Scooby Doo with better CGI: Doctor Sleep reviewed

Wheeeere’s Johnny? Nearly 40 years ago Jack Nicholson went berserk in a snowbound Rockies hotel, smashing an axe through a bathroom door behind which a pop-eyed Shelley Duvall cowered in terror. It is one of cinema’s truly iconic scenes, once voted the most petrifying in movie history.

Now award yourself points if you remember that the family in The Shining were called Torrance. They had a son, Danny, a psychic little boy haunted by apparitions as he pedalled on his trike along the corridor’s hallucinogenic carpets. Danny has now grown up into Dan Torrance and assumed the form of Ewan McGregor who stars in the sort-of-sequel Doctor Sleep.

The Shining was, arguably, the crowning achievement of Stanley Kubrick, one of those rare film-makers accorded the accolade of an exhibition devoted to his oeuvre, which recently ended at the Design Museum. If you are going to bring the world of a masterpiece back to life, you’d better be good. The director of Doctor Sleep is Mike Flanagan. For anyone not steeped in the horror genre, his middle name may as well be Who? In the past decade Flanagan has written, directed and edited films with titles such as Oculus and Ouija: Origin of Evil and was the showrunner for two series of The Haunting of Hill House. Not many Space Odysseys or Dr Strangeloves or Clockwork Oranges on that spooky CV.

Doctor Sleep begins with a bird’s-eye view of a lushly green sunlit forest. Subtext: we’re not in Colorado any more. A little girl is warned by her mother not to wander too far from the camper van and soon enough she is being sweet-talked by a seductive woman in a gaucho hat. Rose the Hat (which is a dumb name) leads a creepy posse of roadies and groupies who (as ludicrously) call themselves the True Knot.