The InstituteMovies like The Institute
- Key Features:
- Mental institution, Mind control, Brainwashing, Psychological horror, Revenge, 19th century, Grief, Experiment, Confinement, Survival, Horror, Violence-moderate
- Tone:
- serious, suspense-driven, gritty
- Target Audience:
- Horror fans, Thriller enthusiasts, Psychological drama viewers
- Emotional Arc:
- Anxiety → Dread → Vengeance
The Institute

In 19th century Baltimore, Isabel Porter, a girl stricken with grief from her parents' untimely death, voluntarily checks herself into the Rosewood Institute. Subjected to bizarre and increasingly violent pseudo-scientific experiments in personality modification, brainwashing and mind control, she must escape the clutches of the Rosewood and exact her revenge, or else be forever lost.
The Institute
20 men are chosen to participate in the roles of guards and prisoners in a psychological study that ultimately spirals out of control.

The teenager Madison McBride is traumatized by the loss of her deranged father when she was nine years old and the suicide of her beloved brother Brandon one year ago. She decides to join the Richard Miller University, where Brandon committed suicide, to overcome her demons. While walking to her dorm, she meets the weird janitor Wilbur Mackey that tells her that the place is haunted.

While on a class observation trip at a local mental hospital, young psychology major Abby Jones, has a chilling encounter with high-risk patient, Harmon Porter. She returns home for an evening of normal study with her two roommates unaware of the darkness she’s awakened within him.

When Simon awakens in the hospital after surviving a near-fatal accident, amnesia has erased the last two years from his memory. He learns that his brother was killed, he has married a woman he doesn't remember and he's haunted by strange visions of the woman he loved.

After he's institutionalized in order to cover for his sister, a young man encounters a doctor who is turning his patients into flesh-eating psychopaths.

Kristen, a troubled young woman, is captured by the police after burning down a farmhouse and is locked in the North Bend Psychiatric Hospital. Soon, she begins to suspect that the place has a dark secret at its core and she's determined to find out what it is.

When a mysterious "John Doe" wakes up in a morgue and wanders into a psychiatric ward, a devoted doctor and curious medical examiner must slowly uncover dark and sinister secrets about the man that reveal a more horrifying truth than they could have ever imagined.

Dr. David Marrow invites three distinct individuals to the eerie and isolated Hill House to be subjects for a sleep disorder study. The unfortunate guests discover that Marrow is far more interested in the sinister mansion itself — and they soon see the true nature of its horror.

A young psychiatric intern unearths secrets about the mental health facility in which he works.

Jocelyn's boyfriend is perfect--except for his dangerous identical twin brother, Derek, who just escaped from a mental institution. When Derek unspools a twisted plan of revenge with Jocelyn in his crosshairs, her mother Ashley must act fast before she falls victim to a psychopath.

A young doctor in a US hospital administers a powerful and untested cocktail of drugs to a coma victim. But instead of curing him, it triggers a powerful "out-of-body" experience and enables the patient - a depraved and dangerous loner - to inhabit other people's bodies and, through them, take revenge on the bullying medical students who were accidentally responsible for his condition.

In the early 1970s, Dr. Henry West creates an institute to find people with supernatural abilities. When Judith Winstead comes to the facility, she exhibits amazing abilities that the military wants to turn into a weapon.

After a family moves into an old Victorian home, they discover a chest in the attic containing antiques tainted by a malevolent spirit. As the antiques slowly possess each family member, the spirit grows stronger, hellbent on kidnapping the children.

When a father is forced to abruptly depart for work, he leaves his children, Aidan and Mia, at their holiday home in the care of his new girlfriend, Grace. Isolated and alone, a blizzard traps them inside the lodge as terrifying events summon specters from Grace's dark past.

Unable to process the death of his daughter, Detective Boyd embarks on a hunt for a serial killer who murders according to a brutal tribal ritual: Muti. The only person who can help Boyd is Professor Mackles, an anthropologist who hides an unspeakable secret. The line between sanity and madness thins as Boyd goes deeper into the killer’s world.

A young woman quits her teaching job to become a private tutor and governess for two wealthy young kids, but soon starts to suspect there’s more to their house than meets the eye.

