Man, how good was The Pitt? There’s something about a medical drama that will always get me. From ER to Scrubs, from MASH to New Amsterdam, stories about doctors, nurses, medical care in general, no matter how predictable they can get (or how unhinged), audiences will always want another.
When I set out to write my newest novel, The Graceview Patient, I had every medical drama I’d ever watched on my mind… with a twist. The Graceview Patient is gothic horror, from the bones up. Following a woman undergoing a grueling experimental medical trial, we’re led to question everything from the contents of her IV drip to the possibility that ghosts are real, and haunting the hospital. At the same time, I wanted the medicine to feel real. I brought on a nurse as a fact-checker and consultant, striving for the perfect blend of realism and the horrific.
The experience left me hungry for more. Now, I’m not a film buff. Luckily, Aaron and Derek of the Watch If You Dare podcast were more than happy to come up with a list of medical and hospital horror. They found it more challenging than expected. There’s a surfeit of mental asylum horror, but I really wanted horror movies that dealt with the body in a medicalized fashion. The four films and one tv show below approach “hospital horror” from different perspectives, but a few themes recur.
Flatliners (1990)
In this star-studded horror/thriller combo, a group of medical students try to cheat death and see what’s waiting for them on the other side. These ambitious doctors-in-the-making take turns being plunged into death, and take progressively greater risks, staying dead longer and longer. Unfortunately, no matter the length of stay, something tends to follow them back from beyond…
Full of religious imagery and focused sharply on ambition and the humbling force of near death experiences, Flatliners is not really a medical movie. We see patients only briefly, and a cadaver lab twice. But the concept can only exist at the frontier of modern medicine, where life and death can be manipulated, where boundaries become blurry, and where science has no answers.
The Void (2016)
Doctors trying to cheat death is the predominant theme of most medical horror I came across. Pardon the mild spoiler, but The Void is no different; the cult that surrounds the sheriff, the staff, and the patients at Marsh Community Hospital is directly linked to Dr. Powell, who, after the death of his daughter, has sought out a way to bring back the dead. The staff is a skeleton crew, and one of the nurses turns thirteen minutes into the film, stabbing a patient to death (through the eye!) with scissors.
The medicine is not the main point (the hospital is largely a convenient way to get the characters trapped somewhere together), but honorable mention goes to intern Kim, who doses a laboring pregnant woman with some kind of pain medication with little to no appropriate training–to upsetting results. Childbirth horror is present in spades here, as is body horror in general.
The Kingdom (1994-2022)
This three-season miniseries has been on my to watch list since the early 2000s, when I bought the first two seasons on DVD and then promptly never got around to it. The Kingdom blends the absurdity of day in, day out hospital work (think Scrubs) with the supernatural, with ghosts stalking the halls and occasionally impregnating doctors. The staff are sometimes brilliant, often arrogant, occasionally deeply careless.
There’s a lot of medicalized body horror here, some tragically realistic, some ridiculous. One patient, Mona, has been majorly disabled by a surgery gone wrong, but may be able to perceive the supernatural. One of the doctors transplants a patient’s cancerous liver into his own body so that he can obtain legal permission to dissect it for his research. This is perhaps less horror than dark comedy, but it has its unsettling and upsetting moments.
12 Hour Shift (2020)
Another entry in the part dark workplace comedy, part gorefest subgenre, 12 Hour Shift is just fun. Mandy, a nurse with a barely-controlled drug addiction, spends her nights stealing patient medication, hating pretty much everybody she speaks to, and handing off pilfered organs to a black market trading ring. When a kidney goes missing, she and her cousin (by marriage) Regina go on a blood-soaked farce of a journey to get a replacement. Like The Kingdom, 12 Hour Shift is deeply committed to showing the absurd, mundane aspects of working in a hospital. The horror comes not from supernatural elements or mad genius doctors but from the very real fear we all have of being vulnerable and in somebody else’s care… somebody who may have just snorted a crushed up valium in the staff bathroom before coming to check your blood pressure.
A Cure For Wellness (2016)
And one more for the mad genius doctor genre, though this time with a gothic twist. An ambitious and shady finance professional named Lockhart is sent to a mysterious Swiss medical retreat to retrieve his boss ahead of an SEC investigation. Once there, he finds a beautiful campus filled with old, wealthy patients in white robes, none of whom wish to leave, and one strange young woman. When a car accident makes him a patient of the lead doctor, things begin to spiral towards madness.
Much of the horror comes from our protagonist’s descent into paranoia and delusion as a result of the treatments he goes through. Lockhart’s periodic protestations that he is not a patient are contrasted with his desperate confession that he is also not well. A Cure For Wellness, in many ways, is the closest entry on this list to my own work, going to great length to foreground the vulnerability and potential horror of being in care, and the paternalistic impulses baked into the history of doctoring, something I would love more of.
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