Once again I’m late to the party, viewing this limited AMC series five years after everyone else in the horror community raved about it. Well, better late than never, I figured when I watched it recently on Hulu.
The Terror was actually conceived as an anthology series, with each 10-part season devoted to a different story that is based on some significant historical event. Only two seasons were made and I’m not sure why. Unfortunately, the series left Hulu before I was able to view the second season, so this review applies only to the first.
The first season is devoted to an actual historical event known as the 1845 Franklin Expedition. Two British ships crewed by 130 Royal Navy members set off to find the Far East by sailing north and west instead of south and east, over and through the Arctic Sea. Finding the so-called “Northwest Passage” would have made trade with China and other Asian countries easier and faster, to say nothing of opening up another route for the Pax Britannica’s ships to patrol in their quest to rule the world. The ships, powered by new-fangled steam engines, are called HMS The Terror and HMS Erebus.
Unfortunately the weather doesn’t cooperate. An unusually cold summer means the Arctic ice doesn’t thaw as expected in the warmer months and the two ships are stuck frozen near a desolate place called Beechey Island. It’s a bit of a bother for Her Majesty’s Navy, but they’ve got plenty of canned and salted food aboard and the senior officers figure they can wait it out until next summer, when the hoped-for warmer weather comes and melts the ice. However, the next summer proves to be equally cold, and severe challenges to the crew and officers start piling up fast.
They make contact with members of an Inuit tribe come to hunt seals on Beechey Island, which ends in tragedy when a crewman shoots an Inuit man in a misunderstanding…a truly fatal mistake. Later on, we learn from the man’s daughter that he was a shaman who was “bound” to an otherworldly creature who looks somewhat like a polar bear, except three times the size and equipped with humanlike intelligence. No longer under control by the dead shaman, the creature, called a tuunbaq, begins to stalk and kill crew members of the two ships. The daughter, whom the crew nicknames Lady Silence for her stoic mannerisms, tries to control the tuunbaq by becoming the new shaman, with tragically mixed results.
As if the tuunbaq isn’t enough, the crewmen begin to exhibit signs of a serious, deadly illness. One of the ships’ doctors discovers that their canned food supplies are unsafe, leading to slow poisoning, insanity, and death among many crewmen. Meanwhile, a malcontent named Hickey plans a mutiny, and his vile actions set in motion even more grim events for the two ships.
Executive-produced by the great Ridley Scott, the director of Blade Runner (1982) and numerous other notable films, The Terror is a handsome historical production, with great care taken to provide accurate clothing, dialogue, and sets. The lead roles of the three senior officers are played excellently by Jared Harris and Tobias Menzies as the two ships’ respective captains, and Ciaran Hinds as the expedition leader, Sir John Franklin. Other standouts include Paul Ready as a sympathetic ships’ doctor and Adam Nagaitis as the despicable villain, Hickey. The main fault of the series is that it takes a very l-o-o-o-n-g time for the plot to get underway, and there are many flashbacks to life back in England that could have been cut down quite a bit to improve the pacing.
However, the last three episodes are worth the wait, providing plenty of thrills and chills. If you’re a fan of body horror in particular, you’ll find plenty of scenes of interest, involving gangrene-infected wounds, harsh disciplinary punishments, decapitations, the grotesque side effects of food poisoning, and the ultimate horror that occurs when the decimated crewmen run out of even their poisoned rations.
I rate The Terror ****½ out of five.
Pick up my latest book A Scream Full of Ghosts, a collection of 12 terror-inducing ghost stories, on Amazon https://www.amazon.com/Scream-Full-Ghosts-Jane-Nightshade-ebook/dp/B0BZLXLRBS or any other online bookseller, or on the website of my publisher, Dark Ink Books, https://aminkpublishing.com/dark-ink-3 .