An Oxford Medical School graduate takes a position at a mental institution and soon becomes obsessed with a female mental patient, but he has no idea of a recent and horrifying staffing change.

A woman is involuntarily committed to a mental institution where she is confronted by her greatest fear.

After witnessing a bizarre, traumatic incident involving a patient, Dr. Rose Cotter starts experiencing frightening occurrences that she can't explain.

A female psychologist wants to understand the minds of a confessed serial killer who spent the last five years in a mental hospital because of his state.

The arrival of an amnesiac patient in a psychiatric hospital somehow frees a mad doctor, who was shot and entombed with his fiendish experiments in an abandoned wing of the asylum 20 years before.

Six people, each of them is on the road to self-destruction. They wake up in cells in a surreal facility, without knowing how they got there or why.

A woman is sent to a mental institution after stabbing her classmate in an attempt to conjure an evil spirit called, Mercy Black. Fifteen years later she's released, and must save her nephew, who has become obsessed with the phenomenon.

A young pathology med student suspects that the spirit of a dead cadaver in the hospital morgue where she works is killing off all those who handle or desecrate the body.

In 1971, Stanford's Professor Philip Zimbardo conducts a controversial psychology experiment in which college students pretend to be either prisoners or guards, but the proceedings soon get out of hand. Based on a true story.

As he helps a young artist with her upcoming exhibition, the owner of a mannequin shop's deadly, suppressed desires come to the surface.

After being released from a mental asylum, a disfigured man becomes obsessed with a student at his sister’s boarding school while grappling with his dark past.

Southern France, 19th century. Teresa, a young girl, arrives at an isolated female boarding school that is tyrannically mastered by Mrs. Fourneau, the strict headmistress, whose protective shadow haunts Luis, her weak son.

A middle-aged woman, traumatized from the death of her adulterous lover, moves into a room at a New Orleans boarding house where the blind landlord becomes suspicious to her activities of continuing her affair with her dead lover.

A man recently released from a mental institute inherits a mansion after his parents die. After a series of disturbing events, he comes to believe it is haunted.

A single mother and a childless morgue technician are bound together by their relationship to a little girl they have reanimated from the dead.

Dr. John Markway invites three distinct individuals to the eerie and isolated Hill House to be subjects for a sleep disorder study. The unfortunate guests discover that Markway is far more interested in the sinister mansion itself — and they soon see the true nature of its horror.

A psychiatrist faces his past, present and future when he finds himself involved in the treatment of a young man recently released from prison for a murder committed when the boy was just 11 years old.

Plagued by frightening occurrences in their home, Kelly and Ben learn that a university's parapsychology experiment produced an entity that is now haunting them. The malevolent spirit feeds on fear and torments the couple no matter where they run. Desperate, Kelly and Ben turn to a paranormal researcher, but even with his aid, it may already be too late to save themselves from the terrifying presence.

A woman becomes very curious about one of her psychiatrist husband's inmates, a man who was found guilty in the murder and disfigurement of his former wife.

With the help of his girlfriend Cathy and Dr. Fong, a psychiatrist, ambitious journalist Johnny Barrett poses as a madman in order to be admitted to a mental institution where a bloody murder has been committed.

After the death of her daughter, wealthy housewife Julia Lofting abruptly leaves her husband and moves into an old Victorian home in London to re-start her life. All seems well until she is haunted by the sadness of losing her own child and the ghosts of other children.

Shortly after moving into a dark, brooding mansion, a psychologist and his co-workers are terrorized by a horrible evil being.

Five dangerous patients, suffering from extreme phobias at a government testing facility, are put to the ultimate test under the supervision of a crazed doctor and his quest to weaponize fear.

After a near-fatal car accident, Sam wakes to discover he is trapped in an abandoned hospital by mysterious and sinister forces that have no intention of letting him leave…

After the traumatic loss of her mother, a teenaged girl tries to uncover the dark secrets behind her new home, in spite of her father's disbelief.

A crew from a paranormal reality television show lock themselves in a haunted psychiatric hospital. They search for evidence of paranormal activity as they shoot what ends up becoming their final episode.

Claire and her husband find themselves moving back into Claire's childhood home only to have the abusive and traumatic memories of her mother come back to haunt her. As her husband starts to get more work, Claire finds herself mixed up in a fog of past and present with a mysterious figure haunting her memories. What is this small figure that is trying to reach out to her, and what does it want?

