Stephen King’s celebrated and twisted mind shines again in MGM+’s latest show, The Institute. Pulling us into a cruel laboratory, it could be a prequel to the Netflix smash Stranger Things. Both shows feature young people with extraordinary psychic abilities trapped and subjected to scientific testing by authority figures. However, where Stranger Things deals with supernatural threats from another dimension, The Institute shows the real horror of government experimentation on children, including its protagonist Luke Ellis.
Through flashbacks to Hawkins Lab in Stranger Things, Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown) was subjected to sensory deprivation tanks, with her powers used for government purposes. The lab’s clinical environment, with observation rooms and numbered subjects, created an atmosphere of institutional horror that The Institute mirrors. While Stranger Things could deflect some of its terror onto interdimensional monsters, The Institute forces viewers to confront human monsters who exploit children for their potential. The series maintains that same 1980s-tinged aesthetic and government conspiracy paranoia that made Stranger Things so compelling, but grounds it in a more realistic setting.
A Story of Innocent Children with Special Powers
MGM+
In this adaptation of King’s page-turner, teenage genius Luke (Joe Freeman) awakens in the Institute following his parents’ murder and his kidnapping by intruders. In a top-secret organization in small-town Maine, he joins other young lab rats with psychic gifts who have all arrived through traumatic circumstances. Luke befriends other kidnapped children, including Kalisha (Simone Miller), Nick (Fionn Laird), George (Arlen So), Iris (Birva Pandya), and later Avery (Viggo Hanvelt) in the area known as Front Half, creating a makeshift family unit that becomes their only source of comfort in the hostile environment. The Front Half, which will eventually lead to the Back Half after graduation, is overseen by Mrs. Sigsby (Mary-Louise Parker), the director of the facility and a master manipulator who’s determined to heighten the children’s psychokinetic abilities for mysterious purposes.
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The children manage to maintain their humanity while being subjected to psychological and physical experiments designed to enhance and weaponize their powers. Meanwhile, in a nearby town, former police officer Tim Jamieson (Ben Barnes) tries to start fresh, but his path will cross with Luke’s, and the plot thickens. The series splits between life inside the Institute and the outside world, showing how the facility’s influence isn’t confined within its walls.
King’s Writing Is Ripe for Screen Adaptations
Warner Bros. Pictures
Stephen King’s impact on screen horror cannot be overstated. The success of the films It (2017) and It Chapter Two (2019) proved that his classically dark stories fascinate audiences today, while Doctor Sleep (2019) bridged different adaptations as a sequel to both King’s novel and Kubrick’s The Shining film. MSB Reviews wrote, “Mike Flanagan took the impossible task of balancing both Stephen King’s The Shining and Stanley Kubrick’s cinematic adaptation, and successfully nailed pretty much everything regarding the connection between the main stories.”
Television has also been prosperous for King adaptations, with Castle Rock (2018) illustrating his fictional universe and Mr. Mercedes (2017) following a crime procedural approach. The upcoming It: Welcome to Derry series will cover the origins of the alien entity Pennywise, while other projects, such as 2025’s The Monkey movie, continue to use King’s catalog for new material. These takes on King’s words find terror in everyday life and corruption in spaces that are meant to protect people. The Institute follows this tradition, using a secret government facility to study power, corruption, and young people’s strength against systematic oppression.
The Resilience of Young People Isn’t Underestimated in ‘The Institute’
MGM+
The Institute, written by Benjamin Cavell and directed by Jack Bender, examines the trauma inflicted on its young characters, with their bonds of friendship providing hope in an otherwise bleak narrative. The children’s efforts to support one another while facing systematic abuse make their suffering all the more heartbreaking. The adult cast, led by Barnes and Parker, sells the institutional horror while avoiding cartoonish villainy. The LA Times stated, “If you regard The Institute as a kind of YA novel about resistance and revolt, and a metaphor for the way young people have been sacrificed by the old to feed their agendas and wars, it has some legs.”
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The show’s production design creates a sterile menace to capture the feeling of being trapped in a place that masquerades as safety while harboring dark intentions. Anyone fond of absorbing horror that doesn’t rely solely on jump scares or gore can get lost in the show. As a pointed statement about how society treats its most vulnerable members, it’s the Stranger Things prequel that Netflix never offered us (yet) and another Stephen King vision to add to an ever-expanding collection.
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