TV shows about teens with psychic abilities often have a unique setting that delves further into the surrounding mysteries of their emerging powers and the danger from outside forces that want to harness them. It doesn’t always appear, but when it does, the “secret lab” is a setting that can be above or below ground, with special clearance granting scientists and guards access to the hallways leading to rooms where the secrets get darker.
On Netflix, Stranger Things has Hawkins Lab and Wednesday has the hidden basement of the Willow Hill hospital. But those Netflix hits don’t come close to what Stephen King has in mind. MGM+’s The Institute is based on King’s 2019 novel of the same name, where there is a secret lab creepier than Hawkins Lab, Willow Hill, and even what a previous King adaptation did. Firestarter (1984) was one of his earliest depictions of a secret lab imprisoning characters with special powers, and over forty years later, The Institute modernizes the setting with more danger. Someone is always watching the imprisoned characters, and their safety is never certain.
‘The Institute’ Is a Stephen King Story With a Familiar Setting
In the first season of The Institute, Luke (Joe Freeman) is a teen boy with a gifted mind, with intelligence that is advanced for his age, and exhibiting signs of telekinesis. One night, he is abducted and wakes up inside a facility known as “the Institute,” where he joins other kids who are like him and either have telekinesis or telepathy. They are test subjects for a cryptic agenda that the adults supervising them only say is to save the world, but no further explanation. There are three big authority figures: Ms. Sigsby (Mary-Louise Parker) is the director, with her eyes closely on the monitors of the facility’s surveillance cameras; Dr. Hendricks (Robert Joy) runs experiments that range from unpleasant injections to disturbing psychic tests; and Mr. Stackhouse (Julian Richings) is the head of security who will protect the facility from anyone trying to bring it down.
Stephen King’s ‘The Institute’ Horror Show Is Similar to His Drew Barrymore-led Movie ‘Firestarter’
The setting the teens are trapped in, the strict rules they are forced to obey, and the sense of danger that hangs over everything share much in common with King’s older novel, Firestarter. Adapted into a movie in 1984, it starred Drew Barrymore as Charlie, a young girl with pyrokinesis, and David Keith as her father Andy, who has mind control. They are on the run from “The Shop,” a section of the government that wants to capture the duo to turn them into a weapon. When the father and daughter get caught, they are imprisoned in a secret lab that may look welcoming, but clearly is a bit “off.” Like the teens at the Institute, Charlie and her father know they can’t leave their safety in the hands of the Shop’s authority figures. What’s even more sinister is that the above-ground level of the Shop looks like a homey bed-and-breakfast and is in a farmhouse.
You expect Charlie and her father to be on vacation here, right? Well, they are separated from each other in different rooms that have cameras in every corner, the windows are covered, and the door into the hall can only be unlocked by the staff. The scientists and government agents in charge don’t need to be supernatural like Stephen King’s other villains. Captain Hollister (Martin Sheen) and hitman John Rainbird (George C. Scott) manipulate their test subjects to get what they want, promising a reunion they never plan on letting happen. The bed-and-breakfast aesthetic is quickly gone when Charlie is taken underground to a cement bunker to ignite her fiery power. This area exposes the truth of the Shop: it’s cold with a lack of humanity. The secret labs that have come after Firestarter have continued to add to how more hostile a location it can be.
Stephen King’s ‘The Institute’ Brilliantly Reinvents the Secret Lab Horror Setting
The Hawkins Lab of Stranger Things is like a bleak daycare, where child test subjects are tricked into viewing Dr. Brenner (Matthew Modine), the man in control of them, as a father figure. Wednesday has the titular Addams girl learn about the L.O.I.S. program conducted at the Willow Hill hospital to steal the abilities of Outcasts and give them to humans. And then there is The Institute, which updates this setting with extra malice for the abducted teens. When Luke wakes up in Episode 1, he finds himself in his bedroom. The memory from the night before of getting knocked out is hazy, but to him, it all seems to have been a bad dream.
Small details he notices around the room make him worry, and then he opens his window’s curtain to see he’s barred in. He’s in the Institute, along with other teens who have had their bedrooms recreated to produce a sense of comfort that ultimately never washes over them. It’s an insidious form of manipulation by taking a child’s bedroom — which should be a safe space — and making it feel wrong. Stephen King’s short-lived horror series The Institute executes this trope in an inventive, captivating, and, of course, terrifying way.
When Luke opens his door and steps out into the hall of the facility with motivational posters on the walls reading, “Your Time to Shine,” that feels less like an encouraging slogan and more like a threatening command (plus being an Easter egg for the psychic ability in The Shining). Life in this facility, as Luke finds out, has privileges that are as much of an illusion of freedom as being able to sleep in their own beds. The teens can smoke cigarettes and don’t have a curfew at night. There is a playground outside, but like the tall fence surrounding the location outside, each “freedom” comes with the reminder that they are surrounded by oppression and punishments.
‘The Institute’ Finds New Ways To Make a Secret Lab Creepy
Image via MGM+
Luke and the other teens are tagged like animals with a chip on their ear to keep track of them. In the rooms where the testing is done, whoever doesn’t listen to the rules given to them is hit in the face. There are no Demogorgons that escape from another dimension like at Hawkins Lab, but the young characters of The Institute do have their powers drained like the prisoners of Willow Hill. The purpose, as Ms. Sigsby claims, is to save the world, and the well-being of the teens is important so long as they can continue to give something to the facility.
Many adaptations of Stephen King’s stories take place in a world that wants to control or destroy the youth. From his first teen with psychic abilities that is bullied in Carrie, the various monsters attacking the friend group in It, and the deadly, dystopian competition in The Long Walk, he creates wildly different and disturbing threats to growing up. Even when a King story returns to a familiar setting, like a secret lab, the horror master never fails to terrify us.
