Director Mike Flanagan was traumatised after editing Doctor Sleep murder scene

Director Mike Flanagan "wanted to die" after editing a brutal murder scene in Doctor Sleep.

The filmmaker helmed the highly-anticipated 2019 sequel to the 1980 horror The Shining, and follows the now-adult Danny Torrance who has to protect a young girl with similar powers from a cult known as The True Knot, who prey on children with extrasensory abilities to remain immortal.

During the horror thriller, Jacob Tremblay's character Baseball Boy is murdered by the sinister cult, and Flanagan confessed that not only was it the most disturbing scene he's ever had to edit, but he was left traumatised after having to watch the scene over and over again.

"There was this two-and-a-half day period where we did the first assembly of that, or I'm going through the raw footage and trying to find everything, and it's just screams," he told CinemaBlend’s ReelBlend podcast, before adding that he listened to the Katrina and the Waves song Walking on Sunshine to try and mask Jacob's terrifying screams.

"Not only to drown out the screams for the other offices, but because after a few hours of going through the footage, like, I wanted to die. Just on the edit. Like you guys, the viewer gets to endure that scene for, I think all-in... the whole thing is for four and a half minutes," Flanagan shared.

And he revealed that he even toyed with the idea of cutting the scene altogether, as he was worried it was too horrifying.

"There was a certain point, we always knew it was there, where if we backed off too far, the scene... its importance in the movie would no longer be there," he stated.