As you navigate the TV listing straits, you might think that The Terror is one to swerve. It has the title of a B movie, the premise of a 50s creature feature and, frankly, looks colossally depressing. Curb your pessimism, though: the show has been one of the finds of 2018. An adaptation of Dan Simmons’ novel, it is based on the real-life expedition of HMS Erebus and its bomb vessel HMS Terror as they set out to find the northwest passage through the Arctic Ocean and into the Pacific in the 1840s. With an imposing cast including Jared Harris, Tobias Menzies and Ciarán Hinds, it garnered gushing reviews when it premiered in the US earlier this year.
All we know for sure of the historical expedition is that the ships were locked in ice and that the 129 men who set out were never seen again. On the show, weeks turn into months as the stranded men await a thaw; they are menaced by a giant – possibly monstrous – polar bear and are beset by the kind of unravelling of the mind inevitable when stranded in one of the planet’s most hostile environments. As the ice exerts a vice-like grip on the ships, the predicament likewise seizes the psyches of the men. Alongside an intense camaraderie, fear, resentment and paranoia flourish. It often calls to mind that other great tale of naval misadventure, Das Boot.
The biggest boogieman on board, though, is the winter itself. It is far from the first time storytellers have employed winter’s elemental heft to good effect. Game of Thrones may have its dragons, sadists, warlocks and shape-shifting assassins, but the people of the north knows that nothing puts the fear of god(s) into their children more than the phrase “winter is coming”. In a land where winters last for decades and sometimes harbour an army of death-dealing ice zombies, this is understandable.
Nor is The Terror the first time that TV has used a historical event as a springboard for frozen horror. NBC’s Siberia took the Tunguska meteor event of 1908 and ran with it, producing a fictional reality TV show where 16 wannabes were dropped in a Siberian forest and left to fend for themselves. Scheming co-contestants wound up being the least of their worries as natives, monsters and reality TV convention conspired to march them towards a fate worse than eviction.
Just like The Terror, Sky Atlantic’s genre-straddling Fortitude leaned heavily on its Arctic setting for its thrills. There are not many places on Earth where ichneumon wasps can incubate inside the carcass of a frozen mammoth for thousands of years to unleash a psychosis-inducing plague on an unwitting human community, but the glacier-bound Fortitude is one of them. With the melting of the ice caps causing the thawing that releases the wasps, the glacier became a powerful metaphor for the dangers of global warming (among all the carnage and killing).
Sometimes it can be more subtle than that. When Tomas Alfredson redefined the vampire movie with Let the Right One In, he did so in the depths of a Stockholm winter. It is the perfect backdrop for 12-year-old Oskar’s isolation and despair – and for his beautiful friendship with the vamp next door, Eli. As cruel as the dark months are, they are also gorgeous.
The Terror knows the power of its location well. The physical dangers of frostbite, polar bears and malnutrition are bad enough. Worse still are the psychological horrors born from their predicament: nights that last for weeks; cold that cuts to the core; an isolation from the world as pure as the ice that imprisons them.
If anything, it is surprising that fear of the cold is not exploited more often in TV and film. If you are from a country where two inches of snow causes calamity, there are few things scarier than a wasteland with naught but ice for miles in every direction. For students of horror, it is no surprise that the ninth circle of hell is frozen.
The Terror begins on AMC on 24 April at 9pm
