Certain Death: Mike Flanagan’s Gothic Antidote to Traumatic Memory and Other Enlightenment Hang-Overs in <i>Doctor Sleep</i> by Erik Bond

“…This article uses the English Gothic’s eighteenth-century dismantling of male lineage and Enlightenment certainty in Horace Walpole’s <i>The Castle Otranto</i> as a lens for understanding the twenty-first-century commercial popularity of director Mike Flanagan’s Gothic films, particularly <i>Doctor Sleep</i>. Building on Stephen King’s 2013 novel and Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 film <i>The Shining</i>, Flanagan’s <i>Doctor Sleep</i> establishes a new lineage of male writers who value how the Gothic traditions of irrational emotion and doubt can inspire new realms of knowledge to lessen psychological suffering caused by traumatic lineage. …”
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