The Big Picture
- Jacob Tremblay delivers a chilling and emotional performance in his cameo role in Doctor Sleep .
- The death scene involving the Baseball Boy is unsettling and difficult to watch due to Tremblay's exceptional acting skills.
- Stephen King told director Mike Flanagan that the scene was too much and Tremblay's co-stars, including Rebecca Ferguson, started crying whilst filming the scene.
He's only 17 years old, but Jacob Tremblay is already a Hollywood star. His role as Jack in the heartbreaking Room in 2015 alongside Brie Larson is where most of us got to know him first. That was followed up by an equally emotional performance as Auggie in 2017's Wonder, and a hilarious turn in the 2019 comedy Good Boys. Tremblay quickly became recognized as one of the best child actors in the industry with an acting ability that even most adult actors couldn't match. The same year as Good Boys, Tremblay landed another part, but this time there would be no laughs. In Mike Flanagan's Doctor Sleep, an adaptation of Stephen King's sequel novel to The Shining, Tremblay only shows up in a cameo as another victim to Rose the Hat's (Rebecca Ferguson) True Knot. While his time on screen is short, his acting took what was already a horrific scene and turned it into a moment so hard to take that even the grown-up actors around him couldn't handle it.
Doctor Sleep
HorrorThriller
Years following the events of The Shining (1980), a now-adult Dan Torrance must protect a young girl with similar powers from a cult known as The True Knot, who prey on children with powers to remain immortal.
Horror Movies Rarely Show Young Kids Getting Killed
Horror movies can show an audience a lot, and depending on who you are, it might not even get to you. We're desensitized to decades of director's filming any frightening thing they can imagine. 2023 might have been the year gore became popular again, for example, but for many horror fans, it doesn't really affect us. There is one thing a horror movie can do, however, to make any viewer squirm, and that's kill a kid. It's such a risky move that a lot of big-name horror franchises won't go near it. That doesn't mean horror is totally unafraid to kill kids. In 2023 alone, we saw kids get tormented a lot more in horror than in previous years, from Evil Dead Rise to When Evil Lurks to Talk To Me. No moment can be more terrifying than a child dying. Seeing a kid falling off the balcony to his death in Halloween Ends is the most shocking part of that strange film. Who can ever forget the death of poor little Georgie in both IT adaptations or Gage (Miko Hughes) getting hit by a semi-truck in Pet Sematary and coming back as some monstrous demon zombie creation?
The Villains of 'Doctor Sleep' Are on the Hunt For Children
CloseStephen King is the master of horror for a reason. He wasn't shy about killing kids in his novels for IT or Pet Sematary. He knows that's the most chilling, helpless fear we can experience. It's the same reason why we can watch an adult die in a movie and feel little; but if an animal dies, we can't handle it. There's an entire website, Does the Dog Die? devoted to helping movie watchers avoid such scenes. Stephen King really leans into that fear for his novel Doctor Sleep, a sequel to what is perhaps his most famous novel ever, The Shining. In Doctor Sleep, Danny Torrance is all grown up. He is haunted by his past and his gifts, but he is forced to face those things when a new group of villains appears called the True Knot. They share Danny's gifts and led by Rose the Hat, they set out to find kids with the shining, killing them for the steam that comes out of them in death, absorbing their energy like vampires.
Jacob Tremblay Had Worked With Mike Flanagan on 'Before I Wake'
In Mike Flanagan's 2019 film adaptation of Doctor Sleep, kids do die, but Flanagan doesn't make it a gory affair. When Rose the Hat and her True Knot surround one child, we're horrified because we know what's going to happen to this girl, but Flanagan lets that be the fear, and not the actual act of her death. Then comes the death of eleven-year-old Bradley Trevor, known as the "Baseball Boy" to Abra (Kyliegh Curran), a girl with the shining protected by Danny (Ewan McGregor), who can psychically see Bradley in his little league uniform.
RelatedHow Mike Flanagan Convinced Stephen King to Accept His 'Doctor Sleep' Changes
King initially pushed back on Flanagan's ties to Kubrick's 'The Shining.'
In the Shudder documentary series, Shudder's 101 Scariest Horror Movie Moments of All-Time (for which the "Baseball Scene" is ranked at a low number 80), Mike Flanagan talked about the challenge of creating this moment because, in King's novel, "this is where the story became an overt horror story." The villains become more than mysterious. We now see how awful they are and how they feed on their prey, and the Baseball Boy is going to show us. Mike Flanagan turned to Jacob Tremblay for the role, which is a bit of a surprise, as Tremblay was doing lead roles, not showing up to die in cameos. However, Tremblay had worked with Flanagan before in the 2016 film Before I Wake. The director was well aware of the kid's acting range and ability to handle a difficult role. In 2019, Flanagan told Cinema Blend:
"My approach was to get out of Jacob's way. Having worked with him before, I know a little bit about what Jacob is capable of, but I'm always surprised, because I thought I knew what he could do, and then I saw Room, and was like, 'Oh my God. I didn't know him at all!'"
Jacob Tremblay's Scene in 'Doctor Sleep' Is Hard to Stomach
The Baseball Boy's death scene isn't a gory one, but it's one of the most unsettling things you'll ever see thanks to Tremblay's performance. His face and voice are the focal point as the True Knot ties him down and holds a knife to his body. Tremblay screams and cries in terror, begging to be let go. It rips your soul out to hear him ask, "Are you going to hurt me?" Rose tells him yes, then stabs him in the stomach. The screams from Tremblay go on and on as the True Knot inhales the steam coming out of his dying mouth. A viewer can detach themselves from these villains because they're not realistic, but we can't detach ourselves from the visceral agony and torment this young child is going through so primally. Other horror movies might show us over-the-top kid deaths or the moment right before a child dies, but Flanagan won't let us look away. Instead, he zooms in and holds onto it.
Flanagan told Shudder that after Stephen King watched the movie he said he thought the Baseball Boy scene went on a little too long and was a bit much. Stephen King of all people was overwhelmed. Flanagan said that studio execs and even his own wife, Kate Siegel, got up and walked out during a screening. Flanagan told Cinema Blend:
"He just did it, and none of us knew how to react. The True Knot was traumatized, like Rebecca [Ferguson] and all these like big swaggery monsters were just destroyed. Zahn McClarnon had to leave. He was crying at the end of it."
Ferguson confirmed this in an interview with the Evening Standard, telling them that she wasn't prepared for the emotional shock of the scene. "Tears were pouring down my face" she said, and everyone behind the scenes was looking away. But how did Jacob Tremblay react? That had to be a traumatic experience for a child actor, right? Nope. Flanagan told Cinema Blend that, before the scene, Tremblay told him, "I've got this. I know what I'm going to do." He then screamed his lungs out, made everyone around him cry, and then after that, covered in fake blood, he jumped up and ran over to his dad, who was on set. He didn't go to him for a consoling, comforting hug, but to give his father a high five with a big smile on his face. After that, they went over to craft services to get a snack, a boy ecstatic about his performance, while the adults he left behind were shattered to tears.
Doctor Sleep is available to rent on Amazon Prime Video.
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