Let’s compare the first two seasons of AMC’s The Terror—Which was better?

Now that The Terror: Infamy has run its course, AMC can look back with satisfaction on two seasons of its anthology show well done. Both series featured true historical events as a backdrop tales of horror. Though The Terror and The Terror: Infamy deal with different historical topics, the matching themes and structures make for easy comparison. Let’s take a look.

Documented History

The Terror is based on author Dan Simmons’ book of the same name, a horror take on the infamous disappearance of the mid-19th century Franklin expedition seeking the Northwest Passage. Some buried bodies, artifacts and the hulks of both ships have recently been found, but exactly what happened to Captain Franklin and his men on the icy barrens remains a mystery, offering ample latitude for storytellers to give their take.

The Terror: Infamy takes place in the World War II-era United States, during the time of the forced internment of Japanese-Americans after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. The unfortunate events of the time are well documented (if long underrepresented), and some of the people who experienced the camps are still alive today, including series actor George Takei. The resources to reconstruct the past from living memory are still available. This is a bonus for historical accuracy, but it also binds the storytellers to actual events to some degree.

Environment

Isolation is often a powerful tool in horror stories, and the icebound ships in the The Terror offer about as much physical isolation as you can find on the planet Earth. The crews of Erebus and Terror are prepared to weather the brutal Arctic wastes, but not the internal demons which soon assault them.

The internment camps of The Terror: Infamy are somewhat isolated, placed in remote areas away from American population centers, but they are small, cramped cities in themselves. The characters are rarely alone, usually in the company of their families and fellow detainees. Yet the theme of overall isolation is still powerful because the Japanese-Americans are locked-up prisoners in a hostile country during wartime.

The Terror. Ciaran Hinds and Tobias Menzies (Photo by Aidan Monaghan AMC)

The characters

The officers and crew in The Terror are men of the sea, brave souls who know the dangers associated with high Arctic exploration. Yet while the officers may have willingly accepted the risk, it is obvious that many of the crew are there because they’re impoverished sailors who would sign up for any mission provided it came with a bed and dependable meals.

While the characters of The Terror largely chose their original journey, the characters of Infamy have their journey inflicted upon them. The Japanese-Americans are family people, living out their lives in a free country until the tides of public sentiment turn against them. They are rounded up and imprisoned because of their ethnicity. Also, while the men of The Terror are a military unit on an expedition, the families of Infamy are civilians, although some of the men later join the army.

Naoko Mori as Asako Nakayama, James Saito as Wilson Yoshida, Alex Shimizu as Toshiro Furuya  – The Terror _ Season 2, Episode 2 – Photo Credit: Ed Araquel/AMC

Social-political impact

The strict British societal hierarchy works as a stabilizing force in The Terror, as military discipline and class roles help maintain order even as the men are breaking down. The wider negative impact of European exploration and colonization is only suggested, though the indigenous monster of the Arctic represents a backlash.

The Terror: Infamy is set in the midst of a more readily identifiable social-political dilemma, plunging into the daily experiences of its unfairly imprisoned Japanese-American characters and illuminating their daily struggles on a highly personal level. The imprisonment of legal residents and citizens by the American government is a shameful act that festers at the heart of the story.

Tobias Menzies as James Fitzjames – The Terror _ Season 1, Episode 3 – Photo Credit: Screengrab/AMC

The Monsters

Monsters are an integral part of AMC’s The Terror anthology, and they’ve appeared in various forms throughout the first two seasons. In The Terror, the obvious material monster is the strange Inuit tuunbaq, a half-man, half-bear abomination attacking the sailors as a perfect metaphor for the outrage of all exploited indigenous peoples. Once revealed, however, the tuunbaq fades as a dangerous force compared to the monsters rising within the dying men themselves.

Unlike in The Terror, Infamy’s monster appears specifically because of the Nakayama family’s deep, dark familial secrets. The monster is Yuko, and she lies at the core of the main story. Because of this integral quality, the yurei monster is vastly more developed than The Terror‘s tuunbaq; we develop feelings of both empathy and revulsion towards what is left of the once-alive young woman.

