November is usually my Shining month, and so I want to bring forward again something I have been repeating for a long time now but that I don't see being picked up a lot by people. A detail that is well-hidden inside the Doctor Sleep movie, but that makes the piece even more infinitely appreciable and shows it was made by true Shining fans.
And this detail is... the ghosts of the Overlook Hotel.
Now, when this bunch appeared during the final scene some familiar faces could be spotted. Grady of course, the Injured Guest from the "Great party, isn't it?" scene, the Twins, and of course the Woman of Room 217 -sorry, 237. But there are other faces there - seemingly random people in fancy outfit just for the sake of it. People were confused as to who these people were...
But all you have to do is look at the end credits. And you have a big surprise.
The familiar faces are confirmed to be the ghosts we always thought we were, or to correspond to famous ghosts of the original novel. The twins are confirmed as Grady's two daughters, while the woman in the white dress (not on the picture above but you can her in the scene) is Mrs. Grady. Meaning we have the whole Grady family as ghosts. The woman of room 237 is confirmed to be indeed Mrs. Massey, just like in the book ; as for the Injured Guest (only referred to as "injured guest" in the original scripts of The Shining), the sequel decided to make him Horace Derwent. Meaning he likely can switch between a young/attractive and older/more gruesome form, just like Massey's ghost, since in the original movie Derwent was clearly seen though not named in the scene with the man wearing a dog-bear-like costume (the script confirms it is supposed to be a dog costume though).
Alright, but what of the others? Now this is where things get interesting! The bald man to the right of Grady? That's Vito the Chopper. Yes, the Vito the Chopper from the novel by King, the mafia boss who got his head blown off in the Presidential Suite - as for the two men near him, they are his two bodyguards, Victor T. Boorman and Roger Macassi. Also from the book. These three characters are actually an Easter egg for those who read the book (and we know from the original treatment of Kubrick's movie that the criminal paradise-era of the Overlook and the murders at the Presidential Suite were originally supposed to play a big role in the cinema version of the story too).
But things get even better with the last ghost of the group. He doesn't appear in the picture above either, like Mrs. Grady, but you can notice him during the scene, a large man right behind Mrs. Grady when the ghosts first appear (he is played by Marc Farley). And the ghost's name, as revealed in the credits is... James Parris.
Now, fans of the novel might wonder "Wait... Who's that? I don't recall reading about him". And indeed, you did not! At least if you just read the regular version of the novel! James Parris is however a true character of the Shining, a true victim of the Overlook Hotel, a character written about and invented by Stephen King... But he is part of the deleted prologue of the novel, "Before the Play". You know this prologue that was not part of the published novel but was released in various TV magazines several times, and then finally re-added to the main novel in the collector Cemetery Dance edition of "The Shining"? You must have heard of it - even before the Cemetery Dance release the prologue was going around the Internet, published on small fan websites and discreet literature blogs...
And James Parris was, according to the first part of this prologue (detailling the building and creation of the Overlook... and its first victims) the second owner of the Overlook Hotel. A man that was touched by the same obsession and madness for the hotel that had overtaken Watson's grandfather (the actual builder and first owner of the Hotel), and, if I recall well, ended up dying of a heart attack on the hotel's garden-grounds (near the topiary beasts if I recall well, but I am not too sure, I haven't read the prologue in a while).
So all of that to say - not only did they bother placing an Easter Egg for the fans of King who had read the original book ; but they also placed an Easter Egg for those that knew of or had read the Before the Play prologue, which most regular fans of the novel never even heard about! If this isn't commitment to researching your source material, I don't know what is!
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