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The patients at New Hyde Psychiatric Hospital have a regular book club overseen by Stephen Root’s Dr. Badger. 

Convention dictates that whatever books the characters are reading will invariably tie into the plot and themes of The Terror: Devil in Silver, premiering on AMC+ and Shudder ahead of an eventual airing on AMC.

Fortunately, Chris Cantwell and Victor LaValle’s adaptation of LaValle’s 2012 novel doesn’t disappoint, as Dr. Badger’s book club starts with Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, followed quickly by Peter Benchley’s Jaws.

Like its source material, Devil in Silver plays like a fusion of those two texts, answering the question “What if a malevolent force of nature were preying on a mental hospital, exposing institutional failures and, at the same time, enabling small doses of collective rebellion and individual heroism?”

This third entry in an unlikely anthology franchise comes in at six episodes, compared to 10 episodes for 2018’s The Terror and 2019’s The Terror: Infamy, and the resulting series feels more rushed and less contextually nuanced than its predecessors. It’s a simmering cauldron of spooky, disturbing elements that never quite comes to a boil in terms of frights or theme. 

Following the anthology formula of claustrophobic dramas set in contained environments — an ice-locked ship, a Japanese internment camp, and now an asylum — in which natural tensions are heightened by the arrival of a possibly supernatural creature, Devil in Silver focuses on Pepper (Dan Stevens), a former heavy metal drummer just scraping by as a Queens moving man.

Pepper, who has a hair-trigger temper, jumps in to protect his girlfriend from a belligerent ex, and gets arrested by a trio of plainclothes cops (Michael Aranov, Philip Ettinger, Marin Ireland). The arrest doesn’t make a lot of sense, nor does the aftermath, in which the cops decide that it’s less paperwork for them if they drop Pepper off at a hospital for a 72-hour hold rather than formally booking him. 

New Hyde is a shabby place, all dingy linoleum floors and droopy ceiling tiles. Dr. Anand (Aasif Mandvi) and presiding nurse Miss Chris (CCH Pounder) make it clear that Pepper’s stay will be brief, provided he complies with the rules. But compliance proves elusive. Does Pepper’s lack of control prove that he belongs in a place like New Hyde or is New Hyde one of those Stephen King-y places so infused with evil that it changes the people within it?

Soon, Pepper finds himself butting heads with Dr. Anand, Miss Chris and the rest of the staff, and forging unlikely bonds with fellow patients including Dorry (Judith Light), a New Hyde lifer, who, among other things, cries blood; and Loochie (the one-letter performer named “b”), a young inmate whose anger management issues may rival Pepper’s own. 

Nobody is especially happy at New Hyde, including Pepper’s roommate Coffee (Chinaza Uche), who has a binder tracking the facility’s misdeeds, which include lackluster amenities, excessive reliance on pharmaceuticals and the mysterious door at the end of a mysterious hallway concealing a mysterious patient nobody has ever seen in the daylight. At night, though, the patient slinks through the building, attacking fellow rehabilitants. 

There are rumors that the patient is a horrifying monster with the head of a buffalo and the body of a man. 

And there are rumors that the patient is the Devil.

It’s one of the hallmarks of the Terror anthology that even if there actually is something unexplainable lurking in the shadows, the real villains are much more human — whether that means stir-crazy British sailors, xenophobic American bureaucrats or the U.S. healthcare industry and its complicity with law enforcement. 

So maybe New Hyde is evil and maybe the creature that lurks behind the silver door really is the Devil. But it’s more justifiable to point the finger at an underfunded, understaffed institution that abandoned its aspirations of helping the troubled over decades pushing unproven treatments accompanied by arduous rules and mantras, leaving invalids strapped to beds or wandering hallways in a Lorazepam haze. 

The subtler aspects work far better onscreen than they do on the page of The Devil in Silver (AMC opted to drop the titular “The”). LaValle has overhauled Pepper’s backstory, providing character-driven motivations that he lacked in the book. It gives Stevens regrets and insecurities to play, and if you can ignore the New York accent that comes and goes — Dan Stevens: Very Good Actor, Very Bad at Accents — it’s an intense and involving performance. Pepper uncovers the sources of his rage and evolves from lashing out at the world around him to self-flagellation, while at the same time forming bonds with Coffee (Uche is fragile and volatile), Dorry (Light is fairly broad, yet emotionally resonant) and Loochie (b is a raw nerve, but could have used more depth from the scripts). 

Rather than making a single Nurse Ratched-style bad guy, the series lets Mandvi, Pounder and Hampton Fluker, as an orderly known as Scotch Tape, play different levels of degraded decency, with Root giving a nicely understated turn. They all might have started work at New Hyde with healing aspirations, only to have their optimism soured. A flawed institution doesn’t need to be possessed by demonic forces for that to happen, though John Benjamin Hickey perfectly embodies amiable malevolence as Dr. Walter, a figure from the institution’s past still featured in portraits on every wall and still responsible for the repeated emphasis on “compliance” over recovery.

There’s a thinness, though, to the world of New Hyde beyond its core characters. There are a half-dozen patients who have defined parts in the book, but are barely background figures here — the two women who may be lesbians, the two older men who don’t even have names. Stevens’ faltering accent and a field trip to a neighboring pizza parlor are the only indication of New Hyde’s location, while there are stretches that imply the series could be a period piece until a current bit of technology pops up. Instead of a critique of mental healthcare in a real and specific version of contemporary America, The Terror: Devil in Silver lands on plausible, but still bland, universality in contrast to the rich worlds The Terror previously constructed in the 19th century Arctic and World War II Southern California. 

The season is similarly evasive when it comes to its actual horror elements. Karyn Kusama, director of the first two episodes, builds a potent mood and teases that the encroaching shadows and unexplained discolorations might have a ghoulish source, both behind that silver door and navigating the crawlspace. Kusama nails the build-up, but if you’re waiting for a creature to jump out of the murk and yell “Boo!” that’s not what Devil in Silver is about. 

The book tiptoes for a while, but eventually the characters see the thing they’re afraid of, and LaValle does his best to describe their adversary in satisfyingly gory terms. Maybe it was decided that there was no way to properly visualize the creature as LaValle wrote it, so instead Devil in Silver sticks to character-driven menace, jump scares and the occasional dose of freaky makeup. But when it reaches its horror climax it’s both rushed and hollow — lots of screaming and flailing against unseen foes, lots of exposition and no real visceral thrills. Jaws was smart to use the shark sparingly, but imagine if Jaws had just skipped the shark entirely?

It’s a large letdown. But then the last scene of the finale, a simple conversation between two characters, nails the human side that the series has been building to, salvaging with intimacy and carefully articulated pain what it fails to deliver in scale. It’s a bad finale overall, but a good conclusion, making Devil in Silver a low-key sinister success, albeit the least of the three Terror seasons.