According to Deadline, AMC has given a 10-episode series order to The Terror, an adaptation of Dan Simmons’ 2007 bestseller of the same name, with Ridley Scott and David W. Zucker serving as executive producers. David Kajganich (True Story, A Bigger Splash) is writing the anthology drama series based on Simmons’ novel that’s a “rare combination of fascinating actual history, ground-breaking genre storytelling, and the complex character work of literature.”
Set in 1847, The Terror is a fictionalized account of Captain Sir John Franklin’s lost Arctic expedition to find the Northwest Passage between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. In Simmons’ retelling though, instead of receiving mundane deaths from pneumonia and tuberculosis, the unlucky crew members are preyed upon by a mysterious beast that skulks through the frozen wilderness.
“Originality is still something that gets our attention every day, and the very unique mixing of historical non-fiction with a gripping and imaginative science fiction overlay in Dan’s novel is something that we hadn’t seen before,” explained Joel Stillerman, AMC’s president of programming and development. “That, combined with an exceptional team behind the project, made this something we really wanted to bring to air on AMC.”
No casting announcements have been made, but because The Terror is being billed as an anthology series, whoever plays the captain of the expedition could come back in a subsequent season as the misunderstood Arctic monster who just wanted to make friends with the first humans he’d ever met.