Geekery: Ridley Scott’s ‘The Terror’ Focuses on a New Horror in Season 2
The brilliant and harrowing first season followed the crews of the HMS Erebus and HMS Terror when they became icebound in Victoria Straight. The new season is set in a Japanese-American Internment camp during WWII.
George Takei plays a retired fisherman that becomes a community leader at the camp, and he was an integral part of creating the series (the actor spent three years of his childhood in Rohwer War Relocation Center with his family). In an interview with EW he talked a bit about how his experiences led the show’s story…
“[After] the bombing of Pearl Harbor, all Japanese-Americans were rounded up and incarcerated, with no charges, with no trial [or] due process, which is a central pillar of our justice system. There is the old Japanese literary form called Kaidan, ghost tales, that is fused onto this experience of Japanese-Americans. The people that were imprisoned were highly stressed, and some marriages broke up, some people went crazy, and they overlaid the story of yureis — spirits — and obake — ghosts that possess people.”
As in the first season, Scott has chosen to set his story of horror into a historical and bleak context where you can’t be quite sure what’s real, and what’s superstition gone out of control. I’m looking forward to watching.
The Terror: Infamy premieres on AMC Monday, August 12 at 9/8c.
