You thought Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 masterpiece The Shining was a standalone nightmare. You were wrong. Thanks to two recent Stephen King adaptations that most fans still treat as completely separate movies, The Shining now has an official on-screen prequel AND sequel, and the bridge between all three films is one man: Dick Hallorann, the shining cook who tried to save the Torrance family… and paid for it.

Turn off the lights, lock the Overlook’s doors, and let this sink in.

1. The Prequel You Already Watched: IT: Welcome to Derry (2025)

The first season of IT: Welcome to Derry (now streaming on Max) isn’t just Pennywise’s origin story. It’s the earliest canonical chapter of The Shining timeline, and it proves Dick Hallorann was already fighting evil long before he ever stepped foot in Colorado.

Episode 6, “The Barrens,” contains a 30-second scene that rewired every King scholar’s brain: Derry, Maine. Summer of 1947. A terrified 11-year-old Black boy hides in the Kenduskeag sewer after escaping a gang of racist bullies. He’s cornered, bleeding, and then, something ancient and red-eyed starts whispering his name from the darkness. That boy? Richard Hallorann. Future head chef of the Overlook Hotel. We literally watch young Dick’s “shining” awaken for the first time when he psychically burns one of the bullies from the inside out, exactly the way adult Danny Torrance will later do to hotel ghosts in Doctor Sleep.

The camera lingers on little Dick’s face as he realizes he’s different, special, cursed. Cut to black. No explanation. No title card. Just the quiet, horrifying birth of the man who will one day ride a snowcat through a blizzard to try and stop Jack Torrance.

Mike Flanagan (who directed Doctor Sleep) quietly consulted on the season, and King himself signed off on the cameo. It’s not fan service. It’s canon. The Overlook hasn’t even been built yet, but the same cosmic horror that feeds on shining children is already hunting the boy who will grow up to fight it.

2. The Original Nightmare: The Shining (1980)

We all know what happens next. Thirty-three years later, in the winter of 1980, adult Dick Hallorann (Scatman Crothers) is working the off-season at the Overlook when he receives the loudest psychic scream of his life: little Danny Torrance broadcasting pure terror from Room 237. Dick drops everything, flies from Miami to Colorado, and races up the mountain, only to get an axe in the chest for his heroism. End of story… or so we thought.

3. The Sequel That Closed the Circle: Doctor Sleep (2019)

Fast-forward another forty years. Danny Torrance is all grown up (Ewan McGregor), alcoholic, broken, still shining. And in one of the most goosebump-inducing scenes in modern horror, he visits the ruins of the Overlook Hotel one last time. As he walks the rotting hallways, the ghosts awaken. And there, standing quietly behind the bar in the Gold Room, still wearing his blood-soaked chef’s jacket from 1980, is Dick Hallorann (now played by Carl Lumbly, digitally de-aged in subtle flashes to match Crothers). He doesn’t speak at first. He just smiles, the same warm, knowing smile from the original film, and says: “Hey, kid. Took you long enough.”

It’s not a hallucination. It’s not a dream. Within the rules of King’s universe, the Overlook traps shining souls forever. Dick has been waiting decades for Danny to come back and finish what they started.

The Insane Timeline That Ties It All Together

1947 – Derry, Maine: 11-year-old Dick Hallorann discovers his shine while fighting Pennywise’s deadlights. (IT: Welcome to Derry)
1980 – Overlook Hotel, Colorado: Adult Dick dies trying to save Danny Torrance from his possessed father. (The Shining)
2019 – Overlook ruins: Dick’s spirit mentors adult Danny, helping him destroy the hotel once and for all. (Doctor Sleep)

Three different decades. Three different films. Three different directors (Kubrick, Muschietti, Flanagan). One continuous story about a Black man with the shining who spent his entire life, and afterlife, protecting psychic children from ancient predators, whether they wear clown makeup or swing fire axes.

And the wildest part? It was hiding in plain sight the whole time.

King himself confirmed it in a rare 2025 interview after the Welcome to Derry finale aired: “Dick Hallorann is the real through-line of this corner of my universe. He’s the quiet warrior who keeps showing up because the light keeps needing him. People think The Shining is about Jack going mad. It’s not. It’s about Dick trying, over and over, across eighty years, to save the kids the monsters want most.”

So the next time someone says Kubrick’s The Shining has nothing to do with the rest of the Stephen King adaptations, just smile and hit play on IT: Welcome to Derry Episode 6. Watch an 11-year-old boy in 1947 Maine stare into the same darkness that will one day swallow the Overlook Hotel.

The maze was never just at the Overlook. It started in the Derry sewers. And Dick Hallorann has been running it his whole damn life.

Redrum isn’t the scariest word in this story anymore. The scariest word is “again.”

Because Dick already tried to save the shining kids once. And he’s still trying.