Ridley Scott Meets 'Chernobyl' in AMC’s 3-Part Historical Horror

Image via HBO Published Sep 26, 2026, 7:36 PM EDT Kelcie Mattson is a Senior Features author at Collider. Based in the Midwest, she also contributes Lists, reviews, and television recaps. A lifelong fan of niche sci-fi, epic fantasy, Gothic horror, elaborate action, and witty detective fiction, becoming a pop culture devotee was inevitable once the Disney Renaissance, Turner Classic Movies, BBC period dramas, and her local library piqued her imagination. Rarely seen without a book in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other, Kelcie explores media history (especially older, foreign, and independent films) as much as possible. In her spare time, she enjoys video games, amateur photography, geeking out over music, and attending fan conventions with her Trekkie family. Sign in to your Collider account Few living storytellers know their way around claustrophobic horror better than Ridley Scott. After all, he's the director behind Alien, that 1979 masterclass in unbearable suspense, where an unknowable, unstoppable, and thoroughly grotesque creature picks off trapped humans one by one. Those slow-burn sensibilities extend to his work as an executive producer on The Terror, AMC's critically acclaimed anthology horror series. The Terror has changed creative hands for each of its three seasons to date, but all maintain the same structure: a psychological horror heightened by acutely relevant supernatural allegory. As beguiling as it is indelibly bleak, television's shrewdest, most atmospheric anthology show has Scott's fingerprints all over it and boldly ventures into its own artistic shadows. 'The Terror' Season 1 Is a Perfect Survival Horror In 1845, the exploratory ships the HMS Terror and the HMS Erebus set out from England, determined to become the first explorers to chart a course through the Northwest Passage. Both ships were stuck in Arctic ice that never thawed. Evidence suggests that the 129 doomed sailors died of starvation and hypothermia, and potentially resorted to cannibalism. Collider Exclusive · 8 Questions · 2 Minutes What Is Your Biggest Horror Nightmare? Elm Street · Chucky · Scream · The Conjuring Four horror franchises. Four completely different ways of scaring you. One waits until you fall asleep. One makes sure nobody believes you. One is already in your group of friends. And one is in the house with your family. Answer eight quick questions about how you actually watch horror, and find out which nightmare was built for you. 😴Elm Street(Freddy Krueger) 🧸Chucky(Child's Play) 📞Scream(Ghostface) 🕯️The Conjuring(The Warren Files) FIND YOUR NIGHTMARE → 01 Which horror scene makes you cover your eyes? Four classic images. One of them is worse than the others for you. ASomebody falling asleep when they really should not. BA toy that has moved, and nobody touched it. CA phone ringing in an empty house. DA child talking to somebody who is not there. NEXT QUESTION → 02 You are home alone and you hear a noise. First thought? Everybody has one. It arrives before you have decided anything. AI am exhausted and my mind is playing tricks on me. BSomething in this room is not where I left it. CSomebody is in here with me. DThis house has never felt entirely right. NEXT QUESTION → 03 Which horror movie rule would you break first? Everybody thinks they would survive. Almost nobody actually does. ANever fall asleep. BNever leave it out of your sight. CNever answer the phone. DNever go down to the basement. NEXT QUESTION → 04 Something genuinely frightening happens. What do you do? Not in a film. In your actual living room, tonight. AConvince myself I imagined the whole thing. BTell someone, and brace for them not believing me. CWork out which person I know could be behind it. DGet everybody in the house into one room. NEXT QUESTION → 05 How do you actually watch a horror film? Be honest about this one. Nobody is checking. AFine during. Wide awake at two in the morning. BShouting at the screen that nobody is listening. CCalling the twist out loud before it lands. DThrough my fingers, holding on to something. NEXT QUESTION → 06 Somebody offers you serious money. Which do you still refuse? The amount does not matter. There is one on this list you are not doing. AFall asleep in a room I have never been in before. BKeep an old doll on the shelf facing my bed. CAnswer every unknown number that calls after midnight. DSpend one night alone in a house with a history. NEXT QUESTION → 07 Which feeling stays with you a week after the film? Good horror does not stop when the credits do. ANot wanting to turn the bedroom light off. BNot trusting one particular object in my house. CLooking twice at people I have known for years. DFeeling like something came home with me. NEXT QUESTION → 08 Something wakes you at 3am. What is the worst possibility? Eight questions in, this is the one that decides your nightmare. AThat I am still asleep, and it knows it. BThat the thing nobody believed me about is here. CThat somebody with a key is downstairs. DThat something is in the doorway, watching us sleep. REVEAL MY NIGHTMARE → The Lights Just Went Out Your Nightmare Is…Four franchises, four completely different ways of getting underneath your skin. This is the one built out of your particular fear, why it works so well on you, and what it would leave behind. Elm StreetYour nightmare does not wait outside the door. It waits for you to close your eyes, which you are going to have to do eventually, because nobody has ever won that particular argument. Freddy is horror's cruellest idea: a threat that lives in the one place you cannot guard, cannot lock, and cannot avoid forever. You are the one who is fine during the film and wide awake at two in the morning. Your own head is where this does its damage. These films