10 Horror Movie Sequels That Totally Insulted Great Characters

Jack Torrance may be cinema’s most infamous bad dad, and his namesake Mr Nicholson’s iconic performance in Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 adaptation of Stephen King’s The Shining takes plenty of liberties with the original novel’s version of the character. Kubrick makes it clear Jack is on the brink of insanity long before King does, and many of the factors which make his madness more poignant and tragic in the novel are elided by the comparatively cold, darkly comic flick.

The film turns the novel’s heart-breaking depiction of an abuse cycle perpetuated by the pressure of fatherhood, hereditary addiction, and inherited trauma into a strangely funny nightmare detached from such emotional asides, and Torrance becomes a lot less redeemable as a result. It’s a daring decision, but unfortunately this means that Haunting of Hill House auteur Mike Flanagan’s eventual belated sequel to the flick, 2019’s Doctor Sleep, flounders with the character—a problem not helped by Nicholson’s absence from the film.

In King’s novel Doctor Sleep, Jack arrives for a brief moment at the denouement, redeeming himself by saving his son’s life. It’s a pretty moving moment which makes the otherwise bloated sequel worth a read. But the moment has no equivalent in Flanagan’s film, leaving the Torrance patriarch a pointless figure whose comical death in the snow now seems more aimless than ever.