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"The most 'worldly' society I have ever lived in is that of schoolboys: most worldly in the cruelty and arrogance of the strong, the toadyism and mutual treachery of the weak, and the unqualified snobbery of both. Nothing was so base that the school proletariat would not do it, or suffer it, to win the favour of the school aristocracy: hardly any injustice too bad for the aristocracy to practice."
C. S. Lewis, On Stories and Other Essays

Not to be confused with your usual Boarding School trope, the Boarding School of Horrors is a place where your nightmares come true. There are no midnight feasts or jolly hockey sticks here. Presided over by cane-wielding Sadist Teachers, you will be beaten or locked up for the slightest misdemeanor — and that's if you're lucky. If summoned to the headmaster's office, don't expect to come out in one piece, if at all. Then there is the matter of your fellow students. At best, you'll have your head flushed down the toilet; at worst, you face years of unspeakable bullying. In a British school, you may be enslaved to the prefects thanks to the "fagging" system. And the Absurdly Powerful Student Council will only add to complications as they promote this form of cruelty as presumably girls or guys they like are sent to be lowly concubines within their ranks and is above the law with the Prefect acting as their muscle as they choose whom to beat up or torture.

The food is inedible slop, there is no central heating, and creepy crawlies are everywhere. If you complain or write home to your parents, they won't believe you (assuming your mail even makes it out of the school, that is — it's not uncommon for such schools to actively screen their students' outgoing mail). The school might be a Military School, where you'll face the wrath of Drill Sergeant Nasty every day, and be subjected to horrific hazing rituals. In the worst cases, you could be sexually abused or even murdered while staying there. And God help if the school actually is a Reform School — an institution for juvenile offenders. Such institutions are basically prisons with schoolrooms.

Had (and sadly still has in isolated cases, even though society at large no longer approves of it) some elements of Truth in Television. Boarding schools were not a Victorian innovation, but the institution was embraced as a means of counteracting the softening, emasculating influence of mothers and preparing young men for the harsh rigours of the world of business and Empire. The move to purposefully harsh institutions as a solution to parental mollycoddling took place in the context of the early-mid Victorian love of childhood and doting parenthood, which it was later feared would render the new generation of the better sort of people — i.e. the middle and upper classes — too soft to maintain Anglo supremacy. Thus, boarding schools were intended to break the attendants to prevent them from becoming 'soft' and/or homosexual. More specifically, they would instill discipline and self-discipline, deference to authority, strict morals, a vague sense of the Christian religion, and teamwork. This was, of course, in addition to all the usual things one expects a public school (a school open to the paying public as opposed to a private school, which was more exclusive) to do. For real-life examples, see also the section on the Strawman U page for "St. Jim Jonestown Academy". The overtly strict atmosphere of the boarding schools produced a proverb When a lower class kid turns bad, he is sent to a borstal; when an upper-class kid turns bad, he is sent to a boarding school. Some boarding schools hardly differed from reform schools (borstals) except on curriculum.

Also, there is some Truth in Television with the system of boarding schools set up in the United States, Canada, and Australia for the children of the native peoples, from the late 19th century and well into the late 20th century, with the last of these schools (Marieval Indian Residential School in Canada) closing in 1997. The agencies in charge of these schools forced parents to turn over their children as wards of the government and sent them, often hundreds of miles, away from their families and communities. Their clothing and ornaments were burned on arrival and their hairnote  was cut short. A few of these institutions did provide a quality western-style education, or at least taught useful trades or skills, but the main purpose was to "kill the Indian and save the man" — forcing these children to accept that their traditional customs and languages are primitive and evil, forbidding them to speak their own languages, and enforcing the rules with cruel punishments.

Children died at these schools, and they died running away. Sexual abuse was common. Once they graduated and were deemed "civilized", they didn't fit in with their communities because of the mental conditioning they went through, and couldn't fit in with society at large because they were seen not as human beings, but more as tamed "savages" that could act "civilized". Most of them ended up as menial servants. To this day, the horrors of the residential schools affect their descendants, and several groups exist to help today's Native Americans recover from ancestral pain that has been transmitted to them. With newly appointed Interior Secretary Deb Haaland (Laguna Pueblo)note  at the helm, a Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative has been established to investigate the schools, admit responsibility, and create more services to help descendants. Today, four Native American boarding schoolsnote  remain in operation in the U.S. as private institutions, now under tribal control and removed from the cultural assimilation program, while in Canada, the horror of it all re-emerged in the summer of 2021, in a highly-publicized incident when the bodies of 200 children were found at the site of Kamloops Indian Residential School (in the province of British Columbia). In the months to come, other unmarked graves would be found at residential school sites across the country.

You are likely to find yourself in one of these places if sent Off to Boarding School by the Card-Carrying Villain, often doubling as a Dustbin School, School for Scheming, or Academy of Evil. Still, count yourself lucky; at least you're not in an Orphanage of Fear and don't have to deal with an Evil Orphanage Lady. If you're unlucky, your summer is only apt to be marginally better — but see Summer Campy for that. In the best cases, expect it to overlap with Tough Love. In the worst case, the Orphanage of Fear and the Boarding School of Horrors are one and the same, so good luck till you graduate.

A subcategory of this is the Day School of Horrors: same sort of thing, but the kids get to go home at the end of each day; The more common types of this variant tend to be schools run by religious organizations, Catholic schools especially.

Not to be confused with an All-Ghouls School, where the pupils and teachers are stereotypical "horror" entities, but are usually quite pleasant. A Sucky School is a downplayed version; it's unlikely to threaten your life, but it is going to give you a terrible experience in other ways. But there are chances you may get to go home for the evenings. The School of Hard Knocks similarly encourages violence against students, but may not always be malevolent. See also Juvenile Hell, which is about young people being committed to youth prisons by the legal system, and which plays out similar to this trope.

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Examples

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    Anime and Manga 
  • Gakuen Alice has the title school, which seems to involve children being abused horribly, sent on dangerous missions, and forbidden to contact their families.
  • Resident Evil: The Marhawa Desire: Even before the outbreak, Marhawa Academy is not the nicest school to attend. The first chapter's title of the first volume, "Academy of Tragedy", should tell you something about it. To the rest of the world, Marhawa Academy is a wonderful place, and headmistress Gracia spends much of the manga trying to keep it that way.
  • While most of the students and teachers of the Youkai Academy in Rosario + Vampire are not terribly evil, there is an Absurdly Powerful Student Council who devolved into Knight Templar Yakuza over the years, a few Sadist Teachers (including Medusa), and all the students (save one) are shape-shifting demons and if any of them reveal their true forms they're threatened with "permanent expulsion", although this is not followed through on. (This is also a somewhat ironic inversion of the trope, in that the school was designed to be softer and more civilized than most students' home lives, and exists as much in the hope of developing empathy as for political purposes.)
  • Shitsurakuen's Utopia Academy, and specially for the girls, the guys have it easier as they can treat the girls any way they want.
  • The hentai Shusaku is about a janitor who blackmails and fornicates with the students of an all-girl boarding school for gifted musicians.
  • Sunday Without God has Goran Academy in the third arc. Children with special abilities are kidnapped by the staff and aren't allowed to leave, and the trigger-happy headmistress prefers to use her revolver to keep the students in line.
  • Umineko: When They Cry: Ange's time at St. Lucia Academy was made pretty miserable because she had no friends and she was often bullied mercilessly by her classmates. The teachers never were around to put a stop to it either. It got so bad that she ordered the Seven Sisters of Purgatory to kill her classmates. And when they couldn't (because they could only do it when Ange herself was willing to do it with her own hands), she denied their existence and got them killed.
    • St. Lucia didn't come out of Higurashi: When They Cry looking particularly good either, but the ante got upped in Higurashi Gou and Sotsu, where they would actively try to force struggling students to drop out by overworking them in remedial classes and literally have a prison (complete with orange jumpsuit) in their basement where they hold students who misbehave.

