Spoilers below for anyone who isn’t caught up with The Terror: Devil in Silver through its fourth episode via Shudder subscription, so be warned!
With Steven Spielberg seemingly tapping into his 1970s roots anew for the alien-centric Disclosure Day, the currently airing horror series The Terror: Devil in Silver is telling a story that (at least to me) has felt in several ways like Jaws set inside a mental hospital. Not merely from a “don’t show your monsters too early” perspective, but with the idea that the New Hyde psychiatric hospital is kind of a stand in for the island town of Amity.
Ahead of The Terror's long- awaited Season 3 premiere date, I spoke with star Dan Stevens, as well as co-showrunners Victor LaValle and Christopher Cantwell, about some of this show’s biggest literary and cinematic touchstones. Despite an all around lack of oceans and fins, I asked Stevens if he shared my take that Pepper and his fellow inmates have things in common with the residents and vacationers in Jaws, and he very much felt the same way, saying:
Definitely. And actually, you know, Jaws was an interesting sort of touch point when we were chatting to Victor, who wrote the original story. I like genre when it sort of is asking the question 'Well, what's the real monster here?' You know, it's like, obviously there is this monster, but there's this bigger monster of the American healthcare system, let's say. And let's really call it what it is. It's like, the way that we deal with mental health in this country is an abomination, is a horror. The real sort of devil in the system, really, is that America doesn't really treat mental illness, it warehouses it.
Dan Stevens
That whole quote would work magnificently as a public-rousing speech in a movie. Stevens could have legitimately convinced even Amity's most hardcore beachbodies to turn back and go home in the face of imminent sharp-toothed danger.
But to the point, The Devil in Silver does have its overarching antagonist entity in the same way Jaws has Bruce the shark, and both also have one or more human characters who count as "bad guys" for ignoring the horrors and/or allowing them to continue. Amity's Mayor Larry Vaughn matches up somewhat with Aasif Mandvi's Dr. Anand, in the sense that Anand continues to preach for New Hyde's success despite all the counter-evidence. Vaughn could also be John Benjamin Hickey's Dr. Walter, though that's a bit more complicated.
But while Jaws' shark can serve as a metaphor for any number of potential dangers, it absolutely fits for The Terror's third season as a larger-than-logic threat. But at least Quint knew what he was dealing with when he went on the hunt, the patients within New Hyde can't possibly conceive what happens behind the silver door. And yet they're still meant to stick around there without protest. Stevens continued:
I think one of the great insights of Victor's novel that it's based on here is that dehumanization doesn't cure dysfunction. It manufactures it. And if you strip someone of their name and their agency, their dignity, and then you're surprised they don't get better, that's not treatment. That's just cruelty with a clipboard.
Dan Stevens
When facing a seeming unknowable evil, it helps to have as many people in one's corner as can be, and Stevens notes that everyone at New Hyde is dealing with something terrible, and that the characters have to work through those personal issues if they want to have a shot at surviving Dr. Walter and the devil within. In his words:
Yeah, the staff are underfunded. They're in hell. The patients are in hell. There's a literal monster stalking the halls. Pepper has his own demons that he's bringing to the party, you know. So you've got a lot of layers going on. And I think we sort of dance between those throughout the show. I think it's a really interesting narrative, and that really kind of drew me in when I read it.
Dan Stevens
I guess it would be too much of a leap to just plainly consider everyone in Amity to be mentally unfit, so this analogy should probably somewhere.
Speaking with Victor LaValle, who wrote the novel that this season is based on, I asked how important it was to keep the focus on the realistic state of the hospital's struggles as more and more supernatural elements were introduced, and he said there wasn't ever another approach to it. In his words:
Well, I would say I don't think the show could exist without that as its central concern, right? Partly because the book that I wrote was based on a lifetime of dealing with family with various kinds of either mental health issues, neurodivergence - whatever we want to call it. Spending a lifetime watching them be rarely helped by this system that was so busted, but knowing I loved those people because they were my family.
Victor LaValle
Having a personal connection to this story likely made this a difficult project to work through at times, though not so much due to the content itself as much as painful memories of the past, and knowing that the "system" really hasn't changed all that much over time.
LaValle also pointed out that Devil in Silver wasn't inspired solely by his more dour memories of certain medical facilities. The camaraderie and friendships between the patients were also influenced with the author's experiences, as were the empathetic staff members. As he put it:
Also, I love the people who they met when they were in the institutions; not just the patients, but also the staff. The other thing that we really stuck to was that we weren't going to do a kind of thing where it was like 'The patients are good and the staff are evil.' It was everybody who is trapped in this system is in some way being preyed upon by the devil. And whether that's the devil in the big supernatural sense, or whether that's the American health care system, they're both devils.
Victor LaValle
Let's bounce back to fictional projects that had an impact on The Terror's third-season creation, thanks to co-showrunner Chris Cantwell. As much as Jaws may have been a foundational connection, the creators were also obviously drawn to One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, to the point where Ken Kesey's classic novel was legitimately quoted and read through as a book club topic.
But in some cases, the impeptus was to buck horror and subgenre expectations rather than leaning into them. As Cantwell told me:
Cuckoo's Nest is in there, yeah, and a lot of stuff. But then also, we're playing on that too, right? Because there's no real Nurse Ratched in this, and that's to Victor's point. This isn't Shutter Island, right? This isn't Session 9. We wanted to bring the humanity to all these people, and have them all feel stuck for different reasons. And that is the scariest thing of all to me, is the mundane horror of the beast.
Chris Cantwell
I had to give Cantwell credit for bringing up Brad Anderson's highly unnerving 2001 horror Session 9, since it doesn't get nearly enough widespread attention. (David Caruso as its star notwithstanding.) To his grander point, though, the co-showrunners successfully grounded New Hyde's staff to differentiate them completely from whatever is behind the silver door. CCH Pounder's Miss Chris isn't exactly Pepper's BFF in this situation, but she and her colleagues are also not needlessly hateful to those in their stead.
Hell, it doesn't even seem like Miss Chris, Dr. Badger, Dr. Anand or any of the on-hand caretakers are truly aware of the threat that they've been housing for so long, and do seem to genuinely think that Pepper and others are lying and/or exaggerating their horrific experiences. (Nurse Ratched would have just sent them all into the monster's room, single-file only.) Can ignorance truly be considered evil?
Perhaps in another setting, such as Jaws' Amity, where the ignorance is intentional and fed into. That's right, I brought it all back around to that 51-year-old LEGO-inspiring blockbuster. But I'll be banana-boating my way right back to shore for the next episode.
New episodes of The Terror: Devil in Silver debut Thursdays on Shudder and AMC+. Catch up with Season 1 streaming via Amazon Prime subscription, while Season 2 is on Shudder.