understood exhaustion as a horror engine. The kids on Elm Street do not lose because they are weak. They lose because they are tired. You can lock every door in the house. You still have to sleep. ChuckyYour nightmare is not really the doll. It is the face of the person you tell, and the way they decide, very kindly, that you have imagined all of it. Chucky works precisely because he is absurd. That is the trap: the more accurately you describe him, the less anybody is going to believe you. You are the one shouting at the screen because the characters are not listening. You know that feeling from real life too. The franchise is at its best when the adults in the room are the real obstacle, and you have met those adults. By the time somebody finally believes you, you will have handled most of it on your own. ScreamYour nightmare has your number, knows your name, and has almost certainly been inside your house before. The worst part is that you already know them. Scream is the only one of these where the killer takes the mask off and turns out to be somebody who was at the party. You are the person who calls the twist out loud before it lands. You watch people the same way you watch films. The franchise made the rules of horror part of the plot, which means the survivors are the ones paying attention. You would be paying attention. Everybody is a suspect, including the person who just offered to walk you home. The ConjuringYour nightmare is not really about you. It is about the people asleep down the hall, and the feeling that whatever is here is not interested in leaving. The Conjuring films are domestic horror. The house, the family, the perfectly ordinary room that quietly stops feeling ordinary. Your instinct is to get everybody into one room. Your fear is protective rather than personal, which is rarer than it sounds. This is the one franchise where belief is the weapon. The people who come through it are the ones who are not alone and refuse to be. Whatever is here did not come for you. It came for the household, and you are the one standing in the hallway. ↻ RETAKE THE QUIZ Based on Dan Simmons' bestselling book of the same name, The Terror Season 1 speculates about how these men met their horrendous fates — in the physically gruesome sense, yes, but how they faced the prospect of imminent death. Showrunners David Kajganich and Soo Hugh craft a survival horror in the purest sense. There is a petrifying despair to the situation's stark simplicity: helpless and stranded, surrounded by an endless expanse of white, food running perilously low. The robust premise doesn't need another predator when stifling isolation and creeping dread already torment these men to the end of their fraying ropes. Yet the crews are still hunted by an Inuit spirit called the Tuunbaq. Captain Sir John Franklin (Ciarán Hinds), secure in his ambition, pushes through territory that isn't his to colonize. The hostile elements and the merciless Tuunbaq retaliate accordingly. Although hubris causing unnecessary tragedy is familiar thematic territory, The Terror's technical excellence and deft hand for interpersonal dynamics make its inevitability curdle the blood. 'Infamy and 'Devil in Silver' Proves That 'The Terror' Has Potent Staying Power Alexander Woo and Max Borenstein assume showrunner duties for Season 2, subtitled Infamy. Following the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941, Executive Order 9066 forcibly relocated Japanese Americans and immigrants from their homes into internment camps. Infamy's Yuko Tanabe (Kiki Sukezane), a vengeful ghost, follows the fictional Nakayama family as they're uprooted from California's Terminal Island and incarcerated in Oregon. Like its predecessor season, Infamy's ominous heart is drenched in extensively researched historical reproductions. This time, it also relies on cultural specificity and tangible authenticity. Infamy is entirely unsubtle about the abominable cycles of xenophobic violence and state-sanctioned dehumanization; Yuko's unnerving bloodshed comes unquestionably second to the lived suffering and trauma. Woo, a Chinese-American creator, and the ensemble cast of Japanese descent, some with immediate ties to the camps — George Takei, who brings arresting grace to his role, also served as a consultant — present one of the most unforgivably shameful atrocities in American history through their perspective. They also infuse the bilingual Infamy with themes of immigration, cultural assimilation, and intergenerational tension, depicted through the vividly realized characters. As for Season 3, or Devil in Silver, author-turned-showrunner Victor LaValle adapts his novel to the screen. The most recent installment pivots to modern-day New York, institutional horror, and serves as a blistering indictment of the for-profit healthcare industry. Pepper Coffin (Dan Stevens) discovers its injustice firsthand when police officers commit him to New Hyde Psychiatric Hospital. New Hyde is underfunded and deteriorating, the patients are neglected and abandoned, and a malicious force from decades past rots the building from the inside. LaValle and a trio of directors wind the thriller-tension taut. They milk the aesthetics for all their worth (disorientation, flickering fluorescent lights, confined hallways), but studiously avoid regressive caricatures surrounding mental health. The patients are empathetic, three-dimensional, and vulnerable; the abusive, racist, and misogynistic system is rigged against everyone except the greedy bureaucrats. Presenting human cruelty as the actual monster is a tale as old as time. Perhaps that's because the fact always remains pressing. Imagined monsters are never as formidable as reality. The Terror Release Date 2018 - 2026-00-00 Network AMC, Shudder, AMC+ Showrunner David Kajganich, Soo Hugh, Christopher Cantwell