    Comic Books 
  • The Batman storyline Gothic reveals that Bruce Wayne spent time in one of these as a child (a British-style school in the U.S.) while he was investigating several murders targeting Gotham's crime bosses. He had simply chalked up some of the more horrific memories of the place as a child's imagination, especially the monstrous, abusive headmaster (who seemingly didn't cast a shadow) and the brutal death of one of his school friends. Even without the headmaster, the school was a bad place even for this trope, as the prefects were psychotic bullies and the teachers sexually harassed their students. It finally reaches its climax when Batman discovers that not only are the killer, Mr. Whisper, and his old headmaster the same person, he's actually a centuries-old former monk who sold his soul to the devil to avoid dying from the plague in 17th-century Vienna, and has spent the years since working on a way to keep the Devil from claiming his soul. Among other things, he's been serial murdering children for years to fuel his magic, Bruce's friend being one of his victims.
  • Diabolik has Morben, which is a mix of this and Orphanage of Fear: its students were either Street Urchins who have been placed in the wrong orphanage or unwanted relatives of powerful families (like Eva Kant, bastard daughter of a member of the powerful Kant family and placed there by her uncle while her father believed her dead), the staff regularly beat up the students for minor infractions or beat them up and closed them in a dark cell for days with little food once every three days, and favourite students of the director Clothilde Luger are free to bully the other students as they wait to be taken in by a rich family. And then there's the REALLY horrible part: at least four kids with a huge inheritance were duped into giving their money to the director and then murdered, with a fifth noticing in time what was happening and running away and replaced by a lookalike who signed off the money and was murdered. As one of the victims of the very bad part (actually the one who successfully escaped) was Eva's only friend during her stay there, Miss Luger was tracked down and slain as soon as Eva found out about it.
  • In Doctor Who (Titan) 12th Doctor Year 2, the Doctor and Clara investigate Ravenscaur, a gothic castle on a remote Scottish island with absurdly strict rules ("no smiling policy") and a horrible caste system among the kids. It turns out it's all a front for the Sea Devils.
  • The Dreaming's Greenwich Private College barely makes it into this trope. While the teachers, though strict, are not sadistic, and the students are friendly, you run the risk of being snatched by a Quinkan whenever you go to sleep.
  • A 3-issue story arc in Excalibur (Marvel Comics) has Kitty Pryde attend one of these, complete with being specifically targeted by the popular girls, when the rest of her team had gone missing. However, it's ultimately a subversion: the teaching staff, particularly the Headmistress, do genuinely care about the girls, and while they're entirely dysfunctional, it's made plain that this is because of their upbringing (the majority of them were sent to boarding school so their parents didn't have to deal with them, and the older ones are bitterly aware of it).
  • In Hollow Fields, the titular school features steam-powered Sadist Teachers, a patchwork security guard, a variety of alarming classes, and once a week the student with the lowest grades is sent to detention... permanently.
  • The first issue of The Invisibles has a Borstal of Horrors run by malevolent extra-dimensional entities who are consuming the mental independence and imagination of the inmates.
  • Implied in Lucky Luke, where Waldo Badminton occasionally mentions the dormitories of Oxbridge, which were kept unheated and the windows open at night.
    It made you a man or it filled the family crypts.
  • In Miracleman, Kid Miracleman is subjected to this after he reverts to his human form, John, for the first time in 20 years. The staff are caring but like most schools of the time ignore bullying between the students. As a result, John quickly becomes targeted by a series of bullies. Co-currently he finds himself having to constantly fight off Kid Miracleman screaming in his ear to let him out. John holds out until the head bully tries to hold him down and assault him. John Maddened Into Misanthropy summons Kid Miracleman who then promptly butchers most of London in a rampage.
  • Violet Paige (a.k.a. Mother Panic) spent a decade in one of these, a school called Gather House located on the outskirts of Gotham City. Once she begins operating as a vigilante, many of her initial targets are associated with the school.
  • The Sandman (1989) features a school like this in a side story in Season of Mists. It was quite a normal Boarding School in modern days, but since Hell had just been emptied and the dead came back to Earth during holidays when there was just one living boy present with a skeleton staff because he couldn't go to his absent father, all the people who died in relation to the place somehow returned there and made it into a Boarding School Of Horrors. The devil-worshiping bullies had attended the place just before World War I, at the time when the place had apparently fit the trope.
  • Secret Path (2016): There are hints in Chanie's Flashbacks that the Cecilia Jeffrey Indian Residential School was this. Such hints include a girl being pulled away screaming and in tears by the arm, and one of the priests entering the student sleeping quarters at night.
  • The St Trinians public school for girls, as illustrated by Ronald Searle's wonderful comics, is an inversion: the students are, without exception, hellions who do the horrifying, rather than being victims of a sadistic system.
  • In the adult comic Viz, the character "Spoilt Bastard" briefly attended one.
  • In Violine, of the day school variety, and it does not last very long before Violine causes mayhem and flees the school.

    Fanfiction 
  • Big Human on Campus exaggerates Youkai Academy's tendency towards this for comic effect. All the authority figures (except for Fran and Ms. Nekonome) are apathetic to students' suffering at best and cheerfully homicidal at worst. The school is terrorized by the Protection Committee, and most of the normal students fall into Blue-and-Orange Morality if they're not outright evil, and everyone tends to take a very casual view towards violence.
  • Child of the Storm generally portrays Hogwarts fairly positively, but also observes and emphasises some of the darker aspects of the school (bullying by students and Snape alike, including Fantastic Racism and implied homophobia). The author, who started the fic in his final year of school, occasionally observes that he went to a boarding school with shades of this and that Hogwarts was in many respects very true to life, except for the fact that it drastically understated two things: the sex, and the violence.
  • In the Discworld fic The Graduation Class, a younger Miss Alice Band revisits her own schooldays at the Quirm Academy for Young Ladies, far less fondly than Sybil Ramkin does. To Alice, schooldays became purgatorial, following an all-too-brief visit to Paradise. Miss Butts and Miss Delcross are seen far less sympathetically and come out as somewhat hypocriticalnote , in that Alice is punished both by the School and her own father for breaking one of the most fundamental rules in any single-sex boarding school. Her latter years there are Hell at the hands of both unkind peers and head teachers who are closely watching her for any further infractions. This colours her later career as a boarding-school teacher at the Assassins' Guild School, where she resolves never to punish any of her girls for the same "crime" and to protect and guide them if she can. (See Literature: The Historical Illuminatus, below.)
  • Harry Potter and the Boy Who Lived: Durmstrang is portrayed as this, and makes Hogwarts on its worst day look like kindergarten; only the barest accommodations are provided for the students, and if they want anything better, they'll have to learn how to make it themselves; the teachers are incredibly strict, bordering on abusive; instead of a house system like at Hogwarts, the students are encouraged to scratch and claw for dominance amongst themselves; and the school still employs some extremely harsh corporal punishment methods that are outlawed in most other magical communities. Somewhat justified as Durmstrang makes no secret about how it operates, as their entire motto is to produce truly extraordinary wizards rather than just passable ones, and any student who enrolls will know what they're getting into.
    • It was even worse during the brief period during World War 2/The Grindewald War when Grindewald himself claimed the role of Headmaster after killing the previous one and turning the school into his own headquarters, effectively making the students his hostages.
  • In the webcomic Kill la Kill AU, we have Honnouji Academy and it is this, along with being The Dreaded, or so it is rumored to be. According to Nui, it's like a prison and those that go in are never allowed out and the only way out is in a body bag. When she finds out Ryuko was to be sent there so she could still go to the same school with her and Satsuki, she was furious.
    Nui: "Remedial School" my ass, more like "Slaughterhouse School", 'cause everyone that goes there may as well be going there to die.
  • Played for Laughs in the Official Fanfiction University metaseries. Being taken to a school where the teachers are all your favourite book or movie characters sounds like fun until you realise that they have seen the fanfic you write about them. And they are not flattered.
  • Lily Potter attends one in the Harry Potter fanfic "Petal In The Rain" by pratty-prongs-princesse.
  • In Soul Eater: Troubled Souls, this is the type of school Ox attended before the Academy and met Harvar here. It was called Washington Boarding School. If a student receives A’s, then they are golden. If not, well, this is where the nasty stuff comes in. Sadist Teachers abound and an Absurdly Powerful Student Council is brought in to do something to students who make a B or lower on exams. Corporal Punishment and harsh lectures only scrape the surface. It is heavily implied worst punishments can be and have been inflicted. All this to ensure that their students are conditioned to make perfect markings, believing smarts are the most powerful tool ever.

