AMC’s Arctic horror The Terror has been getting incredible buzz so it’s not too surprising that the company has given the go-ahead for a second season. What’s interesting, however, is that it’s heading somewhere completely different.
Obviously, the first season was based on Dan Simmons’ novel, and sending another naval expedition to the Arctic doesn’t seem like a massively promising idea for a second run. Instead, AMC has brought on Alexander Woo (True Blood) and Max Borenstein (Kong: Skull Island, Godzilla) for a timely story set “during World War II and center[ing] on an uncanny specter that menaces a Japanese-American community from its home in Southern California to the internment camps to the war in the Pacific.”
Woo, who will be showrunning the second season, said “I’m deeply honored to be telling a story set in this extraordinary period. We hope to convey the abject terror of the historical experience in a way that feels modern and relevant to the present moment. And the prospect of doing so with a majority Asian and Asian-American cast is both thrilling and humbling.”
Borenstein added “As a history-buff and genre geek (not to mention a conscious American today), it’s clear that truth is always scarier than fiction. This season of The Terror uses as its setting one of the darkest, most horrific moments in our nation’s history. The Japanese-American internment is a blemish on the nation’s conscience — and one with dire resonance to current events. I’m thrilled that AMC is giving us the chance to use that darkness as the inspiration for what I hope will be a trenchant, terrifying season of TV.”
The ten episode second season will hit AMC in 2019, will air on AMC on BT in the UK. In case you haven’t caught up with the first season, it was “inspired by a true story about the Royal Navy’s perilous voyage in 1847 while attempting to discover the Northwest Passage. Frozen, isolated and stuck at the end of the earth, The Terror season one highlighted all that can go wrong when a group of men, desperate to survive, struggle not only with the elements but with each other.”
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