The Shining Meets Twin Peaks In Prime Video's 2-Part Thriller
Supernatural thrillers have always been eagerly devoured by audiences, whether they unfold on the big screen or the small screen. The genre has produced dozens of memorable titles, but few stand out quite like Stanley Kubrick's The Shining and David Lynch's Twin Peaks. Both projects transformed relatively mundane settings into deeply unsettling spaces, using supernatural mysteries to explore the darkness lurking beneath ordinary life. Their influence can still be felt, especially in movies and TV shows that refuse to separate the inexplicably strange from the disturbingly ordinary.
The Shining is beloved for its suffocating supernatural terror, while Twin Peaks became a landmark for its dreamlike and increasingly fractured sense of reality. They share an interest in hidden, unsettling forces, yet they remain unmistakably distinct. However, Prime Video's The Devil's Hour manages to capture the best of both, taking the supernatural dread associated with The Shining and combining it with the existential detective story of Twin Peaks and distilling those influences into something genuinely unique.
Created by Tom Moran, The Devil's Hour first aired in 2022, with its second season following in 2024. The plot centers on social worker Lucy Chambers (Jessica Raine), whose increasingly disturbing experiences connect her to a terrifying mystery involving a serial killer, Gideon (Peter Capaldi). For anyone who enjoyed The Shining or Twin Peaks, it is one of the most intriguing thriller TV shows available thanks to its blend of supernatural mystery and all-too-relatable dread.
The Devil's Hour Brings The Shining’s Supernatural Terror To Twin Peaks’ Existential Detective Story
At its core, Prime Video’s The Devil's Hour feels like a meeting point between The Shining and Twin Peaks. The catalyst for the story comes when central protagonist Lucy begins repeatedly waking at exactly 3:33 a.m. and experiences disturbing visions that seem impossible to explain. This is already a chilling starting point, but as The Devil’s Hour unfolds, it becomes clear there’s a lot in Lucy’s life that warrants further examination.
Her young son Isaac (Benjamin Chivers), for example, is deeply unsettling, recalling the fascination with creepy children Kubrick also captured with The Shining’s Danny (Danny Lloyd) and the iconic twins (Lisa and Louise Burns). The use of violent hallucinations and disturbing imagery will also feel familiar to fans of Kubrick’s Stephen King adaptation. Like The Shining, The Devil's Hour understands that supernatural horror is most psychologically effective when it invades everyday life. Lucy may not be trapped in a remote alpine hotel like the Torrance family, but she is just as unable to escape the terror unfolding around her.
Alongside its overlap with The Shining, The Devil’s Hour also shares Twin Peaks' framing as an existential detective story. Lucy's experiences become part of a larger mystery involving Gideon, the serial killer who can apparently remember the future. From there, The Devils Hour quickly descends into a story involving fractured realities and alternate timelines fans of Twin Peaks will immediately resonate with. The investigation gradually forces both Lucy and the audience to question whether reality is as linear and stable as it appears.
That combination gives The Devil's Hour its distinctive identity. It has the oppressive supernatural dread of The Shining, but its mystery constantly expands into stranger territory, creating the same sense of existential unease that made Twin Peaks so compelling. Both Twin Peaks and The Shining are rightly considered iconic, and when The Devil’s Hour season 3 finally arrives to complete the story, the Prime Video thriller one day could be too (and deserves to).
Peter Capaldi Gives A Career-Best Performance In The Devil’s Hour
The Devil's Hour clearly has plenty to offer fans of The Shining and Twin Peaks, but the Prime Video thriller show stands on its own merits too. A particular strength is Peter Capaldi's performance as Gideon. Best known for his work as the Twelfth Doctor in Doctor Who, Capaldi brings an extraordinary intensity that ensures Gideon won’t simply be forgotten as yet another one of the dozens of fictional TV serial killers out there. He’s simultaneously frightening and strangely sympathetic in a way that's uniquely chilling.
What’s more, the extent of his intelligence so far seems to have no limit. Much of the power in both Peter Capaldi’s performance and The Devil’s Hour’s story comes from how Gideon controls information. He often appears to know more than everyone around him, creating a constant sense that another layer of the narrative could be revealed without warning whenever he starts to speak. His presence gives the series an unsettling momentum, particularly as the extent of his connection to Lucy begins to reveal itself.
Peter Capaldi deserves considerably more credit for his work as Gideon in The Devil’s Hour. He elevates every scene he appears in, giving Prime Video thriller a commanding central performance to match the show's ambitious storytelling. Beyond its appeal to fans of The Shining or Twin Peaks, The Devil’s Hour stands as a uniquely intelligent and gripping thriller, and Peter Capaldi gives its strangest ideas a foundation upon which to build an unforgettable story.