Season 3 of AMC’s anthology horror series The Terror is based on The Devil in Silver, Victor LaValle’s 2012 novel about an evil supernatural force preying on the residents of the decrepit New Hyde Psychiatric Hospital. Pepper (Dan Stevens) is trapped there after assaulting his partner’s ex and several police officers. It’s a familiar setting for Stevens, who previously played a man stuck in a mental institution in Noah Hawley’s surreal X-Men series Legion.
“Institutions like this are just great environments for a horror story, or for any story, really,” Stevens told Polygon in a virtual junket. “They’re contained, claustrophobic, and hellish circumstances to be in where you’re sort of like unfairly incarcerated.”
Legion’s David Haller was diagnosed with schizophrenia but discovers he’s actually a psychic mutant infected by a mental parasite. Stevens saw David as “an innocent” while Pepper is a much darker character.
“He is very impulsive,” Stevens said. “He’s a pretty unexamined male who hasn’t really done the work and is showing up thinking that the world is wrong, he is right, and everything can be solved with violence. And he has to learn that that’s not the case. He has to face up to some of his own demons, as well as the actual demons that are haunting the hall — and the demon of the American healthcare system.”
The English actor got to see that demon firsthand while shooting. Most of The Terror: Devil in Silver was filmed at an abandoned Staten Island prison, but some shooting was done at a psychiatric ward that had two working floors in an otherwise empty facility.
“That was the creepiest of all, because we’d be outside in the courtyard filming a scene, and there would be actual patients banging on their windows, disrupting whatever was going on, or we were disrupting whatever was going on with them,” Stevens said. “This place was just like New Hyde — clearly criminally underfunded. It was really in a bad way, and was probably going to be closing in the next couple of years. I don’t know if it’s even still open. And that was a pretty stark reminder of just how real the roots of Victor’s original story are.”
Life at New Hyde takes a physical toll on Pepper. While some of the effect comes from prosthetics used to represent cuts and bruises, Stevens said a lot of his haggard appearance was just the result of him growing out his beard and sweating during the long summer days spent shooting in a prison without central air conditioning. Karyn Kusama, who directed the first two episodes of the show, also found the setting very draining.
“It really was quite extreme, in terms of feeling a kind of institutional entrapment,” she told Polygon. “Something about that gets under your skin. It lends itself to the series in a great way, but as a place to work day-to-day, it was pretty challenging.”
CCH Pounder (James Cameron’s Avatar movies, The Shield) plays Miss Chris, a nurse who largely overlooks New Hyde’s problems, and is more concerned with whether her patients are “compliant.” Pounder sees plenty of parallels to her character in the real world, where she says people relish what authority they have, even when the rest of their life is filled with problems.
“That’s kind of the life we’re all living right now, where we’re accepting it,” she told Polygon. “We’re mumbling about it, we’re cursing about it, but we’re not doing anything about the situation around us in our real life. What an incredible mirror this series is.”
Horror has often been used as a way to examine societal ills, and Stevens hopes that The Terror: Devil in Silver will help grab attention in a way that feels less heavy-handed than an issue-led drama.
“If you dress something up in a genre-sheep’s clothing, you can sometimes deliver a much, much more powerful message,” he said. “The American healthcare system is a horror show. I think we all know that, and I don’t think we need to be told that, but if we’re shown that in this sort of way, maybe it gets through. Maybe it doesn’t, but we are going to keep trying.”
The first episode of The Terror: Devil in Silver is available to stream on AMC Plus and Shudder. New episodes release on Thursdays through June 11.