Four friends break into an abandoned insane asylum in search of a death certificate which will grant one of them a large inheritance. However, finding it soon becomes the least of their worries in a place haunted by dark memories.

A woman named Emily checks into a hotel and offers the bellboy $2000 to temporarily marry her. We soon find out Emily is the caretaker of a wheelchair-bound mute named Helga, who was the childhood guardian of a pair of siblings: Miriam Webster and her half-brother, Warren, who is about to inherit the estate of their late father. Who is the mysterious Emily and what are her intentions?

London, 1974. As Britain prepares for electrical blackouts to sweep across the country, trainee nurse Val arrives for her first day at the crumbling East London Royal Infirmary. With most of the patients and staff evacuated to another hospital, Val is forced to work the night shift, finding herself in a dark, near empty building. Within these walls lies a deadly secret, forcing Val to face both her own traumatic past and deepest fears.

Patrick lays comatose in a small private hospital, his only action being his involuntary spitting. When a pretty young nurse, just separated from her husband, begins work at the hospital, she senses that Patrick is communicating with her, and he seems to be using his psychic powers to manipulate events in her life.

A therapist loses her grip on reality when a ten-year-old boy claims he can control her future.

Emily Johnson, her boyfriend Bobby and their friends Clare and Jude are recent college grads driving cross-country, taking a last vacation together before they face the "real" world. An accident leaves them hurt and stranded on a lonely Louisiana road. When the ambulance arrives, it whisks them to Mercy Hospital.

When Susan was a little girl, she rejected the Valentine of a lovestruck classmate. Decades later, she’s come to the hospital for a routine medical examination, and finds herself trapped in a bizarre nightmare, made all the worse as her vengeful childhood valentine, disguised among the hospital staff, begins murdering everyone in his path as a means of proving his undying ‘romantic’ obsession…

A sickly girl Ju-ran transfers to a new sanitorium boarding school to regain health. But she discovers that students are disappearing and notices abnormal changes happening to her body. She suspects the school for what's happening and tries to discover what secret is hidden.

When troubled 12-year-old Jacob Felsen is sent away to boarding school, he enters every kid’s worst nightmare: a creepy old mansion, deserted except for six other teenage misfits and two menacing and mysterious teachers. As events become increasingly horrific, Jacob must conquer his fears to find the strength to survive.

A young pathologist seeks answers to the mysterious death of a friend and soon comes into contact with the same cursed videotape that caused the death of the friend's wife and son, which is haunted by the curse of Sadako, a relentless spirit.

In a shadowy world stitched from nightmares, a young woman's harrowing journey in a seedy hotel unveils her traumatic past. Haunted by violence and stalked through desolate streets, her psyche unravels as she confronts an abusive husband and unsettling memories.

A tale of terror. Cathy Reed has been institutionalized most of her life because of Schizophrenia, as a child her parents thought she was possessed by demons and had her exercised by priests. Medical science saw different. Now decades later Cathy is freed, relocated to her own flat and given a chance to be independent. Once alone things are not what they all seem and when her nightmares turn real she questions her state of mind before she is left to face her demons.

As a young girl, Alison Parker attempted suicide after being traumatized by her father's sexual exploits. Now an elite fashion model, she moves to a Brooklyn Heights apartment building where she encounters a number of bizarre, eccentric tenants and attempts to uncover the building's sinister secret.

A young psychiatrist applies for a job at a mental asylum and must pass a test by interviewing four patients. He must figure out which of the patients, is in fact, the doctor that he would be replacing if hired.

After being put on a supposedly uninhabited island as a form of behavioral rehabilitation, a high school senior finds that he's not alone on the island, and that getting discovered could be deadly.

David is a teenager whose parents are in a deteriorating marriage after their infant daughter dies. Clara is a chambermaid at a Jamaican resort who's hired to be a housekeeper. She and David develop a close bond, opening his eyes and heart to new experiences, and eventually leading to a disturbing secret in Clara's past.

An African American male is imprisoned and placed in solitary confinement after being found guilty of murdering his wife, as he's haunted by internal demons and his dead wife, and pushed to the breaking point by an abusive female guard.