    Film — Live-Action 
  • The Blackcoat's Daughter takes place at a Catholic school with rumors of demonic worship among the faculty.
  • Child's Play 3 has the boy from the first two movies in a military school, showcasing how brutal such schools can be in real life. Several Drill Sergeant Nasty types come to a sticky end at the hands of Chucky: "Don't fuck with the Chuck!"
  • Dead Poets Society: OK, no Wackford Squeers, but we do have an authoritarian headmaster who beats free-thinking students and a school board who squashes creative kids and teachers beneath "the way things are done here." The fact that most, if not all, of the parents are wealthy in some way and support the school's view doesn't help much, either.
  • Combined with Orphanage of Fear in The Devil's Backbone.
  • Lindsay Anderson's 1968 If was Malcolm McDowell's breakthrough role and embodies this trope.
  • Scum offers an example of this trope, though in fact it is set in a borstal (what we would now call a young offenders' institute), so the less-than-pleasant nature of it is understandable...if not in any way justified, since some pretty horrific stuff happens. The film (and the play it was based on) were an Author Tract against the institution of borstal, and the details are not inaccurate.
  • St Trinians, and its sequel St. Trinian's 2: The Legend of Fritton's Gold (2009), is an all-girl boarding school where the only rule is anarchy. Although it is presented in a pleasant way past the first 10 minutes, it is no wonder the Minister for Education wants it closed. Among the mischief shown on screen: a girl is dragged after a tractor by a fellow student, another is dropped in a staircase head first, a third one is broadcast live on YouTube while running naked in the corridors, the teachers are drunk, the first years play with dynamite, and the students make and sell vodka in their science lab.
    • Even the original St. Trinian's films and the Ronald Searle cartoons were like this, 1950s style.
  • The small all-girls school in The Woods doesn't seem very horrifying at first (just rather isolated) save for one bully, but soon you notice how unnaturally pleasant the teachers are, then your friends start to disappear, and then you start coughing up leaves and twigs...
  • Satans School For Girls. Just look at the title!
  • 5ive Girls has a Christian reform school for girls with supernatural powers run by a strict teacher who doesn't spare the rod.
  • The Italian horror film Suspiria (1977), which has a dance academy run by a coven of truly evil witches.
    • Done again by Argento in Phenomena, where the school is being menaced by a Serial Killer. Whose mother is one of the teachers. There's also the fact that the Headmistress tried to have the main character locked in a mental hospital before she escaped.
  • Werewolf In A Girls Dormitory. Although he never gets into the dorm itself.
  • The Chorus centres on a failed musician, who accepts a job at a school for delinquent boys, the name of which translates colloquially to 'Rock Bottom'. It gets better, though- at least until the school burns down.
  • The Korean Horror Movie Destination Hell takes place in one of these.
  • A variation of this appears in Disturbing Behavior, where it's done with a town. Parents move to Cradle Bay with their troubled teens so that they will be "made" into model students and citizens.
  • Evil: The prep school where Erik goes for a year is a savage and brutal place where an Absurdly Powerful Student Council can brutalize, torture, humiliate, and abuse students to its heart's content, while the administration turns a blind eye. Whenever a student pisses the seniors off, the seniors arrange a cage match in which the student is usually beaten half to death.
  • In The Imitation Game, we see flashbacks of how the introverted and mildly autistic hero was bullied by his classmates in boarding school.
  • In Rhymes for Young Ghouls, the residential school for First Nations peoples is horrific, complete with beatings, solitary confinement, and implied molestation.
  • The Korean drama Silenced was actually based on the true story of a sex abuse scandal at a school for the hearing-impaired, which was suffered by both resident and non-resident students.
  • In Slaughterhouse Rulez, there's a strict pecking order, the "House Gods" (basically, prefects) dish out strict physical punishment to those who break the rules, or whom they just don't like, and the people higher on the pecking order gladly order around those they consider beneath them, much to the benign ignorance of the adults theoretically keeping order. Oh, and there are dragons in the tunnels...

    Gamebooks 
  • Zombie School is set on one such school, where you're a new transfer student. You find out the school's faculties are converting students into zombified slaves and must survive their attempts to brainwash you... but what do you expect from a place called "Ranewash Academy"?

