AMC's new horror show, The Terror, premieres tonight with its first two episodes. Those who tune in will discover a show that's deeply unsettling and filled with dreadful foreboding--but not a lot of actual scares. And that's no accident, revealed The Terror's showrunners and executive producers, Soo Hugh and David Kajganich.
"Jump scares, we have a real allergy to," Kajganich said at a press event recently in Los Angeles. "As in senses of humor, there are just as many senses of horror around, and we wanted to dip into a lot of them...We wanted to mix things up. We wanted low brow tools, and high brow tools, and mid brow tools, and we wanted to take horror conventions from everywhere. And so we offer the viewer a kind of smorgasbord, if you will, of different ways that you might feel unsettled, or frightened, or spooked."
The Terror is based on the 2007 book of the same name by acclaimed sci-fi and horror author Dan Simmons. It's a fictionalized account of the voyage of two British Royal Navy ships that set out to Antarctica in 1845 on a doomed mission to find the fated Northwest Passage, which would hypothetically offer a faster trade route to Asia. In real life, the ships disappeared for over 150 years, until their wrecks were finally discovered between 2014 and 2016.
For the preceding century and a half, researchers strove to explain what had happened to the HMS Erebus and the HMS Terror. Evidence emerged that their crews had died gradually from cold, starvation, disease, lead poisoning, and cannibalism. They probably weren't actually haunted by an Inuit folklore monster called the Tuunbaq, a demon resembling a polar bear with a twisted human-like face--but that's the beauty of historical fiction like The Terror.
"We really wanted to make sure that we respected the subjective view of terror, and we always want--whatever the terrifying element is, whether it is the creature, whether it is starvation, whether it is the onset of disease--that it comes from the characters' point of view. We never wanted to 'scare' the audience," said Hugh, Kajganich's fellow showrunner and EP. "The end game was never to jump scare you. Our rule was: If our characters are not scared, our audience should not be scared."
The Terror stars Mad Men's Jared Harris and Game of Thrones' Tobias Menzies and Ciaran Hinds as the captains and leaders of the two ships--real historical figures who the author and, later, the actors fleshed out via historical records like letters and journal entries. In the first two episodes, their expedition begins to slowly unravel, and we're introduced briefly to the Tunnbaq, the Inuit creature that will no doubt haunt them throughout the season. But the Tuunbaq is far from the only threat the crews will face.
"We have this joke: If you're going to die of any means in our show, the creature is in some ways the preferred method to die, because some of the other horrors are so terrifying. I personally would rather not die of lead poisoning or cannibalism," Hugh said.
They used all the tools at their disposal to make The Terror horrifying, from the understated music to the unusual cinematography. "We always wanted to give the audience as subjective an experience as possible, and one thing that translates into is always having the camera closer to the action than maybe an audience is used to being, or further from the action than the audience is used to being. We never wanted to sit comfortably in the third row, if you will," Kajganich said. "That's why a lot of the set pieces in the show are edited somewhat strangely--because we have this mix of close shots and wide shots, and not a lot of medium. It's a lot of fun to kind of play a spatial game with the audience."
"It's a real strange mix of genre. At points it's a sort of horror story, at points it's a high adventure story, there are episodes that we wrote and cut like westerns, it kind of has the feeling of sort of a war film at times," he said. "We made sure that everyone knew--all of our collaborators, particularly the editors of the show--that they didn't need to be consistent. Episode 1 doesn't need to feel like Episode 10 in our show, because the whole thing is this downward spiral...We wanted things to devolve in a way that the eye would understand, even if the brain couldn't."
That downward spiral gives the show a sense of deterioration--one that we'll surely see more and more as Season 1 marches toward its inevitable, grisly conclusion.
"We knew going into this we don't have a zombie behind every tree, so we had to deploy our horror and our scares in a more restrained way--in a more elegant way," Kajganich said. "Rather than lean too heavily on those moments, the show was going to be about building an atmosphere that was sort of magnetic somehow. Even as things fall apart, and these men experience such difficult conditions, and impossible challenges, you would want to go back to this world because something about it felt kind of addictive, hopefully."
The Terror premieres tonight on AMC.
