Critic Reviews

The Terror takes its time, it knows the dark dreariness it’s headed toward and it’s in no hurry to get there. You will know quickly if the series isn’t paced to your liking, but if you can stick with it, The Terror is easily one of the most downright scary shows to hit TV in years.

The storytelling here, from a team led by David Kajganich and Soo Hugh, gains strength from its slow burn. The utter desolation and horror of the series’ back half is made more potent by how relatively normal things are for the first few episodes, before reality starts to buck and heave like the ever-shifting ice.

"The Terror: Infamy" is so good and so cleanly told that it really doesn't require much of a primer before diving in, but a little background couldn't hurt.

It’s a rare mix of adaptation and anthology storytelling done right; what does “The Terror” have in store for us next? I’m afraid to find out, and that’s a very good thing.

It’s captivating, provoking and complex, as eager to earn your stunned silence as it is to send you pushing back from the television in revulsion. Most importantly, it never sacrifices story and especially character in pursuit of those reactions.

The Terror is an exceptional series of surviving in the face of real yet unimaginable horrors.

This grueling but rewarding 10-part series from Ridley Scott's company is like a Masterpiece version of a classic horror movie: literate and philosophical, yet shocking but terrifically scary. [19 Mar-1 Apr 2018, p.12]

One of the many remarkable elements of AMC’s “The Terror: Infamy” is how it balances a history lesson with the parts of it that you would never learn about in school. At its best, it intertwines the two, suggesting that one begets the other, and it holds a mirror up to 2019, forcing us to wonder what will be unleashed by the current horrors in our country.

AMC's well-acted series recalls John Carpenter's snowy monster freak-out, though it's less interested in creatures than the shifting power dynamics of desperate men. [30 March 2018, p.50]

Infamy falls back on horror clichés whenever Yuko shows up, but its vision of encompassing paranoia is scary enough.