Stephen King’s Weirdest Horror Remake Started With This 13-Episode Cult Classic

Published Oct 27, 2026, 4:46 PM EDT Jasneet Singh is a writer who finally has a platform to indulge in long rants about small moments on TV and film in overwhelming detail. With a literature background, she is drawn to the narrative aspect of cinema and will happily rave about her favorite characters. She is also waiting for the Ranger's Apprentice novels to be adapted... but the cycle of hope and disappointment every two years is getting too painful to bear. It's a wonder that more horrors aren't set in hospitals, a place where devastating tragedy can occur in one room and a jaw-dropping miracle in another at the same time. If anyone was going to harness the surreal potential of a hospital setting, it's no surprise that it was Lars von Trier, a filmmaker who frequently pushes the boundaries of horror. In 1994, he began the absurdist horror project, The Kingdom, which would get its second season in 1997 and its third in 2022. There is nothing quite like this 13-episode series, one that is a masterclass in creepiness and is essential viewing for all horror fanatics. It even led to Stephen King's failed series, Kingdom Hospital. The author was inspired after watching von Trier's series, which he found "both funny and scary." Usually when I write a plot synopsis, I focus on the major storylines surrounding specific characters, but The Kingdom makes this virtually impossible. It'll be more feasible to treat the eponymous setting as a character, one that demands to be felt in every sordid and farcical scene of the show. It's a place that is burdened by the hospital bureaucracy while also housing supernatural entities. All these events are accompanied by a Greek chorus-like commentary by two secluded dishwashers who drop unnerving gems like, "What happens when the house is crying?" or "Swedes are human too." You never know what will happen in this hospital, but it sure as hell will make your skin crawl. 'The Kingdom's Setting Lays the Foundation of the Show's Creepiness The Kingdom's major creep factor stems from the setting, which is hauntingly alive in its own right. The show opens up with a sepia-toned sequence about bleach men working the earth until modernity was built over them, leading to the Kingdom, a hospital that lives in a liminal space between technological reality and the wrath of spirituality. The layout of the hospital is familiar, with a notion of white, sterile hallways and advanced machinery like CT scanners, but it is drenched in a grainy, earthy palette and with frequent shots of grime and blood smeared across walls. When the third season arrives in 2022, it takes a metafictional approach that emphasizes how otherworldly the hospital is; new character Karen (Bodil Jørgensen) watches the show on TV in a steel-blue sequence, then when she herself goes to the Kingdom, the screen returns to the '90s aspect ratio and color palette. Collider Exclusive · 8 Questions · 2 Minutes What Is Your Biggest Horror Nightmare? Elm Street · Chucky · Scream · The Conjuring Four horror franchises. Four completely different ways of scaring you. One waits until you fall asleep. One makes sure nobody believes you. One is already in your group of friends. And one is in the house with your family. Answer eight quick questions about how you actually watch horror, and find out which nightmare was built for you. 😴Elm Street(Freddy Krueger) 🧸Chucky(Child's Play) 📞Scream(Ghostface) 🕯️The Conjuring(The Warren Files) FIND YOUR NIGHTMARE → 01 Which horror scene makes you cover your eyes? Four classic images. One of them is worse than the others for you. ASomebody falling asleep when they really should not. BA toy that has moved, and nobody touched it. CA phone ringing in an empty house. DA child talking to somebody who is not there. NEXT QUESTION → 02 You are home alone and you hear a noise. First thought? Everybody has one. It arrives before you have decided anything. AI am exhausted and my mind is playing tricks on me. BSomething in this room is not where I left it. CSomebody is in here with me. DThis house has never felt entirely right. NEXT QUESTION → 03 Which horror movie rule would you break first? Everybody thinks they would survive. Almost nobody actually does. ANever fall asleep. BNever leave it out of your sight. CNever answer the phone. DNever go down to the basement. NEXT QUESTION → 04 Something genuinely frightening happens. What do you do? Not in a film. In your actual living room, tonight. AConvince myself I imagined the whole thing. BTell someone, and brace for them not believing me. CWork out which person I know could be behind it. DGet everybody in the house into one room. NEXT QUESTION → 05 How do you actually watch a horror film? Be honest about this one. Nobody is checking. AFine during. Wide awake at two in the morning. BShouting at the screen that nobody is listening. CCalling the twist out loud before it lands. DThrough my fingers, holding on to something. NEXT QUESTION → 06 Somebody offers you serious money. Which do you still refuse? The amount does not matter. There is one on this list you are not doing. AFall asleep in a room I have never been in before. BKeep an old doll on the shelf facing my bed. CAnswer every unknown number that calls after midnight. DSpend one night alone in a house with a history. NEXT QUESTION → 07 Which feeling stays with you a week after the film? Good horror does not stop when the credits do. ANot wanting to turn the bedroom light off. BNot trusting one particular object in my house. CLooking twice at people I have known for years. DFeeling like something came home with me. NEXT QUESTION → 08 Something wakes you at 3am. What is the worst possibility? Eight questions in, this is the one that