    Literature 
  • Older Than Radio: Lowood School in Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, where the living conditions are shabby, harsh punishments are dealt out for the most minor errors, the director, Mr. Brocklehurst, is a religious hypocrite Sadist Teacher, and many students die of typhus or tuberculosis. The conditions improve after the big typhus outbreak, though: the filthy cook is fired, Brocklehurst is edged out of his post, and donors put up a new building. It overlaps a little with the Orphanage of Fear since the pupils have all lost at least one parent. note 
  • Older Than Radio: Set at Rugby School in the 1830s, Tom Brown's Schooldays is an 1857 novel by Thomas Hughes, who attended Rugby from 1834 to 1842. Although circumstances improve as the story unfolds, early on Tom Brown is mercilessly tormented by the villainous bully Flashman, at one point being roasted in front of a school fireplace. Not the first novel set in a boarding school, Tom Brown's School Days was nonetheless hugely influential. For example, there are strong parallels between Hughes' novel and Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone.
    • Also the origin of the Flashman novels. Flashman remains a cowardly bully, at one point threatening to torture an Afghan prisoner, saying "I'll show you the advantages of a British boarding school education."
  • While, at the outset, Hailsham from the novel Never Let Me Go seems to be a great, loving place to grow up. That is, until you find out that the place is really a maturing ground for cloned children, who will eventually have all their organs harvested and die very young.
    • You also find out that Hailsham is actually quite nice compared to the schools run by people who approve of the whole scheme instead of reformers who settled for giving the clones normal(ish) childhoods when they realized that they couldn't convince the public to scrap the project.
  • The titular school of Naomi Novik's The Scholomance trilogy is a literal one in that it is not sadistic teachers (there are none) or bullying upperclassmen that are the main problem, but the lurking monsters facilitated by Malevolent Architecture. That said it is also something of a subversion as the alternative to getting in is so much worse that everyone is clamoring to get in despite how horrible it can be. The 1 in 4 odds of surviving the school isn't great, but it still beats the 1 in 20 odds of anyone not lucky enough to get in.
  • Robert Cormier's The Chocolate War is set in a Catholic one.
  • Dotheboys Hall in Charles Dickens' Nicholas Nickleby. The villainous Wackford Squeers is said to be based on a real headmaster, who was so cruel that he blinded some of his pupils.
    • It was reported that Dickens had created a minor backlash against Boarding Schools and a demand for quality assurance from his readers because of that gruesome description.
    • Squeers was based on a man named William Shaw, headmaster of the Bowes Academy in northern England. Dickens made no effort to disguise this; the novel ruined Shaw and led to the closure of Bowes. However, there is quite a bit of evidence to suggest that Dickens unfairly maligned Shaw — the incident with the blinded boys, for example, has been attributed by some historians to an illness that arrived in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars, and Shaw is recorded as having employed an eye specialist (at great expense) to try and cure them. Whatever the truth about him, quite a few people weren't happy with Dickens' treatment of him and apparently installed a window to him in the local church after his death.
  • David's boarding school in David Copperfield. Had it not been for people like Steerforth, Mr. Bell or Tommy Traddles, it would've been even worse. And it was pretty bad, thanks to Mr. Creakle.
  • A Christmas Carol rounds out the Charles Dickens hat-trick: Ebenezer Scrooge spent his childhood years at one. Uniquely, A Christmas Carol's horror is on a more abstract, intellectual level: at Scrooge's school, his teachers strove to pound out any and all glimmers of imagination and fantasy and replace them with cold, hard, facts. (This is also in Dickens' Hard Times). Said teachers are not presented as out-and-out villains (indeed, we never see them as characters in their own right), but as practitioners of then-accepted teaching standards. The Ghost of Christmas Past effectively punctures Scrooge's Nostalgia Filter over his school days and forces him to confront what it really did.
  • The Stjärnberg boarding school in the Swedish novel Ondskan by journalist and action-novel author Jan Guillou, recently turned into a film. It was based on Mr Guillou's own boarding school experience in the 1950s. When he became a journalist in the 1960s, he managed to shut down that school by exposing its horrors to the general public. Funny story, he actually decided to become a journalist because it turned out to be the most effective way to shut down the school. Then he spent twenty years practicing his writing in journalism and in lesser novels like the Carl Hamilton series before he felt confident enough to write the book. We might call that dedication.
  • The school in Mercedes Lackey's Brightly Burning isn't a boarding school, but otherwise matches this trope. An elite group of "sixth form" students can get away with anything, including severely beating a younger boy for not stealing on their behalf. At least until they manage to cause a Traumatic Superpower Awakening to the lead character (the one who would go on to be called Lavan Firestorm) and got most of themselves killed. The incident was so big that it got the King himself aware of things. Considering what Valdemar is built on (it's what America is supposed to be at heart, enforced thanks to the Companions), no one is pleased at all, and a very swift and permanent reform is forced on the school, with plenty of people and rich families who knew what was really going on punished as well.
  • Jill's and Eustace's school, Experiment House, in C. S. Lewis' The Silver Chair. Rather than the "abusively strict and draconian" type, however, Experiment House is the less-common variant of the trope in which the trouble is the complete lack of discipline; its faculty, fancying themselves modern and progressive, just pretty much never punish anyone no matter what they do, creating a hellish environment where bullies have the run of the place, able to do whatever they want without consequences at the expense of everyone else.
    • Also, either Experiment House or another Boarding School Of Horrors is also implied to have contributed to Edmund's mean and resentful behavior in the first book; upon his recovery, Lucy observes that he looks better than he has "since his first term at that horrid school which was where he had begun to go wrong."
  • George Orwell's essay "Such, Such Were the Joys" is about his experiences in such a school.
  • And C. S. Lewis in Surprised by Joy talks candidly about his days at Malvern College where the fagging system was in full play — as an underclassman he was worked to exhaustion — and nearly all the boys were either "Tarts" or "Bloods". (So much for the theory that these schools would prevent homosexuality.) He refuses to condemn the rampant pederasty saying that the authorities condoned much worse crimes.
  • Dear America: Downplayed a bit in My Heart Is On the Ground, which is set at the Carlisle school, a white-run residential school for Native American children that was intended to essentially strip them of their own cultures and force them to emulate the white people's culture instead. While Nannie does mention some negative aspects — such as how upset she was to have her hair cut short or that it's hard to only speak English — she also speaks of how knowledgeable the teachers are and how eager she is to learn all they have to teach, and many of the individual staff are portrayed as kind and supportive. This earned the book more than a little criticism, given that the real Carlisle school was actually a pretty extreme example of this trope (as were most of the residential schools of this type).
    • Played straigter in the Dear Canada counterpart These Are My Words (which was written by an actual residential school survivor). Though it's set in an era where the worst of the abuses had been toned down a bit, Violet's experience is still of a downright miserable place where she's cut off from her culture, has everything she owns taken away from her, and is basically forbidden from doing anything fun. This in turn causes the students to often take out their frustrations on each other because they have no other outlet, which of course only makes the experience even worse for all of them. And then she learns that for the upcoming school year, rather than school boarding facilities, she and the others will be forced to board in complete strangers' homes. And all of this is legally compulsory, meaning that even if their families are on the kids' side (which Violet's family by and large is), it doesn't matter — they don't get to choose not to send the kids back. There also a few hints of other, even more serious things that happened at said schools in the not-so-distant-past, most notably in the fact that Violet's mother (whose parents were threatened with arrest for trying to keep her out of the school) became pregnant while attending one of these schools and refused to discuss the circumstances of the conception, seemingly implying at least the possibility that it wasn't consensual.
  • Discworld
    • The Fools' Guild School. A thoroughly miserable place where students sleep on hard pallets, are woken at the crack of dawn, and spend hours memorizing ancient jokes that simply aren't funny and being drilled in slapstick routines that are even less so. The irony is amped up by it being next door to the Assassins' Guild, which is a much more cheerful place and lets the students go outside.
    • The downside of the Assassins' Guild is that the number of students tends to be considerably smaller at the end of the year than it was at the beginning due to the student rivalries and the Guild's firm belief in competitive graduation exams.
    • Jingo features 71-Hour-Ahmed, a warrior and Cowboy Cop from Klatch who attended the Assassin's Guild school. He notes that after seven years of an Ankh-Morpork public school, "patronized by the sons of gentlemen", life among the most feared warrior tribe in Klatch is an absolute picnic.
    • Hugglestones, a boarding school for the sons of the very rich designed to turn boys into men... apparently by making them play a lot of violent full-contact sports and only allowing those who survive (either by brute force or just being smart enough to avoid the scrum while still acting like they're involved in the action) to graduate; William de Worde from The Truth is an example of the latter sort of student. Hugglestones is also described as physically resembling a maximum-security prison, with the difference that prison inmates get better treatment. In Mrs Bradshaw's Handbook, Mrs Bradshaw watches the boys getting on the train at the end of term; some in wheelchairs, some on stretchers, and two in coffins.
    • Monstrous Regiment has the Girl's Working School, which cranks this up to Room 101 levels. Three of the main characters were in it at some point, and it shows in different ways. (Unlike most Boarding Schools of Horrors, it's for poor girls; it's something between an Orphanage of Fear and a Magdalene laundry). Lt Blouse went to a less extreme version - he's perfectly happy to eat scubbo (soup made of boiled water and anything remotely edible) with the men, as it's what he got at school. Jackrum later quips that "He went to a school for young gentlemen, so prison will be just like old times."
  • Harry Potter:
    • Though everything isn't perfect there, Hogwarts in most of the Harry Potter books is not an example. It's Harry's favorite place in the world, most of the teachers seem to care about the students and try to teach them, and it's generally portrayed as an Academy of Adventure full of friendship. However, it veers toward this in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, when Dolores Umbridge shows up and gets beloved teachers fired, spies on students, institutes corporal punishment, and generally rules with an iron fist. Hogwarts definitely becomes one in Deathly Hallows when Voldemort takes control through his lackeys, the Carrow siblings. Torture of students becomes a routine punishment, and students are encouraged to hurt each other to maintain order. Neville was apparently attacked and injured for refusing to torture another student.
    • Smeltings Academy, the all-boys Muggle school Dudley goes to and that Uncle Vernon attended in his youth, seems to channel the Victorian schools that originated this trope. The uniform includes a gnarled stick for the students to hit each other with when the teachers are not looking. This is supposedly a great help in preparing the students for the future.
    • This is presumably the case at St. Brutus's Secure Centre for Incurably Criminal Boys, the school that Harry attends in the cover story that Uncle Vernon tells his sister Marge to prevent her from finding out the truth about Harry. At Vernon's prompting, Harry admits to receiving frequent beatings intended to stamp out his deviant behavior. It's unclear if the school actually exists in the narrative, or if Uncle Vernon fabricated it for the story.
  • The Oakhurst foundation from the Shadow Grail series takes Hogwarts and carefully removes everything fun and most of the sheer good fortune that kept the school from having a running body count every year. In fact, in the first book, the main characters go through some old records and realize that one student dies, disappears, or goes insane roughly once every six weeks. The casualty rate starts going up in the following books.
  • The Prufrock Preparatory school in The Austere Academy, Book The Fifth of A Series of Unfortunate Events. The buildings are even shaped like gravestones. The school is run by Vice Principal Nero. When the Baudelaire siblings first arrive he informs them about the fine dormitories they have, but that unless students have parental permission, they must sleep on hay in a tin shack (known as the Orphan's Shack). He considers himself to be a genius and thinks that he plays the violin well, but in fact, he is unworthy, stupid, mean, arrogant, obnoxious, annoying, and cannot play the violin well at all. Nonetheless, students must attend his lengthy violin recitals every day, or else they must buy him a large bag of candy and watch him eat it. The Baudelaires are forced to live in the Orphans' Shack which is infested with crabs, fungus drips from the ceiling, and the tin walls are covered in horrible wallpaper (green with pink hearts). They are also regularly bullied by a rude, violent girl named Carmelita Spats and Sunny (a baby) is made to be a secretary for Nero. There's also a rule that if students are late to class (or Sunny is late to work) their hands will be tied behind their backs during meals and they'll have to "lean down at eat their food like a dog". Sunny has her silverware taken away because she must work in the administrative building where students are not allowed. Also if students are late to meals (which are not at specified times) their glasses are taken away and beverages are served in large puddles on the trays.
