Warning: Some SPOILERS lie ahead for The Terror: The Devil in Silver episode 2, “Disturbed”! Dan Stevens’ Pepper has come face-to-face with New Hyde’s most terrifying resident in the latest The Terror: The Devil in Silver episode, and the team is breaking down its debut.
Season 3 of the Ridley Scott-produced anthology horror series is adapting Victor LaValle’s novel of the same name, in which Stevens’ character is wrongfully imprisoned in a decaying psychiatric hospital under the guise of being a violent perpetrator. The premiere, “November in My Soul,” saw Pepper confronted by haunting visions of a malevolent entity living in the ceiling and behind the walls, while also ending with Phillip Ettinger’s Louie seeing a vision of the hospital’s founder, John Benjamin Hickey’s Dr. Walter, and being forced to shoot and kill himself.
As much of the second episode, “Disturbed,” saw him trying to get an answer about the eponymous entity, its ending found Pepper coming directly in contact with a form of New Hyde’s devil, a figure with an old man’s body and the head and hooves of a bison. The devil attacked Pepper with its hooves, though only brief glimpses are shown of the entity before CCH Pounder’s Miss Chris and Hampton Fluker’s Scotch Tape enter the room and turn the lights on, escorting a mysterious older-looking patient away.
Ahead of the show’s premiere, ScreenRant‘s Grant Hermanns interviewed Victor LaValle, Chris Cantwell and Karyn Kusama to discuss The Terror: The Devil in Silver. When asked about the creation of the bison-headed devil, also an entity in the novel, Kusama began by describing it as a figure who “comes from figments of everyone’s collective imagination,” leading the director/executive producer and her team to “think about the way we see bigger-than-life images” with unique origins, like “a buffalo on a coin becoming this bigger-than-life monster“:
Karyn Kusama: So, it was a combination of figuring out what those flashes could be, those glimpses into what the monster was, along with then creating an actual entity of some kind. It took some trial and error, but I think we got there. It was not easy, I’ll say that, because as is the case in Jaws, what you realize is something is more interesting the less you see of it when it comes to the monster. It’s always more interesting to focus on the characters, and their terror of what is in front of them.
Kusama also shared that with The Terror season 3’s story, in particular, the audience and characters are meant to ponder whether the instances “they are engaging with monsters” are even real or entirely in their heads. As such, when it came to deciding how much of the bison-headed devil to show in episode 2, “it was important to strike a balance between something that felt very material,” that the actors and team could have “in front of us that we could touch and smell and feel,” with something “a little more ephemeral and more like a psychological apparition.”
LaValle went on to share that, in the writers’ room, they “figured out fairly quickly [that] that the original monster devil from the book would be” in The Terror: The Devil in Silver, but found themselves wanting to evolve the source material to explore “what would be the boss behind that boss?” This led to them exploring ways to maintain “a grounded sort of feel” to the world and characters of the show but still add “real supernatural terror” to the mix, leading them to realize it could “be more awful if we get an actor to embody that” evil:
Victor LaValle: As wonderful as a special effect is, it’s still an effect versus what an actor can bring. And an actor as wonderful as John Benjamin Hickey, how could he make that evil feel even more sinister by personifying it? And then he just knocked it out.
Cantwell concurred that in casting an actor to more frequently be an embodiment of the show’s devil rather than the bison-headed figure from The Devil in Silver, they could tap into what he finds to be “the scariest stuff” of elements that “could really be happening right now on a human level.” The co-creator/co-showrunner also recalled “a specific conversation” the team had about a certain sequence in which “this presence manifests” as a third actor, which played off the idea that “different people in the hospital are perceiving it in different ways.”
Chris Cantwell: It’s kind of digging into their inner psyche and their inner pain, but it shows up as a certain character. And we had conversations with the director of that block about how they would appear. And it was like, “Oh, should we black out the eyes? Should we have the eyes be all white?” But ultimately, I think what we did was we had this actor have his normal eyes and look directly at you and burn the lens as he’s talking to you/Pepper. You are Pepper in that moment. Connecting with someone through the eyes in film is so powerful.
Cantwell teased that depicting the “malevolent force” of the devil as a person without any changes to their eyes “really strikes at the heart” of the viewer as they look into the camera and “gets them on a primal level.” Though sharing that “we do stray from that several times” in the series with instances like the bison-headed form and elongated arms that injured Pepper while he was restrained, Cantwell described them as being “moments of intense punctuation” with the goal of “reminding the audience” there is an inhuman evil at work.
While the bison-headed figure and the scene of him assaulting Pepper is fairly faithful to the source novel, The Terror: The Devil in Silver has certainly taken a few new directions with its eponymous entity. The most notable is that of the aforementioned Dr. Walter, with ‘Salem’s Lot alum John Benjamin Hickey being an entirely original creation for the series, seemingly amplifying the theme of how broken systems within mental rehabilitation facilities hurt patients more than they help.
What’s currently unclear is how this shift in depicting devils taking on other forms could impact how The Terror translates The Devil in Silver for screen adaptation. In being a more tangible creature with its bison-headed form, Pepper and other patients had a more direct foe to face and ultimately try to kill for escape. However, with this series showing devils either taking on forms of other people or genuinely wearing their skin, it may not be as straightforward a path to eliminate it as presented in book.
Cantwell hints at how devils will take on forms of other actors entirely at some point during <em>The Terror: The Devil in Silver‘s run. With it playing off its prey’s psyche, there are various options for terrorizing Pepper—namely his girlfriend Marisol or her abusive ex-husband Ivan—or one officer who brought him there. However, since only two episodes have aired out of six total for this season so far, there’s potential for introducing yet another character.
Be sure to dive into some of our other Terror: Devil in Silver-related coverage with:
New episodes of The Terror: The Devil in Silver air Thursdays on AMC+ and Shudder.
