Few living storytellers know their way around claustrophobic horror better than Ridley Scott. After all, he’s the director behind Alien, that 1979 masterclass in unbearable suspense, where an unknowable, unstoppable, and thoroughly grotesque creature picks off trapped humans one by one. Those slow-burn sensibilities extend to his work as an executive producer on The Terror, AMC’s critically acclaimed anthology horror series.
The Terror has changed creative hands for each of its three seasons to date, but all maintain the same structure: a psychological horror heightened by acutely relevant supernatural allegory. As beguiling as it is indelibly bleak, television’s shrewdest, most atmospheric anthology show has Scott’s fingerprints all over it and boldly ventures into its own artistic shadows.
‘The Terror’ Season 1 Is a Perfect Survival Horror
In 1845, the exploratory ships the HMS Terror and the HMS Erebus set out from England, determined to become the first explorers to chart a course through the Northwest Passage. Both ships were stuck in Arctic ice that never thawed. Evidence suggests that the 129 doomed sailors died of starvation and hypothermia, and potentially resorted to cannibalism.
Collider Exclusive · 8 Questions · 2 Minutes What Is Your Biggest Horror Nightmare? Elm Street · Chucky · Scream · The Conjuring
Four horror franchises. Four completely different ways of scaring you. One waits until you fall asleep. One makes sure nobody believes you. One is already in your group of friends. And one is in the house with your family. Answer eight quick questions about how you actually watch horror, and find out which nightmare was built for you.
😴Elm Street(Freddy Krueger)
🧸Chucky(Child’s Play)
📞Scream(Ghostface)
🕯️The Conjuring(The Warren Files)
01
Which horror scene makes you cover your eyes? Four classic images. One of them is worse than the others for you.
02
You are home alone and you hear a noise. First thought? Everybody has one. It arrives before you have decided anything.
03
Which horror movie rule would you break first? Everybody thinks they would survive. Almost nobody actually does.
04
Something genuinely frightening happens. What do you do? Not in a film. In your actual living room, tonight.
05
How do you actually watch a horror film? Be honest about this one. Nobody is checking.
06
Somebody offers you serious money. Which do you still refuse? The amount does not matter. There is one on this list you are not doing.
07
Which feeling stays with you a week after the film? Good horror does not stop when the credits do.
08
Something wakes you at 3am. What is the worst possibility? Eight questions in, this is the one that decides your nightmare.
The Lights Just Went Out Your Nightmare Is…
Four franchises, four completely different ways of getting underneath
your skin. This is the one built out of your particular fear, why it works so well on you, and what
it would leave behind.
A Nightmare on Elm Street · Since 1984
Elm Street
Your nightmare does not wait outside the door. It waits for you
to close your eyes, which you are going to have to do eventually, because nobody has ever
won that particular argument.
Freddy is horror’s cruellest idea: a threat that lives in the one place you cannot
guard, cannot lock, and cannot avoid forever.
You are the one who is fine during the film and wide awake at two in the morning. Your
own head is where this does its damage.
These films understood exhaustion as a horror engine. The kids on Elm Street do not lose
because they are weak. They lose because they are tired.
You can lock every door in the house. You still have to sleep.
Child’s Play · Chucky · Since 1988
Chucky
Your nightmare is not really the doll. It is the face of the
person you tell, and the way they decide, very kindly, that you have imagined all of it.
Chucky works precisely because he is absurd. That is the trap: the more accurately you
describe him, the less anybody is going to believe you.
You are the one shouting at the screen because the characters are not listening. You
know that feeling from real life too.
The franchise is at its best when the adults in the room are the real obstacle, and you
have met those adults.
By the time somebody finally believes you, you will have handled most of it on your own.
Scream · Ghostface · Since 1996
Scream
Your nightmare has your number, knows your name, and has almost
certainly been inside your house before. The worst part is that you already know them.
Scream is the only one of these where the killer takes the mask off and turns out to be
somebody who was at the party.