While being interrogated by a police psychiatrist, the near-catatonic Tabitha tries to explain why she and two of her childhood friends are being hunted by a serial killer. The truth that's dying to come out weaves together three tragic secrets from their past. Two of the girls' boyfriends become unwitting targets in their deadly game.

An American journalist travels through 19th-century Japan to find the prostitute he fell in love with but instead learns of the physical and existential horror that befell her after he left.

A comatose hospital patient harasses and kills through his powers of telekinesis to claim his private nurse as his own.

Haunted by her past, a nurse travels from England to a remote Irish village in 1862 to investigate a young girl's supposedly miraculous fast.

A man tries to uncover an unconventional psychologist's therapy techniques on his institutionalized wife, while a series of brutal attacks committed by a brood of mutant children coincides with the husband's investigation.

A team of paranormal investigators go on one last job to a haunted mental institution where children have reportedly gone missing. While searching for evidence of what is haunting the abandoned building, they stumble upon clues that reveal what made the former head doctor snap and go on a killing spree through the halls decades earlier. Unfortunately, the more they uncover, the more they struggle to make it out of the asylum alive because something inside wants that mystery to stay dead and buried.

Dr. Bock, the chief of medicine at a Manhattan hospital, is suicidal after the collapse of his personal life. When an intern is found dead in a hospital bed, it appears to Bock to be a case of unforgivable malpractice. Hours later, another doctor, who happens to be responsible for another case of malpractice, is found dead. Despondent, Bock finds himself drawn to Barbara, the daughter of a comatose missionary.

A psychiatrist tries to put her life back together after a violent attack by seeking to repair the life of a new patient, but he has his own terrifying history.

A young girl, with an amazing ability to communicate with insects, is transferred to an exclusive Swiss boarding school, where her unusual capability might help solve a string of murders.

A young woman is invited by her girlfriend, who lives in an English country mansion, to stay there with her. The estate, however, isn't quite what it seems--and neither is the friend who issued the invitation.

Like any other teenage girl, Tara is just surviving high school — yet her father and mother seem strangely distant. Amidst a nearby spree of gruesome ax murders, Tara has sightings of terrifying entities, forcing her to question her own sanity and shocking ancestry.

When a gloomy, God-fearing island community is rocked by the assault of an infant, a psychiatrist is called in to examine Dorothy Mills, the teenager accused of the crime. Despite the villagers' hostility to her inquiry, she soon comes to suspect that Dorothy suffers from multiple personality disorder...

Deep within the mysterious Arboria Institute, a disturbed and beautiful girl is held captive by a doctor in search of inner peace. Her mind controlled by a sinister technology. Silently, she waits for her next session with deranged therapist Dr. Barry Nyle. If she hopes to escape, she must journey through the darkest reaches of The Institute, but Nyle wonʼt easily part with his most gifted and dangerous creation.

Emma has a strong aversion towards her family’s new house, especially the attic. After moving in, she becomes miserable and reclusive. The rest of her family also seems unhappy and unsettled. The situation escalates one day when Emma is in the attic alone. All of a sudden someone who looks exactly like Emma attacks her viciously.

In a rambling, isolated house, Emily’s first night-shift as carer to an elderly dementia patient turns into a nightmare as she is tormented by a vengeful spirit and uncovers the house's dark secrets.

Ella Blake, a stop-motion animator struggling to control her demons after the loss of her overbearing mother, embarks upon the creation of a film that becomes the battleground for her sanity. As Ella’s mind starts to fracture, the characters in her project take on a life of their own.

By way of an unnatural urge during her Mother's funeral, Susan enters her family's mausoleum, which unleashes an evil presence to lurk inside of her.

20 volunteers agree to take part in a seemingly well-paid experiment advertised by the university. It is supposed to be about aggressive behavior in an artificial prison situation. A journalist senses a story behind the ad and smuggles himself in among the test subjects. They are randomly divided into prisoners and guards. What seems like a game at the beginning soon turns into bloody seriousness.

A recently bereaved teenage girl goes to live with her aunt in a secluded woodland house, unaware that sinister forces lurk within.

Violinist Sydney Wells was accidentally blinded by her sister Helen when she was five years old. She submits to a cornea transplantation, and while recovering from the operation, she realizes that she is seeing dead people.

