Ridley Scott’s new horror series feels like the perfect collision of two of the genre’s most iconic movies: The Shining and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Scott, who serves as an executive producer on the AMC horror TV show, has been at the helm of recognizable entries in the genre such as the Alien franchise and Hannibal. Like the best horror stories, this series uses familiar genre clichés to tap into specific psychological vulnerabilities, like fear of the unknown, loss of control, isolation, and the breakdown of reality.

Set within a psychiatric facility, The Terror: Devil in Silver centers around Pepper (Dan Stevens), a patient who is committed to New Hyde Psychiatric Hospital instead of being arrested after beating his girlfriend’s abusive ex-boyfriend. He soon begins to realize that something is very wrong at the facility — other than the horrible treatment he receives, that is. The similarities between Devil in Silver and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest are apparent from the show’s first episode. Like the movie, Devil in Silver‘s psychiatric facility is not merely a backdrop for the story’s perspective on injustice, but a system that defines, categorizes, and preserves it.

The staff in Devil in Silver insist on order, treatment, and compliance, much like those in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. On the other hand, what makes the series so immediately reminiscent of The Shining is not just its overwhelming dread, but its obsession with isolation. Like Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) slowly losing his grip on reality in the Overlook Hotel, the characters in Devil in Silver know that something supernatural walks through the hallways. Still, they are unable to stop the wreckage it leaves in its wake.

The fact that Devil in Silver is eerily similar to The Shining and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest isn’t an accident. After all, the two movies present some of the common narrative tropes explored in the horror genre. Devil in Silver isn’t a series that’s just about eliciting fear, but one that highlights the institutional problems with mental healthcare and also explores the terror of losing one’s sense of certainty, identity, and perception.

How Devil In Silver Compares Against Other Entries In The Terror Franchise

Devil in Silver is the third entry in The Terror franchise, which consists of 2018’s The Terror and 2019‘s The Terror: Infamy. The Terror is an anthology show; these two seasons aren’t continuations of the same story. Instead, they focus on different characters and plot lines. Unlike the earlier entries in The Terror franchise, Devil in Silver is set in the modern era; The Terror takes place during an Arctic expedition in the 1840s, and The Terror: Infamy is set during World War II. The setting changes the tone of Devil in Silver. Instead of horror feeling like something buried in history or myth, it becomes uncomfortably immediate.

Devil in Silver is also the most psychologically intimate entry in The Terror franchise. The series does an exceptional job of shifting the horror inward by questioning perception and reality, rather than having characters fighting to survive external forces. When it comes to critical reception, Devil in Silver is ahead of the curve with a 95% Rotten Tomatoes score against The Terror’s 94% and Infamy’s 80%.

Fear, like many things, is subjective. While The Terror is widely considered the scariest entry in the franchise because of how it uses the environment to create fear even before the monster arrives, Infamy also has moments that can be truly terrifying, especially with the Japanese folklore at its center. Devil in Silver, however, excels at presenting the psychiatric facility as the season’s true horror, which functions in the story the same way as the previous seasons’ supernatural creatures. When it comes to producing fear, The Terror: Devil in Silver puts up a good fight.