is Jack Nicholson in Stephen King's 'Shining' sequel?