Yuko in The Terror Infamy

Modern vs. Ancient

Both seasons of The Terror anthology set the “modern,” “civilized” world on a collision course with much older and mysterious forces of the supernatural. The sailors in The Terror, exploring aboard one of the most technologically advanced vessels of the time, find themselves vulnerable to the voracious appetites of the mythical tuunbaq man-bear. The men themselves will soon revert to a much more tribal and cannibalistic form of social structure.

This theme is more pronounced in Infamy, where the Japanese-Americans are thrust into conflict with the vengeful yurei, a demon straight of out old Japanese folklore. In an interesting twist, the story also involves a Roman Catholic American-Hispanic storyline, where we see the secretive magics of the curandero, a traditional native shaman of Latin America.

Interior vs. Exterior

Despite the frozen elements, the icebound ships and the Inuit monster, The Terror‘s horror is driven most powerfully by interior forces, namely he crew’s bad decisions, desperation and ultimate descent into paranoia and madness. The sprawling vastness of the Arctic waste with all of its dangers pales in comparison to the darkness inside the little black caverns of deteriorating human brains and souls.

Infamy, on the other hand, is primarily propelled by two external threats. The first is the repression inflicted on the Japanese-Americans by the American government and srmy. The second and most important is the attack of the yurei as the spirit preys upon those who wronged Yuko so many years before. Many private secrets are revealed, but it is all due to the outside supernatural pressure.

Derek Mio as Chester Nakayama, Cristina Rodlo as Luz Ojeda – The Terror _ Season 2, Gallery – Photo Credit: Maxine Helfman/AMC

Which series was better?

Both The Terror and The Terror: Infamy feature similar narrative structures, balance external and internal threats, and have excellent production values, atmospherics and acting. So which is better? Let’s look at the story impact of both shows’ external monster, the aboriginal Tuunbaq in The Terror and the yurei Yuko in Infamy.

The Terror: Infamy drilled down harder and harder on the yurei storyline as the show progressed, but never seemed to find a clear meaning in it until the last two episodes. There was such potential in both sides of the dramatic palette—the story of the Japanese internment and the vengeful old world yurei, played with effective menace, madness and sympathy by Kiki Suzanne. Perhaps the slew of opportunities hamstrung the writers a bit.

The Terror: Infamy paints a superb portrait of the terrible experience of the uprooted Japanese-American communities forced into the internment camps, and that alone adds value to the series. Yuko, the spirit rising from the dead to avenge a terrible family secret, is a potent presence and vastly more integral to the story than the tuunbaq is to Franklin’s sailors in The Terror. Despite their living situation, the Infamy characters are forced to confront their terrible secrets and face a malevolent threat to their survival.

Having made that story choice, Infamy suffers from poor execution of its horror mechanics, employing all-too-familiar cinematic motifs. Most of its scares are set up in far too obvious a fashion. Horror fans want to get a few unexpected shocks here and there. Infamy recovers some of its footing thanks to the wonderfully dualistic and complex nature of the yurei, but in the end her ominousness is watered down by briefly inhabiting one body after another, predictably hopscotching around in scenes, though it all comes together nicely in the finale.

The Terror, to its credit, never gives its inherently weak monster storyline the opportunity to water down the greater horrors threatening the men: starvation, poisoning, paranoia, hopelessness and madness. Infamy’s yurei, with its malevolent obsession, proves to be the most powerful force threatening the characters. The Terror‘s tuunbaq is more a political statement (embodied Aboriginal outrage) functioning as a minor horror tool. The show could have easily succeeded without it.

The Terror, with its characters descending into madness on the icy wastes, is close to a masterpiece of horror cinema. Once the ships become trapped, the dread comes creeping, and an uncanny sense of doom drifts down upon the viewer. The oppressiveness of the long Arctic winters and the cabin-fever inducing ship interiors sets up the long, slow descent of the survivors, whose ultimate fate is the collapse of what it means to be human.

In conclusion, Infamy proved to be an entertaining show that provided an important and effective perspective on the experience of the Japanese interment camp experience during World War II. But by whole-heartedly embracing the horror aspects of its story without the ability to provide effective scares, Infamy wastes some of its potential and ultimately proves a less effective dramatic accomplishment than its stripped bare and soul-chilling predecessor, The Terror.

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That said, AMC’s fusion of history and horror anthology series is proving a success, and we’re excited to see what chapter of the past they choose to haunt next.

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