WARNING: The following contains major spoilers for Ratched Season 1, available now on Netflix.
On paper, Ryan Murphy’s Netflix series Ratched is a prequel to Miloš Forman’s 1975 Oscar-winning film One That Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest that depicted the tyrant Nurse Ratched ruling Salem State Hospital with an iron fist. But while the difference in the characterization of its titular character from its source is obvious, when it comes to its aura and aesthetic, it's less rooted in the gritty realism of Cuckoo’s Nest, being more influenced by Alfred Hitchcock’s cinematic elements and other thrillers from the ‘40s and ‘50s.
In the 1975 adaptation of Nurse Ratched, the story simply conveyed the horror and terror confined within the white walls of the hospital. Ratched, on the other hand, exists in a universe very different from the one created in Forman’s film. For starters, the young Mildred Ratched works at Lucia State Hospital, which couldn’t be more drastically different from the one Louise Fletcher’s Ratched worked at. In fact, it's far from what asylums actually looked like in the ‘40s, the time period the series is set in -- Lucia State Hospital is more of a luxurious, elite hotel, with patients who look like hotel guests.
Ratched goes for a stylish 1940s world in Northern California, giving ample nods to the glamour of Old Hollywood along with the classic horror and noir films by Hitchcock and Stanley Kubrick. Both are known for depicting the era via unrealistic grand settings that bear witness to horrifying acts, like Kubrick’s Overlook Hotel in The Shining. But Murphy doesn’t stop here as Ratched is practically teeming with Hitchcock references. The simple fact that Mildred opts to drive to a creepy motel in the middle of nowhere, managed by a weird and eccentric owner, and spends much of the season living in it, evokes Hitchcock’s Psycho, where much of the story takes place in Bates Motel.
Another Hitchcock wonder Vertigo influences Murphy's creation of the series. Hitchcock's famous use of the colors red and green in the film’s settings to express the emotions of the characters is amply applied in Ratched. Green is a predominant color in this show and implies a character’s sinister intentions, feelings of lust, envy, as well as the greed for power. In the show, Mildred is lit up in green lighting after she's added to the roster of nurses, symbolizing her evil plans. The home of Lenore Osgood has a lush green exterior, masking the insidious plots that are planned under its roof. Similarly, the curtains in Mildred’s motel room are a shade of fluorescent green, working as a backdrop to the sinister schemes she concocts in the place.
While the series has so many shades of green that it gets overwhelming, there are certain bursts of red, which is used as a sign of love, a loss of command over one’s reality and the presence of danger. Dr. Richard Hanover is often drenched in red lighting whenever he becomes high, which conveys that he is losing his control over his clinical facade. The credit for Ratched’s ability to induce a menacing vibe also goes to its soundtrack which contains bits from music composer Bernard Herrmann’s orchestral pieces in classic horror films, including Hitchcock’s Psycho and Vertigo and Martin Scorsese’s Cape Fear.
The long hallway shots of Lucia State Hospital is another obvious influence, this time of Stanley Kubrick's horror classic The Shining. Each shot where a character walks through the hallways and the camera’s perspective narrows evokes the similar unsettling vibe that is felt when little Danny Torrance innocently moves through the halls of the Overlook Hotel on his bike. And just like it was in the 1980 film, the hallways in Lucia are riddled with closed doors, successfully giving rise to uneasy and never-ending speculations as to what horrors they may hide.
Starring Sarah Paulson, Jon Jon Briones, Cynthia Nixon, Finn Wittrock, Charlie Carver, Judy Davis and Sharon Stone, the eight-episode 1st season of Ratched is streaming on Netflix.