Things that go bump in the night? Bad. Things that go bump in the night in a dilapidated psychiatric hospital? Infinitely worse. That, basically, is the premise of Devil in Silver, the latest volume of anthology series The Terror, which began in 2018 with a supernaturally charged tale of a polar expedition to find out what happened to Sir John Franklin’s voyage. Crikey, it does not end well. The next was set during the second world war and was about shapeshifters from Japanese folklore terrorising a Japanese-American community in southern California. A hiatus followed, but now The Terror is back with a double dose of horror: a malevolent spirit moving in and out of the bodies of the patients of New Hyde psychiatric hospital, and the more tangible but no less frightening diabolism of the US mental healthcare system.

Pepper (Dan Stevens, still of Downton Abbey fame despite his many varied roles since) is in New Hyde because the three policemen who arrested him after they caught a few punches he was aiming at his girlfriend’s controlling ex threw him in there rather than completing the paperwork the station would have required. There he meets the lost and suffering souls who have ended up in what amounts, due to underfunding and understaffing, to a holding pen rather than a rehabilitative or care facility. Dorry (Judith Light) is the longest-serving resident – put there decades ago by her husband because of her endless crying fits, though her later memories reveal a greater darkness. Kofi (Chinaza Uche) – or Coffee, as he is called by the rest of his companions until it is too late – was a structural engineer in Ghana but now depends on medication to keep himself steady. Loochie (played by non-binary actor b) ended up in the system after a violent incident with a sibling, but at least one member of staff believes her charge is able to cope in the real world and, as the hospital’s evil spirit gathers strength and wrath, gets the chance to prove it.

Pepper comes to understand from his fellow patients – and some of the staff, none of whom is an out-and-out villain and many of whom are almost as trapped by circumstance as their patients are – that the key to whatever is haunting the hospital lies behind a locked silver door. Beyond it is a single occupancy room that contains the comatose body of a man who has, in one state or other, been at New Hyde even longer than Dorry. Arnold received a transorbital lobotomy after killing a doctor a year after he was sent to the ward.

Jump scares, gory set pieces, flickering lights, endless corridors and an extremely unsettling turn from John Benjamin Hickey as the hospital’s founder Dr Walter take care of the required horror element of the show in a fairly rote manner. We have seen it all before, often more punchily done (though the ending does redeem the lack of innovation before). Ditto the idea of monster as metaphor for both mental instability and the systems that are supposedly in place to steady it.

You could say that Devil in Silver does not shy away from the latter point. If you were feeling less generous, you could say it labours it. Dorry embodies the effects of misogyny and patriarchalism on the medical profession. The question of racial prejudice permeates the fates of all the patients of colour. None of the patients/prisoners comes from the kind of money that might have protected them – or at least got them placed in a facility that does not require the services of a nurse like Scotch Tape (Hampton Fluker), so called because of his talents for keeping mod cons running with little more than a roll of the stuff and a prayer.

It works best as a straightforward drama. The real-life horrors of old-fashioned treatments (as we see when Dorry’s backstory starts to play out), and of contemporary care standards for the forgotten and marginalised masses, are bleaker than any imaginary beastie prowling through psyches and corridors. The ease with which Pepper gets trapped in the system – drugged on arrival, he sleeps through discharge time – the guilt he wrestles with over his abandonment of his young son and how an essentially good man can find a way to redemption: these are all more terrifying and more mesmerising to contemplate than any bogeyman under the bed.