  • St Custards in the molesworth books, and St. Trinian's, both drawn by cartoonist Ronald Searle.
  • In the Inspector Linley detective novel Well Schooled In Murder, a murder is covered up by the staff and all 600 pupils of a Boarding School of Horrors.
  • Happens in a Goosebumps short story, "The Perfect School"
  • The school that Alex Rider attends in Point Blanc. The school appears awesome, it's just that the other students are all Stepford Smilers. The real students are held underground while the clones of the Big Bad study them in order to imitate them properly
  • The Afrikaaner boarding school in The Power of One fits this trope, though Peekay's experience is worse than most because he's English.
  • The horribly built school in The War Between The Pitiful Teachers And The Splendid Kids is not only a dumping ground for "bad" students (the main POV character is actually very intelligent but infuriated his teacher by making up words ("inkwart- that blister that develops when you write too many stupid English assignments") and sticking to them; another is a very smart Cloud Cuckoo Lander; another was raised by hyenas) but also for bad teachers like the self-absorbed art teacher who jousted as The Rococo Knight.
  • Crunchem Hall in Roald Dahl's Matilda fits the trope to a T, despite being a day school. The headmistress (who is a fan of Wackford Squeers from Nicholas Nickleby and admits it) delights in, among other things, locking students in an iron maiden-style closet full of broken glass and nails, forcing students to eat chocolate cake until they either vomit or explode, and picking students up by their hair and hammer-throwing them across the school grounds.
  • Similarly, Roald Dahl wrote about his horrific experiences at a boarding school in his first autobiographical book, Boy: Tales of Childhood.
  • In Lois Duncan's Down a Dark Hall, the headmistress is forcing her trapped students to channel the ghosts of dead geniuses...which causes enough mental damage to drive them to insanity or suicide.
  • The school in Cinda Williams Chima's The Wizard Heir is mainly a way for its wizard headmaster to locate young wizards to bind to him; the non-magical students are tormented — and sometimes killed — by the others, and when the protagonist refuses to go along, he's subjected to months of constant mental torture.
  • In Otherland, Felix Jongleur, evil mastermind of the Grail Brotherhood, grew up in the World War I era and was sent to Cranleigh, a British boarding school that he remembers as a place of abject misery and torture, not the least of which because he is French. Even nearly two hundred years later (yes, he is that old), these memories give him Past Experience Nightmares. Interestingly, they also cause him to pick Paul Jonas as his Opposite-Sex Clone "daughter's" tutor because he went to the same school, and this forms a minor plot point late in the story.
  • The 19th century Austro-Hungarian military academy portrayed in The Confusions of Young Törless is one of these. While we never see much of the rest of the student body, the plot centers on the sadistic torment of one of its students, observed dispassionately by the title character.
  • Ella Enchanted: Ella attends one which she eventually escapes. It wouldn't have been so bad if it weren't for Hattie ordering her about and the punishment of meals being taken away if you talked back to a teacher.
  • Coates Academy from Gone might count. It starts out as a boarding school for "difficult" kids, which translates into sadists, sociopaths, juvenile delinquents, bullies, and a few decent kids who talked back too often, or whose parents just wanted to get rid of them. It is described as a cold, foreboding place where the bullies rule. Then, things only get worse (for the few decent kids) after some of the kids develop superpowers, the adults all vanish, and the bullies really rule. Eventually, it gets to be unbearable for every character except Drake.
  • Drearcliff Grange in Kim Newman's The Secrets of Drearcliff Grange School combines this with Superhero School for a Deconstruction of Girls' School stories such as The Silent Three. The main character is warned that the prefects can punish her for having a red mark on her face by slapping her (and can continue to do so as long as she continues to have red marks on her face), and will already have ritually burnt the doll in her luggage at the stake (as it turns out they haven't, they're waiting to torture it in front of her). But then that gets deconstructed, when we're told that after three weeks she no longer sees the school as either good or bad; it's simply how things are.
  • In Red Planet, the main characters are sent to a dispassionately oppressive boarding school where the headmaster attempts to steal the hero's (sentient) pet and the heroes discover a plot against the colony.
  • In Morton Rhue's Boot Camp, the boot camp "Lake Harmony" is this, its methods a mix between Nineteen Eighty-Four (on the instructors' part) and the Experiment House from The Silver Chair (on the bullies' part)... and things still manage to go From Bad to Worse in the end. Given that it was based on Tranquility Bay, a "Teen Treatment" facility in Jamaica for troubled American teens that was infamous for the horrendous treatment of the kids sent there and the deaths that occurred, it's understandable.
  • In Robert Anton Wilson's The Historical Illuminatus II - The Widow's Son, Edward Babcock lives through Hell at Eton when the School launches a witch-hunt to find and detect actively gay pupils. Wilson describes a Gestapo-like interrogation of all pupils who are called, one by one, in front of a panel of teachers and urged to confess to the cardinal and disgusting sin of sodomy, so that they can repent and their souls may be saved before God. Knowing to confess to being gay means expulsion, disgrace, and lifelong ostracism, Babcock bluffs and lies his way out of it, although he is both frightened and intimidated. After the first flush of elation at having successfully lied to his teachers, he is pulled up cold by the appalling realisation his lover is yet to be questioned. As the boys are being called in by alphabetical order, he realises Geoffrey Wildeblood will have a long agonising wait... eventually he realises Geoffrey has fled the school and has killed himself, rather than face shame and disgrace.
  • Cackle's Academy in The Worst Witch teeters on being an example. The school is described as cold during the winter and the girls are forced to spend break outdoors even when it's cold. The food is also always served cold (mostly because it takes half an hour to carry up to the Great Hall from the kitchens). And while there is a Sadist Teacher Miss Hardbroom and a few strict others, the headmistress Miss Cackle is good-natured and friendly. The school's conditions are all in the name of tradition rather than any desire to be cruel. The TV series does also help make the school a little more welcoming.
  • Murderess features a Downplayed version of this trope. The James Centre Boarding School is shabby and grey, the food served in the cafeteria is awful (rumours say that a boy who ate everything he was served for a week died because of it), the teachers are a bit mean and grating (but by no means blatantly sadistic), and the magic-wielding Alpha Bitch Bridget seems to terrorise her fellow student, but all in all, it could be much worse.
  • The school Carrie attends in Petals on the Wind.
  • TPU in Morganville Vampires is a collegiate example.
  • The all-boys wizard academy in Skin Hunger is this. Pupils' clothes are burnt on arrival, they are given rough sackcloth robes instead, and no shoes. They are only given water to drink and wash with, and no food or soap. After a couple of days, a wizard shows them how to make food appear using a magical jewel ... but most of them aren't (yet) able to do this, and the headmaster actively discourages them from helping each other, threatening that they will be killed if they do. It is mentioned that only one of the group will become a wizard and ever see his parents again, the others will ... become part of the school. Which can be interpreted in a multitude of ways. Some of the boys vanish, presumably starved to death.note 
  • The main character attends one of these in The Moth Diaries, full of emotional repression and tension, though pre-story she made it work, finding a best friend to confide in, a group of girls to hang out with, and generally keeping her head down and pushing through. It helps that we get the sense that the school's better than her situation at home. Then the plot kicks off when Ernessa shows up and takes an interest in the main character's best friend, and vaguely supernatural events start happening, and things really go to hell in a handcart.
  • This is what happens to Lily Floris in the 1864 novel Quite Alone by George Sala. Initially left at a strict but reasonable boarding school, she later ends up dumped in one of these. The Pension Marcassin is a hellhole that makes Dickens' worst schools look good. Even the best students are ridiculed as completely without merit, the rules are set up so that it is impossible not to break them, punishments are sadistic and the food is ghastly. Lily isn't even a student for most of the seven years she spends there; her tuition money runs out and she ends up like Sara Crewe, an indentured servant.
  • In Die Alchimistin St. Jacob's Institute for Highborn Ladies is a particularly ghastly version of the trope. At first it doesn't seem so bad: true, all your things are searched and censored when you arrive and the headmistress can give you a harsh beating if you speak against it, but the rest looks like a normal if strict girls' school and the girls aren't overloaded with work and have enough time to rest and walk in the park. And then the heroine learns that it is a place governed by an ancient alchemist where once in a while he picks girls to sacrifice so that he could retain his immortality.
  • The Doctor Who Official Annual 2017 features the short story "Yes, Missy", in which the villainess turns a perfectly nice all-girl boarding school into one temporarily. Going by the name Miss Magister, she takes over Saxon Heights by using hypnosis on the faculty, and from there forces all the girls to dress like her at all times, sends the prefects to London for "something about inspecting the copies of Magna Carta...", and seizes all the girls' smartphones and tablets — ostensibly so they'll stop wasting time "SnapBooking and FaceChatting" but really to assemble a transmitter for summoning a Daemon! UNIT stops her before that happens — and before she kills a girl who was disobedient — but she gets away to scheme another day, of course.
  • The Stolen Spring by Hans Scherfig, has a quite straightforward example, set in a pre-war Danish society. The boys are regularly bullied by the teachers, and they bully back on each other and on other teachers. No wonder the whole story centers around the pupil who eventually ended up killing the most hated teacher of them all.
  • In The Penderwicks, Jeffrey's mother Mrs. Tifton wants to send him to the extremely strict Pencey Military Academy so he can be like his grandfather, a famous general, but Jeffrey wants to be a musician and study at a music conservatory. Even worse, Mrs. Tifton's boyfriend Dexter wants to get rid of Jeffrey by shipping him off to the academy a year early, so he can spend more time with her.
  • Played with in Brotherhood Of The Rose, by David Morrell. The protagonists aren't mistreated in the orphanage, but they are being groomed as patriotic Cannon Fodder for the US military.
    "The way we were raised, I don't think we were ever kids."
  • Innovations Academy in Girls with Sharp Sticks, a finishing school in the Colorado Rockies where the daughters of wealthy families are sent to be turned into Proper Ladies. Their curriculum includes cooking, etiquette, and botany in place of math, science, and history, they are prohibited from leaving the grounds except on specially arranged field trips, the diet includes strange pills full of nanomachines that are used to slowly rewrite their minds, and punishment for acting out involves being sent for impulse control therapy, a procedure that is uncannily similar to a lobotomy.
  • In the novels of Lidia Charskaya, boarding schools are often a nightmare for newcomers (students and teachers alike), with severe bullying and unfair punishments. When in Princess Dzhavakha Nina can’t cope with the bullies and wants to change the school, one of her few friends tells her that other schools are no better and that at least they are lucky to have nice teachers.
  • Seabrook Academy, a mixed boarding/day school in Skippy Dies, is a downplayed example. Corporal punishment isn't allowed anymore, but violence between students is rampant and nobody seems to learn anything in class. More horrifyingly, the school administration covers up the rape of a student by a teacher that led to the student's suicide, and the teacher gets away with no punishment.
  • Wilder Girls: Before the outbreak of an infectious disease called the Tox, Raxter was a regular boarding school for girls. But after 18 months, the survivors and the two adults left have to deal with strict rationing, the cold, their symptoms, and being cut off from communicating with their families.
  • The Witch of Knightcharm: A student witch named Emily joins the evil Wizarding School The Scholomance and soon learns that it's an example of this. Scholomance students are forced to fight in brutal Wizard Duels to advance in class rank, they have to take deadly tests as part of their education, the top students can straight up kill others if they so choose, and poor performing students are kept in terrible conditions. After failing to pass the orientation course on her first try, Emily wakes up in a tiny room, on a thin cot, with a single torch on the wall for light, and with a badly injured arm that she can't heal because only students who are good enough to pass the orientation course are given a pass to get into the infirmary. Oh, and there are monsters outside the front door who kill anyone that tries to run.
  • Doom Valley Prep School: Played for laughs. Doom Valley is a school for creating villains, and is quite proud of its reputation as the #2 school in the world. Bullies are allowed to do almost anything they want that doesn't involve murder or causing a fellow student to be sent home due to injuries. Teachers are allowed to murder students, although they usually just give them detention where they could, and sometimes probably will die. Shadow monsters keep students out of the wrong dormitories by eating intruders. Teachers bet on which students will die, be crippled, or transformed and unable to stay at school. The school is a maze and being late for class will get a detention. Eldritch tentacle monsters are a frequent pest and will attack students. And combat class involves live practice dummies, rabid dogs, and a lava field. And this is just for the freshmen, it gets worse as students advance.
  • In The Star Dog, there is the School for Horrible Children that General Besf has organized to raise juvenile delinquents into full-fledged criminals who would join his gang. The students' food is dreadful and their living conditions resemble an army barrack, corporal punishments are the norm, and bullying and tattling are actively encouraged. In addition, the students get drugged into blindly obeying their teachers.

