‘The Terror’ recalls real-life camp horror
>>The best horror stories tell us something about ourselves. A zombie horde stands in for toxic conformity, a monster for unconquerable grief. But not every scary story is an allegory. One of the scariest the actor George Takei ever heard was a true one about his own life.
He just didn’t grasp the full horror while he lived it.
“For me, it was an amazing adventure, catching polliwogs in the creek and seeing them turn into frogs,” said Takei, 82, describing the three years — from ages 5 to 8 — he spent behind barbed wire in an Arkansas swamp. Never truly comprehending why he was there, he adapted, played with other children, adopted a stray dog.
Life was “butterflies and playing games,” he said. “I learned about the internment from my parents when I was a teenager.”
Takei’s family, he discovered, had been among the roughly 120,000 West Coast Japanese-Americans who were forcibly relocated to a World War II internment camp, the result of racist anti-espionage measures enacted by executive order after the bombing of Pearl Harbour.
Now, three-quarters of a century later, he has the chance to help bring that story to a wider audience with the AMC anthology series The Terror, which is returning on Aug 12 with a story set mostly in a camp like the one that imprisoned him. It is a subject that has rarely been central to any major work on screen, let alone one with a distinctly Asian voice: Most of the cast is of Asian descent, as are the showrunner and two of the directors.
Takei, best known for playing Hikaru Sulu on Star Trek, is an actor on the show and a consultant, serving as a rare source of direct knowledge of what the camps were really like. On set, as he worked among the recreated barracks and guard towers, amid the mud and the tar paper, the memories welled up inside him. So, too, did an evident feeling of pride.
“This project is groundbreaking in that the story of the internment of Japanese-Americans is being told on this scale, this scope, for the first time on TV,” Takei said. “It’s massive, 10 hours, 10 episodes and in such depth — the characters are examined in depth.”
As Takei and others noted in several on-set interviews in May, the series, which infuses historical drama with supernatural horror, was a perfect vehicle for conveying such a dark historical chapter of prejudice and paranoia. It also seems fitting for a story that has stayed mostly in the shadows, with only a few major Hollywood exceptions — like Snow Falling on Cedars and Come See the Paradise — which had white male directors and leads.
“The horror of the internment was harrowing,” said Takei, whose family was uprooted from its Los Angeles home and wound up living on that city’s skid row after the war. Fusing a story of injustice with a literary genre about justice-seeking demons was “an inspired combination,” he said.
“Imagine innocent people — I mean, everything taken from you, our home, our bank accounts, our business,” he added. “The stress was incredible.”
The production was as large in scale as it was in personal importance for Takei and others. For the four-month shoot, the producers assembled a cast of over 150, many of whom had relatives who had been interned. Every actor with a speaking role of a Japanese or Japanese-American person is of Japanese extraction.
“To me, it was really important, because the subject matter is so personal,” said the showrunner, Alexander Woo, himself Chinese-American. “This is a really special production for people who are deeply, deeply, personally invested. These are their families’ stories and, in the case of a couple of people, their own stories.”
The crew built elaborate period sets, including a partial re-creation of an internment camp, complete with barracks, mess hall, infirmary and stockade. Its 10 full-scale buildings, surrounded by guard towers and barbed wire, were outfitted with latrines, searchlights and military vehicles.
Takei, who still has vivid recollections of his camp, pointed to the crawl spaces underneath the reconstructed buildings as particularly evocative. “We adopted a stray dog, and he was black, so we named him Blackie, and when something scary happened, he always crawled into the crawl space,” he said. “Those memories came back, seeing the barracks and the tar paper and the strips of wood that kept it attached. It was like I had gone back to Arkansas.”
The horror elements, Woo noted, are designed to deepen viewers’ connection to the prisoners’ terror. “If you want to convey a visceral feeling, horror’s a terrific way of doing it,” he said.
The internment story is ultimately an immigrant story, Woo said, one he hoped all Americans, many of whose ancestors faced discrimination, could identify with.