© Warner Bros.
With the steady stream of remakes over the past decade-plus, horror movie fans should know by now that nothing is sacred. With that in mind, it shouldn't come as a surprise that a seemingly untouchable classic like Stanley Kubrick's The Shining is, in fact, touchable. You can breathe a bit easier, though, in knowing that there's no plan to actually remake the 1980 Stephen King adaptation (at least, not yet). Rather, according to the LA Times, Warner Brothers is exploring the possibility of making a prequel to The Shining, focusing on "what happened before Jack Torrance...his wife and their psychic son arrived at the haunted retreat where Torrance soon descends into violent madness."
If that sounds rather vague, you're right. I'm not sure what in the pre-Overlook Hotel lives of the Torrances would be worthy of a horror movie, but perhaps it has something to do with the concept introduced in the final shot of the film that Jack is some sort of reincarnation of a previous caretaker of the hotel and thus has some supernatural ties to the place. But if anything really creepy had happened to them before what we saw in The Shining, you'd think their reactions would've been a bit different -- like, "Oh, not this again..."
Anyway, this could very well all be moot, since things are at such an early stage that Warner Brothers won't even consider it "in development." But at least it seems to be in good hands at the moment, with the team behind Shutter Island -- including screenwriter Laeta Kalogridis -- reportedly taking a run at the prequel idea.
If it doesn't pan out, there still may be another Shining movie in the works down the line, as King will be releasing a sequel to the novel entitled Dr. Sleep -- about a middle-aged Danny Torrance and his attempts to protect a young girl with a powerful "shining" -- in 2013. And where there's a Stephen King novel, a film adaptation can't be far behind.
Source: LA Times
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