REVIEW | TVTEXT BY SERENA KIM
Who needs a haunted house for creepy-crawlies
when you’ve got an internment camp? The second
season of A MC’s prestige drama The Terror takes
us back to one of the darker periods in American
histor y. The sum-total horror of being rounded up
on the basis of your race, enduring visitations from
Japanese spirits (and we don’t mean getting lit on
Suntor y) and coping with dirty, uninhabitable liv-
ing quarters make for plenty of thrills, chills and
jump-scares.
Set during World War II, The Terror: Infamy fol-
lows American-born Chester Nakayama, a kind of
Fred Korematsu-like character, who struggles to
make sense of mysterious killings menacing the
Japanese Americans being interned. Actor Derek
Mio is convincing as Nakayama, balancing his red-
blooded American personality and expectations
with his immigrant family’s beliefs in Japanese
my tholog y and the supernatural. To complicate
things further, he’s embroiled in a relationship with
the gorgeous and pregnant Luz (Cristina Rodlo),
whose “Mexican” accent sounds like a combina-
tion of Ukrainian and Australian, and who willingly
enters the internment camp in order to stay by
Nakayama’s side.
He is also separated from his father, a stoic and
resilient fisherman (an outstanding performance
by a wonderfully grumpy Shingo Usami) who is
being detained in the freezing cold environs of
South Dakota, ice fishing for sur vival. As Nakayama
and his family tr y to make their horse stalls as
homey as possible, various members of their com-
munity are being possessed by evil demons that
force them to commit suicide or are killed by the
American soldiers guarding them, with many
appalling gross-out moments sure to please even
the most diehard horror fans.
A gloomy gray pall haunts the entire art direc-
tion of The Terror: Infamy, from the dr yer lint-like
fog blanketing Terminal Island (shouldn’t the Cal-
ifornia coastal island off San Pedro be a bit sunnier
in real life?) to the prison camp in Colinas de Oro,
Oregon. The costume and set design is period-per-
fect, from the puffed shoulders on Luz’s cardigan
sweater to the shiny, black Packard sedan that plays
a crucial role in the Nakayama family drama.Warm amber light bathes the tea ceremony as
Yuko, the beautiful spirit girl, reads Nakayama’s
fortune in the tea leaves. A jade green sky stretches
across the horizon, creating a bizarre ref lection in
the frozen lake, with its patches of splintering ice
and snow. As with The Terror’s first season, these
striking moments of cinematography captured on
location in Vancouver are more worthy of a cine-
ma-plex than palm-sized phone screens, on which
the show will, realistically speaking, probably be
viewed.
Overall, Infamy is an emotionally taxing watch.
When you’re not cringing because of a hairpin
going where no hairpin should, you’re outraged
as Nakayama and his father battle over dueling
notions of masculinity, when in reality no man,
woman or child should suffer the indignity of a
race-based prison camp. And lastly, depression hits
when you realize that these kind of camps should be
ancient histor y, but they’re still alive and well in the
migrant detention centers of Texas and California.
The real horror is how little we’ve learned in the
past 60 years.Boo Camp
Thrills, chills and blood spills in a Japanese American internment camp haunted by spirits.
CUP OF TEA? Yuko, the beautiful spirit girl, reads Nakayama’s fortune in the tea leaves. Photo courtesy of Ed Araquel/AMC.CM