decides your nightmare. AThat I am still asleep, and it knows it. BThat the thing nobody believed me about is here. CThat somebody with a key is downstairs. DThat something is in the doorway, watching us sleep. REVEAL MY NIGHTMARE → The Lights Just Went Out Your Nightmare Is…Four franchises, four completely different ways of getting underneath your skin. This is the one built out of your particular fear, why it works so well on you, and what it would leave behind. Elm StreetYour nightmare does not wait outside the door. It waits for you to close your eyes, which you are going to have to do eventually, because nobody has ever won that particular argument. Freddy is horror's cruellest idea: a threat that lives in the one place you cannot guard, cannot lock, and cannot avoid forever. You are the one who is fine during the film and wide awake at two in the morning. Your own head is where this does its damage. These films understood exhaustion as a horror engine. The kids on Elm Street do not lose because they are weak. They lose because they are tired. You can lock every door in the house. You still have to sleep. ChuckyYour nightmare is not really the doll. It is the face of the person you tell, and the way they decide, very kindly, that you have imagined all of it. Chucky works precisely because he is absurd. That is the trap: the more accurately you describe him, the less anybody is going to believe you. You are the one shouting at the screen because the characters are not listening. You know that feeling from real life too. The franchise is at its best when the adults in the room are the real obstacle, and you have met those adults. By the time somebody finally believes you, you will have handled most of it on your own. ScreamYour nightmare has your number, knows your name, and has almost certainly been inside your house before. The worst part is that you already know them. Scream is the only one of these where the killer takes the mask off and turns out to be somebody who was at the party. You are the person who calls the twist out loud before it lands. You watch people the same way you watch films. The franchise made the rules of horror part of the plot, which means the survivors are the ones paying attention. You would be paying attention. Everybody is a suspect, including the person who just offered to walk you home. The ConjuringYour nightmare is not really about you. It is about the people asleep down the hall, and the feeling that whatever is here is not interested in leaving. The Conjuring films are domestic horror. The house, the family, the perfectly ordinary room that quietly stops feeling ordinary. Your instinct is to get everybody into one room. Your fear is protective rather than personal, which is rarer than it sounds. This is the one franchise where belief is the weapon. The people who come through it are the ones who are not alone and refuse to be. Whatever is here did not come for you. It came for the household, and you are the one standing in the hallway. ↻ RETAKE THE QUIZ Within the Kingdom are the bold strokes of tonally disparate storylines and genres, where the extreme difference between them and how they coalesce together is entirely unsettling. As mentioned previously, hospitals are a place of duality, of life and death, of rigorous science and unexplained miracles. On one level, the show operates as a medical drama, drawing heavily on staff hierarchies, lawsuits against malpractice, or student doctors who steal roses from the morgue and gift them to the woman they're stalking. On the other hand, we get a supernatural investigation into the echoes of a girl crying in the elevator and a poor woman who gives birth to... something. The tonal whiplash is perfectly suited to the setting, devout to extremism and unapologetic about watching the goosebumps rise across our skin. If the visuals or atmosphere don't convince you that the hospital is alive, then Season 3 certainly will. At one point, one of the rooms holds a literal giant beating heart, though I won't spoil how it got there. The Kingdom won't just provide a creepy viewing experience; it envelops you in its surreal world, then hooks you up to laughing gas for good measure. 'The Kingdom' Is a Creepy Mix of Absurdity and Morbidity It's not only the setting of The Kingdom that accommodates extremism, but the characters too. Of the ensemble cast, two in particular flesh out the surrealist, divisive atmosphere of the show: the arrogant, Danish-hating Dr. Helmer (Ernst-Hugo Järegård) and the spiritually-minded, stubborn Drusse (Kirsten Rolffes). Dr. Helmer is outrageously visceral in his hateful tirades against anyone he deems lower than him — including the Danish resident doctors and patients who sue him — and his attitude is so hyperbolic that it is genuinely disconcerting to watch, even as we chuckle. Meanwhile, Drusse fakes neurological diseases to get admitted into the hospital so she can conduct her communications on the astral plane, where her kind demeanor is an unsettling contrast next to her gory discoveries. Järegård and Rolffes' inspired performances were consistently the highlight of the first two seasons, and even though they tragically passed away before the third, their influence is clearly seen in the new characters. Between the duality of the setting and the characters who inhabit it, The Kingdom creates a whiplash of a show that forms the basis of its mastery over creepiness. It never relents in its absurdity, overachieving with every season until we're trapped in the unrecognizable hallways of a hospital that defies the laws of both man and nature. There's truly nothing out there quite like The Kingdom, a decades-spanning project that combines hyper-reality and ultra-surrealism into the ultimate dose of goosebumps.