[COLUMN] In The Terror: Devil in Silver, Human Beings Craft Their Own Hell | by Darren Mooney

Note: This piece contains spoilers through the fourth episode of The Terror: Devil in Silver, the third season of the horror anthology series that is currently airing on AMC and streaming on Shudder. The six-episode miniseries is pretty good, featuring a really wonderful cast including Dan Stevens, Judith Light, Stephen Root and CCH Pounder, and offering a modern twist on the classic horror set up of the haunted psychiatric institution. If you want to see the show entirely unspoiled, feel free to bookmark the piece. Otherwise, hell-o there.

The third season of The Terror, subtitled Devil in Silver, unfolds in New Hyde Psychiatric Hospital, a decaying psychiatric institution in New York City.

In the midst of trying to intervene during a physical altercation involving his girlfriend Marisol (Juani Feliz) and her abusive ex-husband (Manuel Herrera), Peter “Pepper” Coffin (Dan Stevens)  accidentally strikes several undercover police officers, who he nicknames “Huey” (Michael Aronov), “Dewey” (Marin Ireland) and “Louie” (Philip Ettinger). The three detain Peter, but Huey laments the amount of paperwork that he will have to file on the assault to properly book him.

So, Huey lands on an alternative. Instead of arresting Peter, they will instead discharge him to a temporary hold in the New Hyde Psychiatric Hospital, overseen by Doctor Anand (Aasif Mandvi). “This is better than jail, I promise,” Huey promises Peter, but it very quickly becomes clear that this is not the case. Once Peter has been fed into the system, the system is designed to keep him there. The temporary hold is extended and pushed on. He quickly becomes a permanent resident.

In some ways, this is a cliché story about a psychiatric institution. There is a long history of movies and television shows about these sorts of structures. The first season of Legion found Dan Stevens playing a character confined to another such institution. This literary tradition is even acknowledged within Devil in Silver itself, with Doctor Laurence Badger (Stephen Root) leading a particularly misguided book group discussion of Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

However, adapted by Victor LaValle from his novel of the same name, Devil in Silver offers something of an update to the classic template. The monster in Devil in Silver is not some sadistic institution or even wider society’s intolerance of unconventional thinking. It is instead entropy and decay. From the opening moments of the show, New Hyde Psychiatric Hospital is literally falling to pieces. There are stains in the ceiling, shattered tiles on the floor. There is a rot here.

In some ways, this is in keeping with LaValle’s larger thematic interests, reflected even in his brief foray into writing for the X-Men franchise. During the Krakoa era, LaVelle wrote a pair of miniseries – Sabretooth and Sabretooth and the Exiles – that were effectively meditations on the idea of the carceral state within the ostensibly utopian framework of the mutant paradise. These interests are reflected in Devil in Silver, which is a story about the business of this sort of place.

New Hyde is a decidedly impersonal institution. Its staff are overworked and under-resourced. When an inmate dies in the first episode, the nurse known as “Scotch Tape” (Hampton Fluker) because he “holds things together, fixes what’s broken”, does what he can to clean up the mess. “That’s all you’re going to do?” asks his colleague Josephine (Maureen Sebastian). “Flip the mattress?” Ever the pragmatist, Scotch Tape replies, “That’s all we can afford these days.”

New Hyde is operated at the behest of external benefactors, who have no interest in the human beings who work or reside in the institution. “The people above me, all they care about is the charts,” Doctor Anand explains. “The charts dictate whether we live or die. This unit is the last unit running in this whole compound. And we’re in danger of being shut down everyday.” These owners and operators never visit their investment.

“The board of New Hyde sent me an award, in recognition of my tireless work with at-risk communities,” Anand muses to veteran nurse Chris (CCH Pounder). “They misspelled my fucking name.” He continues, “This is who we’re dealing with. Those who will never face the consequences for their neglect. Those consequences trickle down to us. The money comes, they sleep fine. The money stops, they push a button, we all go away, and you know what? They still sleep fine.”

Across the first half of the season, Dorry (Judith Light), a long-serving resident on the ward, keeps asking Peter, “Do you know the history of the American buffalo?” It initially seems like something on a non sequitur, but she eventually reveals that it is in fact a metaphor. She relates the history of the buffalo to Peter, recalling the value of the creature’s carcass. “The American buffalo became big business and nothing gets in the way of that,” Dorry reflects.

She tells stories of train travelers casually shooting buffalo from passing trains. “But the fastest, easiest, worst way to kill the buffalo in mass numbers was to drive the herd towards the edge of a cliff and make them jump off,” Dorry explains. It is a very mechanized process of extermination. “Hundreds of bison broken into pieces at the bottom.” She then explains the implicit comparison. “Folks like us, we’re the buffalo,” she warns Peter. “And New Hyde is the cliff.”

