Stephen King's Weirdest TV Remake Started With This Unforgettable Filmmaker's 3-Part Horror Series

It's a wonder that more horrors aren't set in hospitals, a place where devastating tragedy can occur in one room and a slack-jawed 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.

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 into 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 with 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, over-achieving 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.