A new film to compliment Stanley Kubrick's amazing The Shining has been talked about before but of the two times it has surfaced it's been on the back of Stephen King announcing that he was working on a sequel novel and nothing has really transpired either in book or film form since.

Now there's hushed talk of a sequel being developed and although it's not official or in any serious stage of development, the discussions are beginning.

Back in 2009 we heard that Stephen King was looking at writing a sequel to The Shining novel (Amazon.co.uk / Amazon.com), then he said:

"Danny is now 40 years old and living in upstate New York, where he works as the equivalent of an orderly at a hospice for the terminally ill. Danny's real job is to visit with patients who are just about to pass on to the other side, and to help them make that journey with the aid of his mysterious powers. Danny also has a sideline in betting on the horses, a trick he learned from his buddy Dick Hallorann."

Later in 2011 he revisited the topic with a little more information on the proposed plot:

...bad people in this story that were like vampires, only that what they sucked out was not blood, but psychic energy from special people like Danny Torrance. And I came to realize that these people were called The Tribe and that they move around a lot. Their leader is a woman called Rose [unintelligible] they all have these kinda pirate names, because pirates is sort of what they are.

It sounded really strange and a little off track with what The Shining was, in fact it sounded more in tune with his later work of strange creatures in the novel Insomnia (Amazon.co.uk / Amazon.com) and around the story of Black House (Amazon.co.uk / Amazon.com), it really doesn't sound like a sequel to The Shining.

However Warner Bros., according to the L.A. Times, is looking into the possibility of a prequel for The Shining film and not the book, something which might provide a little more direct connection with the story and characters than King's proposed novel.

There is no confirmation and the rumour from the "insider" who is "familiar" (not on, connected or involved with the project) is that the studio has producers Laeta Kalogridis, Bradley Fischer and James Vanderbilt connected with early discussions. These names inspire a lot of confidence considering there is the writers of Shutter Island and Zodiac and producers of those films and of Black Swan (Filmstalker review) amongst them.

While King's work heads off in a future direction, this prequel would be looking to the past and would look to what happened at the hotel before the events of the film, which clearly sets it aside from the novel that King has been talking about writing.

It's not clear whether the prequel idea would head back to all the events we see in the visions through the first film or if we would see others arriving at the hotel and experiencing similar haunting and possessions, but either would be tricky ground.

The temptation for the new film would be to leap into current horror fare and that would mean hand-held cameras, 3D, gore filled first person accounts, and not to keep it visually exciting and scary more on a psychological level as it was with Kubrick's classic.

I wonder how they could even begin to believe that they could live up to the original, and this is probably what the producers are talking about right now - what do they do, create a entirely new film or try to recreate some of the original. What would work and what would you go to see? Would a new film be viewed very negatively from the outset just for being associated with The Shining? More to the point who could compare with Stanley Kubrick and Jack Nicholson?