Movies & TV The Terror: Devil in Silver The Terror: Devil in Silver Nails Its Premiere The adaptation of Victor LaValle’s book starts strong right out of the gate. By Alex Brown | Published on May 7, 2026 Comment 0 Share New Share AMC’s horror anthology The Terror has returned, this time adapting Victor LaValle’s hospital horror book The Devil in Silver. All you need to know going in is that a guy finds himself imprisoned in a mental hospital that may or may not be haunted by a monster.  I’ll be covering each weekly episode, with some spoilers. Before watching the first episode, I read the book. I wanted to make sure I had a firm grasp on the themes and what to expect in the show. However, I will try not to turn these reviews into diatribes comparing and contrasting the source material with the adaptation. Alright, enough background. Let’s check in on the poor patients at New York City’s worst mental hospital. We begin not with our main character but a dead man. The sun has set on New Hyde Hospital, a brick building that looks more like a derelict factory than a facility housing a vulnerable population. Mr. Bromden is dead in his bed, long enough for rigor mortis to set in and twist his body to look like he died of terror. Nurses Josephine (Maureen Sebastian), Miss Chris (CCH Pounder), and Scotch Tape (Hampton Fluker) discover him, a pool of blood staining the blanket over his face. The latter two move the body, but only after breaking Mr. Bromden’s limbs. Respect for the human body isn’t something the staff at New Hyde are particularly concerned with. Did Mr. Bromden kill himself? Or did someone kill him?  In an interview with Reactor, LaValle talked about how this opening scene does a lot of heavy lifting for the show. Not only does it set the tone, but it also functions as the first of many indictments against a system working exactly as designed. “I remember reading a story after Hurricane Katrina about this old folks’ home in Far Rockaway, where a lot of the elderly patients were just essentially left there to die. And there was one body that had died in rigor mortis in a way that they couldn’t get it out of the room. And then I was like, ‘Huh, let’s take that…’ I just thought you couldn’t think of a better way to say something is wrong—not with these people, but with this whole system.” If the Big Bad is a monster in the walls, that’s scary. If the Big Bad is a system that has beaten everyone, patients and staff, down so much that they can rip open their own throat or break the legs of a dead person without complaint, that’s worse. Finally we get to the main event. Dan Stevens plays Pepper with a real joie de dirtbag quality that is both impossible to dislike and also frustrating in big doses. (I used to work in cheap restaurants, and he reminds me a lot of the cooks, grungy dudes who will cook a server a free meal while also threatening to kill a customer.) He’s charming if rough around the edges, and has a chip on his shoulder that is constantly on the verge of tipping him out of control. He’s the kind of guy who is fun to have around but not someone you build a future with; he’s reckless enough to sabotage his happiness and oblivious enough to not realize when he’s doing it. Girlfriend Marisol (Juani Feliz) has more patience than I do, or lower standards (probably both), but there are cracks in this romance. After a tense conversation over Pepper’s inability to respect her financial boundaries, he dives in like a superhero vigilante to save her from her abusive ex. Here come the cops, violating procedure like it’s in their job description, and off Pepper goes to New Hyde. After a stressful intake and some unsettling backstory from Dorry (Judith Light!!!), the local “tour guide,” Pepper ends up in poor Mr. Bromden’s old room. Something I noted in both the book and the show is that most of the patients are women or people of color. The only white staff we’ve seen so far have been two of the three doctors; the nursing team is all BIPOC, as is the head doctor. Pepper is one of the only white men in the hospital, and he replaces a white man. When he’s sitting in the cop car, he even tries to play good ol’ white boys with the cops, but it doesn’t work. Being white offers privileges the rest of us don’t get, but in some situations, like being disabled or a cop deciding they want to take time out of their day to personally fuck up your life, those privileges are few and far between. This is probably the first time in Pepper’s life where being white hasn’t benefited him as much as it usually would (on the other hand, he only got arrested, not shot). He’s a victim of the system just like everyone else, but he still has it better than many BIPOC patients. The only other person besides Pepper who believes he doesn’t belong there is an unnamed cop known only by the nickname Pepper gives him, “Louie” (Philip Ettinger). When he gets lost in the bowels of the hospital, he encounters one of those hallucinations/ghosts, and it goes as well for him as it did Mr. Bromden. Pepper’s 72 hour hold whizzes by under a haze of antipsychotics, and he retaliates by assaulting Anand, landing him with more drugs and another extension on his unofficial sentence. Pepper isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. Image: Emily V. Aragones/AMC At first everyone seems to acknowledge that Pepper isn’t mentally ill and is only there because a trio of cops were lazy. Dr. Anand (Aasif Mandvi) plays the game, but it’s a recitation of procedure, nothing more. He drugs him up not for any reason other than he can, it’s easy, and what is Pepper gonna do about it? When Pepper has several hallucinations, again instead of anyone asking themselves “could this be because we drugged a guy who doesn’t need drugs” (or because the hospital is haunted), Anand and the cops talk themselves into thinking maybe Pepper really is mentally ill. He has to be, right? We’re helping people, drugs help people, he is breaking the rules, ergo he deserves to be there.  Louie is the only good apple in the spoiled barrel. He tries to be a good cop, but not that hard. He probably got into the job because he wanted to help people and then realized corruption and violence is the system. He tries to crack the system from the outside by leaking information to journalists, but of course nothing changes. You can’t fix something that isn’t broken. He is in the same leaky boat as the staff at the hospital, a regular guy trying to get by and not cause too much harm in the world but unwilling to stand up to the powers that be if it means risking his livelihood, telling himself he’s doing what’s right but it’s mostly what’s right for him. Louie says “This can’t be the job,” but it is, buddy. It is exactly what you signed up for.  