TV Rewind: The Terror’s Icy First Season Is Unmatched Historical Horror

Editor’s Note: Welcome to our TV Rewind column! The Paste writers are diving into the streaming catalogue to discuss some of our favorite classic series as well as great shows we’re watching for the first time. Come relive your TV past with us, or discover what should be your next binge watch below:

Horror television fans have been blessed with an embarrassment of riches in recent years. From the overly gory (The Walking Dead franchise) and the overtly campy (American Horror Story) to the nostalgic (The Midnight Club, Stranger Things), religious (Evil, Midnight Mass), or dystopian (Black Mirror), there’s been no shortage of quality content that appeals to every kind of viewer. But the odds are decent that you may have missed out on a series that’s not only one of the best horror shows of the past decade but one of the best period dramas too: AMC’s The Terror. 

A limited series turned anthology that uses supernatural-tinged storytelling to explore all-too-human fears and failings, The Terror’s first season combines a chilling (literally) atmospheric setting and a grisly historical mystery to delve into the darker limits of the human soul. It’s a show that forsakes many traditional horror elements completely—you won’t find much in the way of jump scares here—yet still somehow manages to be one of the most harrowing stories this medium has produced in recent memory.  

Based on Dan Simmons’s best-selling novel of the same name, Season 1 of The Terror follows the doomed Franklin expedition, which set sail from England in 1845 in the hopes of finding the rumored Northwest Passage to the Pacific Ocean. That it did not is documented in history: The ships were trapped in the Arctic ice, and their crews ultimately vanished without a trace. Although the wrecks of the HMS Erebus and the HMS Terror were discovered fairly recently—in 2014 and 2016, respectively—very little is known about the fate of the men aboard them. The scant information we do have from interviews with the local Inuit population points to a long, hellish nightmare for them all, involving everything from lead poisoning and madness to (probable) cannibalism. 

The ten-part series takes the mystery surrounding the fate of the Franklin expedition and runs with it, mixing known facts with carefully crafted fiction so that even its most outlandish plot twists never feel unearned or even particularly unlikely. Full of carefully rendered physical details and oozing with atmosphere, it’s a series that dances between the gaps in the historical record, using real-life threats—disease, malnutrition, a harsh and unforgiving frozen landscape—-to ground the idea of an unseen supernatural threat. This is a lot to say that The Terror is a rare horror story that doesn’t need many of the traditional trappings of its genre to succeed, if only because the most frightening things that happen out on the ice are the actions of the story’s all-too-human men. 

The story follows the Erebus and the Terror as the ships journey into the Arctic Circle, carrying 129 souls and supplies that, unbeknownst to them, are already tainted and rotting. Led by Sir John Franklin (Ciarán Hinds), who can already taste the glory the discovery they seek will inevitably bestow upon him and his legacy, the expedition also includes his second in command, Captain Francis Crozier (Jared Harris), a bitter alcoholic and accomplished sailor who first recognizes the very real danger his crew faces, and Commander James Fitzjames (Tobias Menzies), a flamboyant try-hard who loves to retell his stories of previous military glory. They’re joined by a sharply realized cast of supporting characters who range from a loyal captain’s steward (Liam Garrigan) and a curious ship’s surgeon (Paul Ready) to a grizzled Ice Master (Ian Hart) and a manipulative caulker’s mate (Adam Nagatis) with flexible morals and a stolen identity. 

The crew must face their worst nightmares when the ships are trapped in the pack ice, where they remain for the better part of two years. As conditions steadily worsen and men begin to suffer and starve, the social contract between them all begins to fray, with predictably dark and occasionally deadly results. At its heart, The Terror is a story about death, but not necessarily in the way you might expect. We tune in fully aware that all these men are going to die, and each episode is a slow, inexorable march toward an ending we all know is coming. Any hope these men manage to achieve, we know to be false, and we’re well aware that any light they may find in the darkness of their day-to-day existence will snuffed out soon enough (likely quite violently). As a result, even the most innocuous or lighthearted scenes are shot through with an unspoken, often nigh-on unbearable tension, bolstered by the series’ unrelentingly grim and claustrophobic setting. As the ships slowly list sideways, the sun fades away into longer (and darker) nights and the ice seems to go on forever, paranoia and fear are rampant, in ways that have nothing to do with the unexplained growls in the distance.

Like most horror stories, there’s also a monster at the center of The Terror, a mysterious creature known as the Tuunbaq that looks like a misshapen polar bear and delights in ripping unsuspecting mariners apart. But it’s far from the scariest thing you’ll see onscreen. A cautionary tale about the fear of the unknown—and the unknowable—as much as it is the menacing creature lurking in the dark, this is a show that doesn’t give its characters or its viewers any easy answers. Whether it is the origin of the Tuunbaq, the fate of the bulk of the ships’ crews, HIckey’s true name, or even the existence of an afterlife, we’re asked to make our own meaning out of much of what we see. But that task is more challenging than you might think.

The Terror is a story with no true heroes or villains. Crozier, perhaps, has the clearest and cleanest arc as he battles his own inner demons in the name of becoming the leader his men so desperately need him to be, but he is also a man full of resentment and bitterness, whose rigid adherence to protocol has dire consequences. (It helps that Harris gives a career-best performance here, grounded in a simultaneous dedication to duty and an unexpected reluctance to export empire.) And while Nagatis’s Hickley may be the show’s most obvious bad guy, he’s also not always wrong—about Crozier’s choices or the systems that privilege the officers over the regular men—and he exhibits a tenacious determination to survive that many of the men around him would do well to emulate. Even the grotesque Tuunbaaq, who violently rips men limb from limb, can also be read as a powerful, if vengeful, avatar for the land the British are itching to claim for themselves.

On paper, perhaps the story of a mid-19th-century polar expedition that meets a grisly end—no matter what you believe happened to its participants—is a strange choice for one of the best prestige series of the past decade, let alone one of its best horror stories. But as its recounting of a fight for survival out on the unforgiving ice unspools, The Terror wrestles with surprisingly timely themes, ranging from imperialism and greed to climate change and toxic masculinity. And while the men at its center prove themselves more than capable of monstrous deeds, they equally hold the capacity for genuine kindness and unexpected moments of loyalty. Like the nature it depicts, this is a series with hidden—and ultimately worthwhile—depths. Here’s hoping that, with the series’ arrival on Netflix earlier this Fall, The Terror will finally garner the broader, more mainstream audience it has so long deserved. 

Lacy Baugher Milas is the Books Editor at Paste Magazine, but loves nerding out about all sorts of pop culture. You can find her on Twitter @LacyMB.

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