You are the person who calls the twist out loud before it lands. You watch people the
same way you watch films.
The franchise made the rules of horror part of the plot, which means the survivors are
the ones paying attention. You would be paying attention.
Everybody is a suspect, including the person who just offered to walk you home.
The Conjuring · The Warren Files · Since 2013
The Conjuring
Your nightmare is not really about you. It is about the people
asleep down the hall, and the feeling that whatever is here is not interested in leaving.
The Conjuring films are domestic horror. The house, the family, the perfectly ordinary
room that quietly stops feeling ordinary.
Your instinct is to get everybody into one room. Your fear is protective rather than
personal, which is rarer than it sounds.
This is the one franchise where belief is the weapon. The people who come through it are
the ones who are not alone and refuse to be.
Whatever is here did not come for you. It came for the household, and you are the one
standing in the hallway.
Based on Dan Simmons‘ bestselling book of the same name, The Terror Season 1 speculates about how these men met their horrendous fates — in the physically gruesome sense, yes, but how they faced the prospect of imminent death. Showrunners David Kajganich and Soo Hugh craft a survival horror in the purest sense. There is a petrifying despair to the situation’s stark simplicity: helpless and stranded, surrounded by an endless expanse of white, food running perilously low. The robust premise doesn’t need another predator when stifling isolation and creeping dread already torment these men to the end of their fraying ropes.
Yet the crews are still hunted by an Inuit spirit called the Tuunbaq. Captain Sir John Franklin (Ciarán Hinds), secure in his ambition, pushes through territory that isn’t his to colonize. The hostile elements and the merciless Tuunbaq retaliate accordingly. Although hubris causing unnecessary tragedy is familiar thematic territory, The Terror‘s technical excellence and deft hand for interpersonal dynamics make its inevitability curdle the blood.
‘Infamy and ‘Devil in Silver’ Proves That ‘The Terror’ Has Potent Staying Power
Alexander Woo and Max Borenstein assume showrunner duties for Season 2, subtitled Infamy. Following the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941, Executive Order 9066 forcibly relocated Japanese Americans and immigrants from their homes into internment camps. Infamy‘s Yuko Tanabe (Kiki Sukezane), a vengeful ghost, follows the fictional Nakayama family as they’re uprooted from California’s Terminal Island and incarcerated in Oregon.
Like its predecessor season, Infamy‘s ominous heart is drenched in extensively researched historical reproductions. This time, it also relies on cultural specificity and tangible authenticity. Infamy is entirely unsubtle about the abominable cycles of xenophobic violence and state-sanctioned dehumanization; Yuko’s unnerving bloodshed comes unquestionably second to the lived suffering and trauma. Woo, a Chinese-American creator, and the ensemble cast of Japanese descent, some with immediate ties to the camps — George Takei, who brings arresting grace to his role, also served as a consultant — present one of the most unforgivably shameful atrocities in American history through their perspective. They also infuse the bilingual Infamy with themes of immigration, cultural assimilation, and intergenerational tension, depicted through the vividly realized characters.
As for Season 3, or Devil in Silver, author-turned-showrunner Victor LaValle adapts his novel to the screen. The most recent installment pivots to modern-day New York, institutional horror, and serves as a blistering indictment of the for-profit healthcare industry. Pepper Coffin (Dan Stevens) discovers its injustice firsthand when police officers commit him to New Hyde Psychiatric Hospital. New Hyde is underfunded and deteriorating, the patients are neglected and abandoned, and a malicious force from decades past rots the building from the inside.
LaValle and a trio of directors wind the thriller-tension taut. They milk the aesthetics for all their worth (disorientation, flickering fluorescent lights, confined hallways), but studiously avoid regressive caricatures surrounding mental health. The patients are empathetic, three-dimensional, and vulnerable; the abusive, racist, and misogynistic system is rigged against everyone except the greedy bureaucrats. Presenting human cruelty as the actual monster is a tale as old as time. Perhaps that’s because the fact always remains pressing. Imagined monsters are never as formidable as reality.
