The Haunting Spectacle of 'The Terror', TV show based on the ill fated 'Franklin Expedition'
Thoughts on Horror
I am not a horror buff. Horror, especially supernatural horror - wraiths, ghosts, witches, spirits, poltergeists — I am not a fan. Movies insofar they are vicarious adventures, you subconsciously settle into the shoes of a character you identify with the closest and see the story unfold. In horror films, that person often is some ordinary dude terrorized out of his fucking mind with doors creaking and walls oozing dark fluid, as the horror tropes go, then likely eviscerated with his guts falling out in spectacularly visceral fashion. I don’t get queasy with violence: cracked ribs, bones torn out of their sockets, hanging entrails, gouged eyeballs — I have seen it all through squinted eyes sighing and wondering where this tale is going. What I hate about all this is the asymmetrical battle. What chance a mere mortal has against the Supernatural? You have no powers against the unseen, the disembodied. This is NOT a level playing field. Why doesn’t the chosen victim just surrender with a fart: “Fuck me and get it over with”? Instead, they show a lot of running (why!! this is not a marathon! you are not going to outrun that ghost who can appear anywhere instantly) and screaming and hiding in cupboards and attics before the unfortunate idiot is yanked with his ankle out of there and his blood is sprayed across the ceiling. Apparently, the Supernatural likes to play with its food before eating it.
But I do, sometimes, stumble upon a different kind of horror which chills me to the bones, at the same time, fills me with awe. A few months back, I watched Scavenger’s Reign, a Netflix animated show about a space crew which crashlanded on an alien planet and now looking for survival and rescue. I was mesmerized by the stunning visuals, character development, storytelling, and a very wonderous alien biology which rivaled, in my opinion, in originality the James Cameron’s Avatar films. There is no monster hunting the survivors in ‘Scavenger’s Reign’. The unknown itself is lurking at the edge of the screen in every frame: you are somewhere you don’t belong; you want to leave but first you must last. Surely, there are a lot of things on this alien world which can kill you, and they do, but as you watch unblinking at the fate of these survivors, you experience fear, not because something is after them — this is what I love about cosmic horror; it doesn’t give a fuck about anybody; the vastness will swallow you whole in a blink of an eye, but not because it is evil, it simply doesn’t care. But you are just unlucky to exist in the middle of the unfeeling void — it is because as you walk with these survivors (vicariously, in your mind), you inhabit the unsettling world around in the knowledge that the charming strangeness can turn to terror any second. The show is a marvel, with its visuals so surreal, and its music so beautiful, any praise probably falls short.
This week, browsing through random YouTube videos, I found myself tumbling down the rabbit hole that is the mystery of the lost Franklin Expedition of 1845 to find the Northwest Passage connecting the Atlantic with Pacific ocean through Arctic. The more I read about it, the deeper it pulled me in. The expedition with 129 men aboard two ships HMS Erebus and HMS Terror last seen by whaling ships in 1845 was never seen or heard from ever again. Many expeditions were sent after in subsequent years (even decades and centuries later) for search but all they could gather were traces of evidence left behind which have helped to connect the dots. What the researchers have pieced together appears like this: the two ships got stuck in ice near King William Island in what is today the Canadian territory of Nunavut. The crew waited aboard the ships for more than a year for the ice to thaw which never did (it figures those were particularly cold winter years) and eventually in 1848 running low on hope and rations they decided to abandon the ships and go on foot in the arctic winter to find the nearest outpost on the mainland Canada. What happened afterwards remains an enigma all these years later except the fact that all of them perished.
That is the premise of the events depicted in the series ‘The Terror’ which I recently binged and couldn’t stop myself from writing about. Naturally, since there are so many unknowns, the series takes creative liberties in weaving characters and events into the story arch of a failed expedition with a terrible fate for all aboard. But it also uses every known element remarkably accurately which I shall remark upon later. In any case instead of reading research papers and watching documentaries about the Franklin Expedition (I still read them and I still watched them), I thought it was better to actually see this acclaimed series, especially with Jared Harris starring in it.
From the very beginning, it held my attention. It has gorgeous views considering the series was not shot at location and makes abundant use of green screen to create visuals. I am fascinated by the arctic, the northern lights, and the utterly desolate landscape, and I have seen it in countless nature documentaries. But to actually see a ship in the 19th century, even on screen, sailing to the arctic is truly something to marvel at.
Would you do things differently if you could see the ramifications of your past actions? Could you change your fate? It is an impossible yet universal desire, isn’t it? To retrace our steps, go back to the past, and change things, may be our own minds about the decisions we made, and that would turn the Present infinitely better, more bearable. Could you save a life?
It is a spectacle that ‘The Terror’ presents us with in its first episode itself. We already know the fate of these men and as we watch the commander of the expedition, the ever optimist Sir John Franklin, deciding to push his ships through the icepacks gathering around against the counsel of his more grounded Captain Francis Crozier to return to a nearby harbour and wait through winter, we almost gasp as this man is signing the death sentence of his crew. This is the terror of ‘The Terror’: watching the hapless men gradually descend into hell through bad decisions and worse circumstances in a place very inhospitable to human survival. As Crozier put it, “this place wants us dead”.
The ships do get stuck. Thereafter starts a series of fruitless efforts to leave the endless white wasteland of arctic. One by one the men perish — some to cold, some to hunger, some to disease, some to madness (and some to a monstrous supernatural bear controlled by a Shaman). As I kept watching, it kept getting more depressing. The series oscillates from atmospheric horror to body horror: with episode progression the faces of the sailors start to turn white and haggard and their skins begins to peel off without any perceptible injury and their teeth start to fall out of their own accord. There is talk of Scurvy, caused by Vitamin C deficiency, and the lemon juice that they use to keep it at bay loses potency with time. Their food is rotten because the shipping company gave the tender to the lowest bidder who packed inferior stuff. And worst of all, the tin cans in which the food was packaged had faulty lead soldering which melted like wax into the food inside causing lead poisoning. It is just depressing, like watching rats caught in a trap trying to escape. All of these unfortunate circumstance have been found to be true by researchers, even if their exact effect on the loss of life is uncertain.
It is a testament to how great this show is in capturing the despair of the situation that I almost skipped the last two episodes. And for good reason: as though every horror preceding wasn’t enough the men ultimately resort to cannibalism. Humans eating humans to survive. This also seems to be factually true. Human remains have been found by researchers on King William Island with cut marks on the bones which establish that. It is pretty fucking disturbing.
I have kept thinking: are we just bodies? Bags of slowly rotting meat succumbing to our basest forms when pushed to the edge! All that patina of soul, God, divinity, grace, elegance seem to be very synthetic. When the speculation of cannibalism reached the people of Victorian England about their fellow countrymen, they were aghast and denounced the researchers who found the evidence. They said it was impossible that fine men from amongst themselves would ever do something horrific, but there it was.
Well, ‘The Terror’ it is not all terrible. The show excels at the scenes which show tenderness, vulnerability, and loyalty. I couldn’t take my eyes off it even though it made me so depressed that by the end of it I wanted to talk to somebody. And that is why I decided to write. Even if you are not marooned at Arctic, the reality can still be unsettling. That, dear friends, is existential horror.
