Still, when you look at other media, you could argue that Jack London’s short story To Build a Fire and films like The Descent or Open Water are good narrative examples of survival horror. Survival horror is a nebulous term, and one that’s more popularly applied to video games-the Resident Evil franchise is one classic of the genre. But as the elements and monster close in, it becomes clear that leaving or staying are likely to mean the same thing: death. When they can get Lady Silence to speak, she warns them in her own language of something called a “Tuunbaq,” and tells them they must leave as soon as possible. Provisions begin turning up spoiled, or riddled with bits of lead that leave crew members with splitting headaches and rotting teeth. A mission to a nearby shoreline ends in a glimpse of a terrible, loping shape out in the dark, the accidental shooting of an Inuit shaman, and the capture of the shaman’s daughter, whom the crew dubs Lady Silence (Nive Nielsen). Over the next six episodes, the ramifications of that mistake echo outward. It’s a bad gamble, and soon both ships are irretrievably stuck. When the Erebus breaks its propeller on floating ice, the optimistic Franklin decides to forge ahead in hopes of reaching open water. But the only immediate trouble at first seems to be minor personal tensions between Franklin and Captain Crozier (Jared Harris) of the Terror, a sharp-tongued alcoholic whose affectionate relationship with his commander has grown strained. Sure, the two ships under his care-the Erebus and the Terror-are inauspiciously named, and their mission to locate the fabled Northwest Passage is a treacherous one now that the Arctic summer is winding down. When viewers meet Captain John Franklin (Ciarán Hinds) in the show’s pilot, he has no reason to think he’s not a modern argonaut embarking on a great colonial adventure. Through careful writing and by avoiding the genre’s more common pitfalls-weakly sketched characters, pat philosophies about the fragility of civilized behavior, exoticized natives- The Terror offers what is perhaps television’s first good example of survival horror. The basic setup is familiar from Alien, The Thing, and plenty of other creature features.īut while the seven currently aired episodes of The Terror offer their share of monstrous thrills, the show’s real strength lies in the ways it plays with the trappings of survival horror, a category broadly concerned with the fear of being caught unprepared in an exceedingly dangerous situation. The show, adapted from Dan Simmons’s 2007 novel by the same name, proceeds from a simple, killer hook: two ships trapped out on the ice, a crew under increasing strain, and a murderous, largely unseen presence stalking them through the howling snows. It’s perhaps little surprise that The Terror, AMC’s chilling new 10-part series about the expedition, would decide to make that horror more explicit by adding a monster. What’s all but certain is that the sailors’ predicament was terrifying, and their demises horrific. Historians have only scattered Inuit reports, a few abandoned messages, and the remains of disease-wracked and partially eaten bodies. Quite how Franklin and his crew died remains a mystery. None of the 129 men on that expedition came back, and the battered wrecks of the HMS Erebus and HMS Terror were found in 20, respectively. Three years later, both disappeared in the Arctic. In 1845, two ships under the command of Captain John Franklin set sail from Britain on a mission of exploration.
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