    Live-Action TV 
  • Doctor Who: Farringham School for Boys in "Human Nature"/"The Family of Blood", more so in the novel the episodes were based on. And that was before the Doctor turned up, Cosmic Horror-Show in tow. The school was fairly representative of similar British schools at the time.
  • Firefly's River Tam went to a School for Scheming version of one of these that was presided over by Mad Scientists. She came out...a bit touched.
  • The un-named boarding school in House of Anubis could be considered this. While it is a rather clean and rich school, and students are (usually) well taken care of, it is also a school where the teachers tend to be evil, ancient secrets haunt Anubis House, and it seems to be a hotspot for ancient evil activities, as well as endless dangers the students face daily just to sometimes simply survive. The school WAS only started for the teachers to succeed in their plots of achieving immortality...
  • The discipline is harsh at El internado: Las Cumbres:
    • Students who misbehave are locked up in chilly isolated cells called "las neveras" (the iceboxes or freezers). The cells are furnished only with a bench and a bucket (not even a toilet), and rats can be seen crawling outside.
    • Paz's punishment for getting caught with a cell phone: getting her long hair buzzed off.
    • Twice Mara, the headmistress, makes the students stand at attention until someone confesses to a transgression: once in the dining room without being allowed to eat (another favorite punishment at Las Cumbres); and another time outdoors under the rain.
    • On a flashback to Manu's first day of school, he tries to get expelled as soon as he can by telling a teacher to suck his dick. Instead, he gets hosed down on the front lawn while naked, as all the students gawk.
  • A school of this type was the subject of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit "Hothouse" episode. The school in question was for gifted children, but the teachers and administrators cared more about symbols of success than the students' well-being; no matter how well the students were doing, there was constant pressure on them to do more and be better, and they were made to feel ashamed and like they were failures if they didn't jump through every hoop and then some. Olivia learns that many students are on prescription stimulants so they could focus better and sleep less and that this was something the school encouraged from behind the scenes.
  • Francis spends the first few seasons of Malcolm in the Middle in Military School. If he is not being punished by the headmaster, he does something to bring punishment upon his group, who take their frustrations out of it.
  • Night Gallery: "The Academy" features one of these, as it's revealed the students never graduate, and that it's actually a prison in everything but name. Some of the students are actual former underage criminals, while others are implied to just be "disappointments" who were abandoned by their parents at the school and will likely spend the rest of their lives working on an education they'll never use. The main character decides that this is the perfect place for his own difficult son at the end.
  • Poltergeist: The Legacy's tenth episode "The Substitute" was a classic example of this trope.
  • Ned from Pushing Daisies gets sent to a school that is not necessarily a Boarding School Of Horrors as it is a Boarding School of Abandonment and Gloom For Unloved Children.
  • Reservation Dogs: "Deer Lady" in Season 3 shows Native children forced into a residential school during the early 20th century away from their families. They are forbidden to speak their language while there (even when none speak English), forced to do manual labor, harshly punished for breaking any rules (to the point some are killed) and hunted down if any run away. Sadly, it's all Truth in Television.
  • The Graybridge school in "Tomkinson's Schooldays", the pilot episode of Ripping Yarns. At Graybridge, School Bully is actually an official position functioning as a one-man Absurdly Powerful Student Council.
    • "I was seventeen miles from Graybridge before I was caught by the school leopard."
  • That'll Teach 'Em is a British series where 30 modern teenagers attend a simulated '50s boarding school. This includes, to their standards, strict teachers, grueling lessons, terrible food, and harsh punishments. Individuality is severely discouraged and every step a student makes out of line is met with being yelled at or a nasty punishment. However, it is not all gloom and doom, as several fun activities are still organized by the staff.
  • Tower Prep, where kids with special gifts are knocked out and wake up at this school with no explanation, have no idea where they are, a giant wall keeps them from leaving, they are not allowed to contact the outside, and they are forced to act like they are simply normal students.
  • The Twilight Zone (1985): In "Song of the Younger World", Tanner Smith is an inmate at the House of Refuge Reformatory for Wayward Boys. Its superintendent Mordecai Hawkline beats him severely when he finds him with his daughter Amy. He later tells Amy that Tanner and the other boys are scum, animals, beasts who must be caged away from decent society. After Tanner tries to kill him as he thinks that Amy is dead, Mordecai has his men put him in a cell called the Hole and bind him in a full-body straitjacket.
  • Jennie Garth starred in the Lifetime Movie Of The Week-style series Without Consent which is about teenage "re-education" facilities. Along with torturing the students in their control, whether they've actually done anything wrong or not, the program ditches a clearly-troubled young man as soon as his parents' insurance runs out of money, claiming that he is now "cured". He kills himself.

