CHILLING TALE
Terror is signaling, Sir John,” someone says early in The Terror, now streaming on Amazon Prime. “Terror” here is the name of a ship. But the words carry a portent, just as the title of the show’s second episode, “Gore”, could refer to a character’s name, and also signal what will happen to him. Such wordplay is par for the course in a series that takes a real-life mystery—the 1845 disappearance of two Royal Navy ships, Erebus and Terror, in the Arctic—and infuses it with supernatural elements. So far, The Terror has only hinted at the latter (the first two episodes were online at the time of writing; the others will follow in weekly instalments). But it’s clear that this series, adapted from a Dan Simmons novel, will glide on thin ice as it balances creature-feature horror tropes with psychological tension and the restraint and authenticity required of a historical narrative.
The period and the setting help. The many majestic shots of ice-crusted ships moving through an unfathomably large (and uncharted) Arctic desert suggest that in this place the line between ‘real’ and
The Terror balances creature-feature horror themes with a historical narrative
‘mystical’ is blurred, and even a rational mind can get spooked. The show conveys this very well through the grand bleakness of its visuals: men playing football on the ice after the two ships are stuck; a scene that cross-cuts between a postmortem on a young sailor and a different sort of operation being conducted on the bowel of a ship. The cast includes wonderful actors Jared Harris and Ciaran Hinds. And Marcus Fjellström’s very effective, minatory score seems to evoke the Arctic wind groaning at these intruders, warning them to stay out of what they cannot understand. “This place wants us dead,” one character says. It’s a shiver-inducing line that could come from a horror tale—but it is also plausible here, given the cold implacability of this environment.
Is nature really so detached, though? From our vantage point in 2018, cognizant of global warming and the effects of Victorian-era industrialisation and exploration, the story of these doomed ships suggest that nature is exacting her revenge in advance. The big scary horror-movie monster stalking them could just be one of her minions.