Take the constant refrain “follow the doctor’s orders.” Sounds simple enough, right? The system works based on rules. But the people working in the system immediately use those rules against Pepper. They give him haldol, an antipsychotic used mostly to treat schizophrenia symptoms and Tourette’s. Of course that’s going to knock him out; he’s never taken anything like it and doesn’t have any of the symptoms the medication is supposed to ease. Which means he’s out of it long enough to miss his other meds, and the nurses, who are too overworked to care, just mark him as noncompliant instead of taking time they don’t have to check on him. Being NC means he’s stuck there longer than he should be.  None of this is technically a problem. The nurses followed the rules, Pepper did not. Doesn’t matter that if the nurses were better staffed and resourced, they wouldn’t have given Pepper haldol in the first place or at least could have monitored him for compliance over the weekend. Doesn’t matter that Pepper didn’t intentionally choose noncompliance. The system is working exactly as designed, because the system was designed to exploit the vulnerable… and both the patients and staff count as vulnerable. “Oh, you think it’s bad in here? Because they have no chance on the streets.” As if those are the only two options. Or, I guess, in the current system, those are. But instead of trying to do anything about it, the staff cash their paychecks and over-medicate their patients. Everyone says they’re helping people, and Louie even believes it. But no one is being helped by the system. That’s not why it exists. It exists to incarcerate. There’s a reason 19th century insane asylums used the term “inmates” for patients. The system is designed to “profit off our bodies,” as Coffee (Chinaza Uche), Pepper’s roommate, says. There isn’t much profit to be made, but the board is going to squeeze every last dime out of people like Pepper and Coffee.  Image: Emily V. Aragones/AMC Writers and co-showrunners Christopher Cantwell and Victor LaValle nail this adaptation. As far as the first episode goes, they succeed in setting up the season with teases of horror. It’s tricky to tell a story like this where the audience doesn’t know what’s real and what’s a fabric of our protagonist’s imagination. It’s clear something wicked this way comes, but what, how, and why are unknowns. The first episode is visually and aurally evocative. The music wobbles like a warped record, the camera (with stunning cinematography by Julie Kirkwood and direction from Karyn Kusama) cuts harsh angles and perspectives, and the hue is tinted a sickly yellow. The production design is spot on, too. Nothing in the Northwest looks like it was made this century. The building is rundown, falling apart, out of date.  Also! Getting the inimitable CCH Pounder is such a score. There are many tremendous actors in this stacked cast, and this woman is one of the best. She is an actor actor. She has been around for ages and never misses. She plays Miss Chris somewhat differently from in the book. In the book I felt like she enjoyed being cruel to the patients. Here, she enjoys having power over others—see that little smile at “the new girl” crying—but she brings a level of competence and exhaustion to it. She is no nonsense because she’s seen it all and she’s never been paid enough for it. She can instruct Scotch Tape to break bones while at the same time gently covering Mr. Bromden’s face out of respect. As a side note, I’m watching ER for the first time as a way to tide me over between seasons of The Pitt, and one of my big thrills has been Pounder as Dr. Angela Hicks. I was late to the Victor LaValle bandwagon. The first book of his I read was the 2016 novella The Ballad of Black Tom. Loved it immediately and haven’t stopped recommending it. But it was his 2023 historical horror novel Lone Woman that turned me into a fanatic. That same year I got the opportunity to both read the book The Changeling and review the first season (and likely only season) of the adaptation. I’m also a huge fan of The Terror. I recently rewatched the first season and had forgotten how good it is. What a joy it is to be able to combine two of my horror interests with my critic brain. Can’t wait for the rest of this season! Quotes “You get rid of everything, it’s like throwing away a whole person. You don’t want to do that.” Paging Scotch Tape and Josephine. “It is meant to help,” said in the least convincing way possible. Pepper: “What is that?” he says pointing to the silver door. Dorry: “You’ll find out soon enough.” Well, that’s not ominous. “You were summoned. But who summoned you?” “Do bad things happen in a place because the place is evil, or were so many bad things done there, it invited evil in? I don’t know the answer. I only know what it’s like now.” Final Thoughts The way the ceiling tile constantly changes positions is disconcerting. What (or who) is up there??? Dan Stevens is so good at playing barely restrained men. He plays Pepper as a man about to snap, but also unsettled and skittish.  The note Pepper reads says: “Hello, you might not even remember who I am, which is fine, but I thought you should know. My mother, Antoinette, is dead. If you want to talk with me, that would be great. You can reach me at (917) 183-9833” The changes they’ve made to Pepper’s relationship with Marisol—and the introduction of the mysterious letter writer—pose some interesting challenges to his plot. In the book, he’s much more adrift in terms of interpersonal relations. I wonder how the show is going to play this. Pro-tip: ladies, don’t merge your finances with your man. Or if you must, at least keep a separate bank account he can’t access. That way if your man wants to splurge your savings on, say, a drum kit, he won’t ruin your trip to Orlando. When Pepper was beating the shit outta Manny, it felt like Stevens was playing it like Pepper had some unresolved childhood trauma. I wonder how much the show will get into it. Do the others not hear the scrabbling in the ceiling tiles or are they choosing to ignore it? Seems telling that only Pepper and Louie react. Dr. Walter, huh? Interesting… Stevens plays the descent into unconsciousness so well.  If the guy who is extremely hostile and breaks the bones of dead men is the guy who “fixes things,” that doesn’t bode well for anyone at New Hyde. The ringtone and the song playing at the end is Iron Maiden’s “Run To The Hills” If you’re a nerd like me and want to read more research on systemic racism in inpatient mental hospitals: this and this.[end-mark] The post <i>The Terror: Devil in Silver</i> Nails Its Premiere appeared first on Reactor.