<i>The Terror</i> Is More Than a Chilling Monster Show
In 1845, two ships under the command of Captain John Franklin set sail from Britain on a mission of exploration. Three years later, both disappeared in the Arctic. None of the 129 men on that expedition came back, and the battered wrecks of the HMS Erebus and HMS Terror were found in 2014 and 2016, respectively. Quite how Franklin and his crew died remains a mystery. Historians have only scattered Inuit reports, a few abandoned messages, and the remains of disease-wracked and partially eaten bodies. What’s all but certain is that the sailors’ predicament was terrifying, and their demises horrific.
It’s perhaps little surprise that The Terror, AMC’s chilling new 10-part series about the expedition, would decide to make that horror more explicit by adding a monster. The show, adapted from Dan Simmons’s 2007 novel by the same name, proceeds from a simple, killer hook: two ships trapped out on the ice, a crew under increasing strain, and a murderous, largely unseen presence stalking them through the howling snows. The basic setup is familiar from Alien, The Thing, and plenty of other creature features.
But while the sevencurrently aired episodes of offer their share of monstrous thrills, the show’s real strength lies in the ways it plays with the trappings of survival horror, a category broadlyconcerned with the fear of being caught unprepared in an exceedingly dangerous situation. Through careful writing and by avoiding the genre’s more common pitfalls—weakly sketched characters, pat philosophies about the fragility of civilized behavior, exoticized natives— offers what is perhaps television’s first good example of survival horror.