    Music 
  • Dolly Parton's song Evening Shade is about one of these, combined with Orphanage of Fear. The abuse becomes so bad, and the kids so hopeless, that the narrator and "some of the older kids" conspire to burn down the building with the headmistress in it, having first evacuated all the children.
  • The video for Bonnie Tyler's "Total Eclipse of the Heart" is set in a British Boarding School of Weirdness, featuring kids with Glowing Eyes, one of whom can fly, a kid with huge wings, and Ninjas. None of this is ever explained and Bonnie walks through the video with Selective Obliviousness.
  • In Pink Floyd's The Wall, "The Happiest Days of Our Lives" details Pink's experiences under the tutelage of an oppressively strict school system full of Sadist Teachers. The film adaptation accentuates this during the sequence for "Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2", with scenes of children being turned into obedient putty-faced zombies and then mindlessly walking over a platform and toppling into a giant meat grinder. The latter song's promo video further includes an animation of Pink's teacher forcing students through a school-shaped meat grinder (with this clip also appearing in the film's scene for "The Trial").

    Podcasts & Radio 
  • Bleak Expectations:
    • St. Bastard's. A late Georgian school for boys with dead dads, mad mums, and a huge wad of inheritance money when they reach eighteen. It's run by a psychotic maniac who enjoys beating students senseless for violating the school's many ludicrous rules, and that's if he's feeling nice (if not, they're just taken outside and shot). Meals are infrequent, since he's too much of a tight-fisted bastard to bother getting food, so students must spend meal times convincingly miming their meals, or they'll be beaten. They're also forced to work in the mines beneath the school, watched over by hussars in case anyone tries to escape. Not that any student ever makes it out alive, because before they actually reach eighteen, they suffer "accidents". And this all played entirely for extremely dark laughs.
    • Antarctic House is even worse.
  • Ede Valley: St. Adelaide's is this in a nutshell. The principal of the school is conducting experiments on and mind-raping many of the students in the basement.

    Tabletop Games 
  • It's the main premise of the deck building game Miskatonic School For Girls, which involves a girls' school staffed by Eldritch Abominations.
  • A special character in the 5th edition of Warhammer Fantasy is Werner "Al Muktar" Glook, a pastiche of Lawrence of Arabia. Son of a wealthy nobleman & merchant from the city-state of Marienburg, he spent his youth in a particularly infamous boarding school, where life was little more than torture, with the teachers beating him at the slightest excuse and the older boys using him like a slave. It toughened him up to the point it's mentioned he spent three days hanging from the flue of the headmaster's chimney without making a sound, even when the headmaster lit the fire. This ironically came in handy when he undertook a fateful trip to Araby; captured by a tribe of desert bandits, he endured three days staked out in the sun with no water and constant beatings without any cries of pain or fear, instead constantly cursing his tormentors, an act that ultimately convinced them he was a divinely ordained prophet.
  • Warhammer 40,000 has the Schola Progenium, which is a combination of this and an Orphanage of Fear that exclusively raises and trains the orphans of elite members of society. Deaths are to be avoided, but they are expected and not uncommon especially for those being trained for combat. Graduates, referred to as Progena, become fanatical loyalists of the Imperium of Man and serve a variety of military and civilian roles.
  • The Werewolf: The Forsaken supplement book Night Horrors - Shunned By The Moon has Sanctuary Boarding School, an exclusive and secretive English boarding school that has been taken over by an idigam. The faculty have been transformed into soulless servants, the nearby woods are filled with monsters, and the students have had their souls removed or altered.