Even the title of Devil in Silver hints at the show’s themes. It literally refers to the silver door at the end of the ward holding one of the earliest institutionalized patients. However, it also reflects the extent to which this is a horror story about the nightmare of late capitalism, in which human beings are effectively rendered as economic units to be exploited. The longer the patients are held, the more money for the institution, money that is not channeled back into the hospital itself.

After all, it is not just the economic exploitation of the inmates that contributes to the horror, it is the refusal to let the money flow downstream, leading to institutional rot. Summarizing how he ended up in this situation, Peter explains the motives of the officers who admitted him, “A trio of dipshit cops had their overtime cut. And in order to avoid unpaid paper work, they dropped me in a mental institution.” Josephine laments the institution cutting her wages, opining, “They are devils here.”

There has been a lot written and discussed about the prison-for-profit industry, with Ava DuVernay’s 13th explicitly comparing it to slavery, the exploitation of human bodies for financial gain. The bail bonds industry is worth $2bn a year. Prisons themselves are worth $4bn a year. Within that, the private prison healthcare industry is seemingly worth $3bn a year. It is not just prisons. The GEO group reported $2.5bn profit in 2025, operating immigrant detention centers for ICE.

Private psychiatric institutions are arguably part of that pipeline. Although it has always existed to some extent, the private psychiatric care industry has grown substantially since 2020. To give a sense of how rapidly the industry has expanded, more than 40% of inpatient mental health beds were operated by for-profit entities as of 2021, up from about 13% in 2010. The total number of mental health beds held relatively constant during that time. The industry has exploded in California.

Companies treat patients as a consistent source of revenue. Acadia Healthcare charges $2,200 a day per patient, often manipulating insurance companies to pay it. The company’s practices were so predator that it had to pay out a $19.85m settlement in 2024 related to unnecessary medical services, which was just a drop in the ocean of the company’s reported $3.15bn in revenue that year. It is a system designed to treat human beings as chattel.

However, part of the power of Devil in Silver is the way that the show lets that theme bleed into a broader commentary. If human beings are commodified by the system, it is inevitable that they come to see each other as commodities. Peter is haunted by visions of his own past, his own failures with his biological son Anthony (Hayward Leach). Peter gave Anthony up for adoption. However, he had a crisis of conscience, and arranged with the agency to take Anthony into his own care.

Peter is tormented by visions of the breakfast that he shared with young Anthony after taking him out, taunted by a supernatural demon in the form of the ward’s original head, Doctor Walter (John Benjamin Hickey). Walter points out that Peter got cold feet. “After this breakfast, you brought him back to the agency, you put him back into the system,” Walter narrates. Peter treated his own son as a commodity, as a product that he could buy and then return when it proved unsatisfactory.

Indeed, Devil in Silver offers its own twist on the classic gothic haunted hospital narrative. After all, psychiatric institutions lend themselves to supernatural horror stories – think of horrors like Brad Anderson’s Session 9, John Carpenter’s The Ward or Gus Van Sant’s A Cure for Wellness. As Peter’s new roommate Coffee (Chinaza Uche) explains, “This hospital profits off our bodies. Something else feeds on our souls.”

“Devil is just a word meant to describe an idea that’s almost impossible to grasp,” Dorry argues at one point. One of the clever twists in Devil in Silver is the idea that the supernatural and demonic presence that has taken root in New Hyde has itself begun to decay and erode, that it is being starved by institutional entropy, trying desperately to escape. Throughout the season, the residents and the staff don’t talk about being afraid or being angry, just about being tired.

Coffee was a structural engineer in Ghana, and so has ruminated on the structures that now hold him. He has spent years trying to convince outside forces to intervene and repair the decay and erosion. “I used to think this system was broken and people out there just didn’t know,” he confesses to Peter. “But now I realize that nothing is broken. This system is working perfectly. That’s why they never fix it.”

Watching Devil in Silver, it’s hard not think about “The Good News About Hell”, the first episode of Severance, another portrait of the dehumanizing horrors of late capitalism. In that premiere, Harmony Cobel (Patricia Arquette) explains the title. “The good news is hell is just the product of a morbid human imagination,” she suggests, quoting her mother. “The bad news is whatever humans can imagine, they can usually create.”

Devil in Silver suggests that mankind has done a remarkable job constructing its own hell and its own devil, to the point that even a literal demon finds itself trapped within the monstrous systems.