Two estranged sisters are forced to rob a bank in order to save their brother. But this is no ordinary bank.

When a deadly secret rots the mind of a grieving widower, the decision to work alone on a deserted island morphs into a terrifying race to save his sanity and his life.

In post–War England, a writer and sometime-ghost hunter investigates a reported haunting at a boys boarding school.

A woman’s body disappears mysteriously from the morgue without a trace. Police inspector Jaime Peña investigates the strange occurrence with the help of Álex Ulloa, the widower of the missing woman.

Forensics students arriving an isolated, island "body farm" get to try out their CSI skills on a bunch of corpses under the watchful eye of their grumpy professor. The island used to house a state penitentiary where the authorities were experimenting on death row inmates and now the bodies won't stay still.

Anna returns home after spending time in a psychiatric facility following her mother's tragic death and discovers that her mother's former nurse, Rachel, has moved into their house and become engaged to her father. Soon after she learns this shocking news, Anna is visited by her mother's ghost, who warns her that Rachel has evil intentions.

A deranged scientist locks 6 people in a steam room and threatens to turn up the heat if the local paper doesn't publish his story about global warming.

A psychologist connects her missing brother to the strange case of a mysterious little girl believed to be Sadako reincarnated.

A new girl in a quiet town, Tess tries to manage her psychosis while adjusting to her new life with her mom. After stumbling upon the shrine of Lucy, a hit and run victim, Tess finds herself overwhelmed by hallucinations of the dead girl and starts to question her sanity again. When the spirit possesses Tess’s mind and soul, mother and daughter are at a loss for where to turn next for salvation: religion or medicine? Both institutions have failed them to date but faith leads them to the house of Sarah, Lucy’s mother, who has been despondent since the accident. All together with time working against them, Sarah is desperate to believe that Lucy is still alive in Tess but neither parent wants to give up on their daughter. Now that she understands what is happening to her, ultimately Tess must decide whether she wants to keep fighting or succumb to her affliction.

30 years ago, when members of a religious cult known as Heaven's Veil take their own lives. The truth behind what really happened remains buried deep in the memory of the sole survivor, a five-year-old girl. Now as an adult she returns to the compound with a documentary crew. They soon discover something that is far more terrifying than anything they could have imagined.

West Point, New York, 1830. When a cadet at the burgeoning military academy is found hanged with his heart cut out, the top brass summons former New York City constable Augustus Landor to investigate. While attempting to solve this grisly mystery, the reluctant detective engages the help of one of the cadets: a strange but brilliant young fellow by the name of Edgar Allan Poe.

A young woman with a troubled past takes a job at recently closed down hospital. Working the night shift alone she begins to experience a series of unsettling events that lead her to believe that the hospital may be connected to a number of recent murders in the area. To uncover the truth she will have to revisit the past behind the walls of Psych:9.

Traumatized since childhood by her brother's accidental death, Danika Merrick hallucinates a bank robbery and quits her job. Despite support from her three children and loving husband, Danika continues to experience unnerving visions. She seeks help from therapist Evelyn Harris but pervasive reports of violent incidents involving children make Danika fear for her own family, and she grows increasingly paranoid, worrying she may be going insane.

Oxford PhD student Ana finds herself unable to build new memories, following an experiment to generate and travel through a wormhole. The story follows her increasingly desperate efforts to understand what happened, and to find out who—or what—is behind the rising horror in her life.

Medical student Ted Grey graduates at the top of his class and quickly joins an elite pathology program, whose top students invite him into their circle. There he uncovers a gruesome secret: They play a game in which one tries to commit the perfect, undetectable murder, then the others compete to determine the victim's cause of death.

David, an orderly at a hospital, tells his horrific story of being kidnapped and forced to play a vile game of survival.

A man's recently transplanted heart leads him on a frantic search to find the donor's killer before a similar fate befalls him.

Admitted to Mt. Abaddon Hospital for a routine procedure, George Grieves discovers that his condition is much more serious and complicated than originally expected; and as his own fears begin to manifest around him, he learns that Mt. Abaddon is not a place where people come to get better... it is a place where people come to die.

A woman's carefully constructed life is upended when an unwelcome shadow from her past returns, forcing her to confront the monster she's evaded for two decades.
