Lars von Trier’s TV series Riget (The Kingdom, 1994, 1997) engages with space and geography in various ways. The hospital (Rigshospitalet) in Copenhagen provides a labyrinthine and multi-layered setting equivalent to the castle or the haunted house in earlier Gothic narratives. It is a liminal space that both registers clashes and serves as a conduit between the past and the present, between rationality and the supernatural. Riget also highlights tensions cast as national between the Danish hospital staff and a Swedish physician who perceives his Danish colleagues as irrational and unscientific and who longs to be back in Sweden.

This paper will draw on Linda Hutcheon’s account in A Theory of Adaptation (2013) of “transculturating” and “transcultural adaptations” in examining how the hospital and geographical tensions are portrayed in Stephen King’s Kingdom Hospital (ABC, 2004), an American TV series inspired by and based on Riget. In King’s adaptation the (fictive) hospital is placed in Lewistown, Maine, and the physician at odds with the rest of the hospital staff is from Boston and not from another country. This change, I would argue, introduces a different kind of geographical tension. Apart from discussing this tension and contrasting it to the national one in Riget, I will compare the depiction and function of the hospital in the American TV series to that of the Danish one.