New Ratched Trailer Features Sarah Paulson, Cynthia Nixon, Lesbianism

Horror and film noir meet in the Sarah Paulson starrer Ratched, and the final trailer for the exquisitely over-the-top series is out now.

From Ryan Murphy and Evan Romansky, the Netflix series imagines the formative life of the young Mildred Ratched, the sadistic nurse from the 1975 film One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, the role for which Louise Fletcher won the Academy Award.

For the eight-episode series, Paulson, a longtime fixture of Murphy's projects including American Horror Story and American Crime Story: The People vs. O.J. Simpson, steps into Nurse Ratched's sensible shoes at an institution to explore the origins that made her the terror she became.

The post-World War II series is lush with shots of California's Central Coast and hearkens to Hitchcock films and film noir as Ratched's motives for worming her way into working at an asylum are revealed. There's also plenty of gore blended with queer content and camp as is Murphy's hallmark.

Hints of the show's queer sensibility and its LGBTQ+ storyline turn up in the latest phantasmagorical trailer for the series that drops on September 18.

In the trailer, the head of the asylum, the maniacal Dr. Hanover (Jon Jon Briones), claims he's perfected a method for the lobotomy that will cure "juvenile distraction, lesbianism, mania." Meanwhile, Cynthia Nixon's Gwendolyn Brooks (press secretary for the California governor, played by Vincent D'Onofrio) gets to the heart of her own desire.

"Aren't we playing God?" she asks Mildred. "Aren't we saying there's one feeling that's right and another feeling that's wrong?"

The trailer then cuts to Mildred kissing a man in either a fantasy or a flashback and then Gwendolyn in what appears to be a fantasy.

The series boasts a star-studded cast including Judy Davis, Finn Wittrock, Charlie Carver, Sharon Stone, Hunter Parrish, Corey Stoll, and Amanda Plummer.

Watch the Ratched trailer below.