You have good villains and bad ones. In the category of most vile villains, the ones you don’t actually love to hate but just hate, it’s hard to top Louise Fletcher’s icky, nasty, and… hateful Nurse Ratched from the 1975 Academy Award-winning movie One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. If you’re the type of person that can’t get terrifying imagery out of your head, you’re going to want to skip the trailer for the new prequel series Ratched. From the people behind American Horror Story, the series Ratched is the next spin-off of a classic horror film character–think Vera Farmiga’s Norma Bates in A&E’s Bates Motel–the spin-off prequel of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho.
As with Bates Motel, Netflix’s Ratched has a pretty powerful lead in Sarah Paulson, who we last saw in a similar role in M. Night Shyamalan’s superhero flick, Glass. Other actors to take note of include Judy Davis (Impromptu, Barton Fink), Sharon Stone (Total Recall, Basic Instinct), Rosanna Arquette (Silverado, Pulp Fiction), Amanda Plummer (So I Married an Axe Murderer, Pulp Fiction), Cynthia Nixon (Hannibal, Amadeus), Vincent D’Onofrio (Men in Black, Full Metal Jacket), and Corey Stoll (Ant-Man, The Strain).
In truth, the character in the preview for the late Summer series coming to Netflix starring Sarah Paulson could easily be swapped for the similarly vile Mrs. Emerson played by Elizabeth Ashley in the 1978 horror film Coma. These two antagonists make Maleficent seem like someone you’d actually want to be your neighbor.
You can’t deny the incredible style reflected in the trailer, but Nurse Ratched was the stuff of nightmares so I’ll leave this to the diehard horror fans. It could have been created by David Lynch, Quentin Tarantino, or Stanley Kubrick–this looks creepy.
Check it out if you dare, the trailer for Ratched (peeks through hands covering eyes):
Thirteen episodes of Ratched are scheduled to stream on Netflix, coming September 18, 2020.
C.J. Bunce / Editor / borg