    Theatre 

    Video Games 
  • Bully takes place in one of these - Bullworth Academy. It starts out miserable and ends up just really sucky. Cliques run the school, classism runs rampant, the prefects are thuggish and violent, and physical violence is the only way to solve your problems. About the only thing it doesn't have is corporal punishment, since the game is set in present day, and physical abuse of the students would lead to a PR nightmare. Not that the resident Sadist Prefects and Dean Bitterman don't have other ways of making you miserable. Unusual for this trope though, quite a few teachers are very nice, most notably the art teacher Miss Philips and the English teacher Mr. Galloway.
  • Henry from Fire Emblem: Awakening was sent to a magical-based version of these in the English version of the game after he awoke to his powers and killed those who murdered his Only Friend, the local wolf. The Japanese original only mentions "an institution", likely an Orphanage of Fear. Either way, it didn't do him many favors.
  • In Knights of the Old Republic and its sequels, the Korriban Sith Academy doesn't just live down to the reputation, it revels in it. Teachers backstabbing one another, students backstabbing one another, recruits sent to the school just to become saber fodder, a student complaining that they've run out of unarmed, starving prisoners for him to kill, and a torture chamber on school grounds. Then again, we are talking about the Sith.
  • While Blackwell Academy in Life Is Strange looks inconspicuous with its accommodating dorms, five-star courses, and impressive reputation, it holds its own fair share of secrets and bad habits that make it a nightmare for some of its students. Because the Prescott family is the number one financial backer of the school, the clearly unstable Nathan Prescott is able to get away with pretty much anything. The principal bends over backwards to appease the Prescotts, accusing Max of trying to slander Nathan Prescott should she tell him about Nathan carrying a gun with intent to shoot Chloe with it. A drug-dealing felon sells drugs to its students in the school parking lot with the authorities none the wiser (no doubt due to Nathan's involvement). Its one security guard David is an overly paranoid veteran with PTSD who always antagonizes the wrong people (usually students who are being victimized by the real criminals) and wants to set up security cameras all over the school to the point of Sinister Surveillance made all the worse when it turns out his paranoia is not unfounded. The groundskeeper is a complete weirdo riddled with a mental disorder (or disorders). The school's most popular students in the Vortex Club are all rich, elitist snobs that frequently take advantage of their status to bend the rules (like the use of drugs and alcohol in their parties) and gang up on innocent students, driving Kate to commit suicide (should the player fail in talking her down, that is). Its photography teacher Mark Jefferson is a Serial Killer that manipulates (and eventually kills) Nathan, tries to subtly push Kate into committing suicide, and is responsible for Rachel's death and disappearance.
  • Our Darker Purpose takes place in what may be the worst boarding school in video game history: a supernatural death-fest mega-prison, where kids are constantly killed/tortured/whatever by intentionally poor-designed school practices, sadistic (and superhuman) school cliques, supernatural occurrences stemming from poorly maintained areas and items, and a general lack of hope from being trapped in a magic prison surrounded by wastelands with no idea of who they are or why they deserve to be here. All while the headmasters laugh and snark at the many deaths of the protagonist. Towards the end, it's revealed that the boarding school is one big Mental World of a famous (and Joker-like) criminal mastermind, whose psychopathic tendencies originate from his own traumatizing experiences at his orphanage school, the worst of which came from the other kids, with the main character as the worst of the lot; a shy little girl who liked to throw lit matches at shy little boys For the Evulz. The kids in his world represent his cruelty and ingenuity; they are used for his infamous wacky heists and then terminated to prevent them from taking control and driving him insane. Cordy was so important to him that he needed to recreate and kill her (and her two former friends Goneril and Regan) hundreds of times, but once he's injected with Psycho Serum during a battle with his archnemesis, Cordy slowly gains the experience needed to fight back. And she's worse than anything else in the school.
  • Pokémon Scarlet and Violet: While, by the time the player character gets enrolled into it it has become a full-on Academy of Adventure, it's revealed during the story that Naranja/Uva academy used to have shades of this, thanks mostly to rampant bullying that the teachers chose to ignore. This lead to the creation of Team Star, a group made up of bullying victims who decided to fight back and managed to intimidate the bullies so bad that they chose to drop out of school. The whole thing was about to turn into such a PR disaster that all the records of the bullies that dropped out were gotten rid of, the whole thing was swept under the rug and the whole teaching staff quit out of shame, while Team Star became a band of delinquents about to be expelled due to constant truancy and unjustly mistaken as being bullies themselves. Current academy principal, Director Clavel, joins the main character, in (very bad) disguise, in their quest to disband Team Star in order to understand why they became a band of delinquents and try to convince them to return to class.
  • Psychonauts: Gloria Von Gouton was sent away to the Hagatha Home School for Girls as a child, which taught her how to act and dance. According to the Memory Vault "Gloria's Cruel Training", the headmistress whipped the girls at every opportunity, up to and including when they were performing onstage. Of course, these are the skewed memories of a neglected little girl who'd essentially been abandoned at the school by her awful Stage Mom who was more interested in her own career and her boyfriend than doing any parenting, so it's debatable just how accurate those memories are.

    Webcomics 
  • Sokolov Academy from Bad Moon Rising more than qualifies for both students and staff. Deformed werewolves lived in the basement, multiple teachers used their positions to sexually abuse their students, children were used as hostages against their parents, and every headmaster the school ever had met a grisly, violent end at the hands of a student.
  • Joe vs. Elan School is based on the creator's real-life experience in Elan School, a "therapeutic boarding school" and "behavior modification" facility in Poland, Maine that used cult-like indoctrination and attack therapy on its teenage students.
  • NoNamed is set in a school described as being this, though at first the rules seem relatively lax in some respects and it looks like an Informed Attribute. It isn't; the school is under the control of an Eldritch Abomination, and what you have to beware of is the other students, who he controls.
  • The School of Strange School definitely qualifies. They kidnap children from Earth, outfit them with robot bodies in a factory, then force them to go through school lessons without sleep, and when graduation comes, they're killed off by the Principal.

    Web Original 
  • Addergoole is a boarding school for faeries who've been raised human. There's mind control built into the walls. Slavery and rape are encouraged. The older kids are geased to not tell the new kids anything until it's too late. A lot of them don't want to warn them anyway. The whole school is a training version of their society.
  • Grave Academy's students and protagonists are all monsters, and all are at least Deuteragonists.
  • The protagonist of Red Rover arrives as a new hire at a boarding school, only to find out the hard way that it's the site of a massacre and haunted by all sorts of storybook monsters.
  • Dorian Sanders from v3 of Survival of the Fittest apparently went to one of these, though so far the only clue about said school is the description of how he was psychologically changed by his time there in his bio.
  • In the flash series XIN, the story takes place during a fictional time in America where, in an effort to prevent street gangs and violent delinquent crimes, the punishments of suspension and expulsion have been made illegal in all schools (not just boarding ones). Instead, corporal punishment has been reinstated, and as you may have guessed, it doesn't take long for staff to start abusing these powers. However, due to falling academic standards, along with rigorous school evaluations, a new system needed to be created. This led to the hierarchy system known as the Pillar System, created by the main antagonist. The Pillar System takes advantage of the existing student hierarchy, and gives a select group of students, called monitors, complete power in setting rules and administering punishment to students. This goes about as well as you'd think. It's made worse by the fact that many main characters (including the top monitors) in the series know some insane superhuman fighting techniques (the series is animesque). You also know a system is bad when you find yourself cheering for the delinquents who are trying to expose and break it.

    Western Animation 
  • Archer attended several boarding schools in his youth, almost all of which were horribly traumatic experiences. He rarely had any friends, he was frequently forgotten there by Mallory, and when he was 13, he was beaten so badly by two bullies, including being dunked in a toilet filled with piss, that he developed pneumonia and had to spend most of freshman year in the hospital. It's shown that from all of the things Archer has endured as a spy, including torture, clinical death and sexual assault, this incident is one of the few that caused legitimate trauma for him, well into present day.
  • Codename: Kids Next Door: Apparently, each year Numbuh 4's parents try sending him to a boarding school and each year he escapes. We're never shown if the schools are bad, until Operation F.U.T.U.R.E. where they send him (most likely accidentally) to a boarding school for girls, where the principal has developed a weapon that turns boys into girls and tries to forcibly turn Numbuh 4 into one. Oh, and the academy itself doubles as a Humongous Mecha. The second part of the plot begins when the principal succeeds and leads to a Bad Future.
  • Daria's dad is traumatized by his father sending him to a military boarding camp with dreaded Corporal Ellenbogen and "boys who can smell fear". In fact, his subplot in Is It College Yet is him trying to convince her not to go to military school (which she never wanted to do in the first place).
  • Molly of Denali: As revealed in "Grandpa's Drum", Grandpa Nat was sent away to a residential boarding school when he was younger, which part of a broader forced assimilation campaign by the United States government. There, he was shamed and bullied by teachers for being an Alaskan Native.
  • St. Olga's Reform School for Wayward Princesses in Star vs. the Forces of Evil. Star is in constant fear of her parents sending her there if they find out she's done something wrong. The Doom Troops that are sent after runaways suggest its reputation is pretty well-deserved. In the aptly-named episode "St. Olga's Reform School for Wayward Princesses", the place turns out to be just as bad as Star imagined, if not worse. The Headmistress, Miss Heinous, is a cruel taskmistress who makes a fortune breaking down her wards and brainwashing them into being bland, obedient Princess Classic types. Marco brings down the institution, but it's become a Teenage Wasteland.
    It's a reform school, cupcake, not jail. Although, admittedly, it is a lot like jail.
    • It gets worse when it turns out Miss Heinous was also draining the princesses of their emotions not just to brainwash them, but so she could use them to live longer.
    • And then worse again when it turns out that Miss Heinous was raised there by St. Olga herself, a robot who constantly brainwashed her to hide and forget about her cheek marks and half-monster features.
  • The Simpsons: "The Secret War of Lisa Simpson" showcases the Military School example. Although that was mostly a subversion: the school itself was fairly decent (the principal even seemed a fair and friendly man) and the only abuse we see was focused on Bart and Lisa (later only Lisa) because the school made them shoulder the burden of accepting their first female student (giving her their entire cabin to herself while forcing them to double-bunk with a rival troop). Then they end their stay with a Death Course that's getting retired at the end of the year due to silly things like "students dying". Before they had THAT, the school year used to be finished off with a full-out battle royale between the students.

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