As viewers of the The Terror have been eating up the show following its addition to ITV X, many will be wondering one specific question.
“Wait, what do you mean that’s based on a true story?”
The ‘bone chilling’ horror series starring Ciaran Hinds and Jared Harris follows a group of arctic explorers from the 1800s.
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Now admittedly, there are certain aspects in which the filmakers may have taken a little creative license.
Though we can’t promise you there wasn’t a huge hidden spirit polar beast bigger than a bear eating humans, there is unfortunately no signs that there was one.
Much of the rest of the show though was inspired by true events, and fans are only just finding out.
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Spoilers ahead for The Terror.
One post on the subreddit r/TheTerror saw a new fan asking how much was true to be met with the fact that it’s … well all of it.
The most shocking detail though that is genuinely true? The fact that when stuck in the ice, the crew members of the ship resorted to cannibalism to stay alive.
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Another fan commented: “All the characters aboard the ship and the white explorer at the beginning and end (John Rae) were based on real people on the expedition. Even if it's just a name on the ship's roster.
“The Inuit reported that the ships had become stuck in ice and that the men resorted to cannibalism.
“Unlike the show, they might not have deliberately killed each other to get the meat but just ate the already dead.
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“Men back in England including Franklin's widow and Charles Dickens did not like this and smeared John Rae's name.”
The Independent covered this true story, saying: “Cannibalism was suspected in Rae’s report, which was substantiated many years later by cut marks on some of the bones of bodies later recovered from the scene of the shipwrecks.
“Some of the bodies showed evidence of lead poisoning, which is believed to be the result of shoddily made containers used to store provisions.”
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The shipwrecks of the two ships in the show, including the titular Terror, were found in the last 10 years.
One ship, the Erebus, was located by Canadian archaeologists in 2014, whilst The Terror was discovered two years later.
A good description of the show’s true elements vs not comes in the form of a reddit comment on an r/horror post requesting the best ‘based on a true story’ horrors.
They commented: “Kind of an oddball choice but the first season of THE TERROR was based on a real incident. Those two ships were locked in the ice trying to find the Northwest Passage and no one survived.
“Obviously the show added horror and supernatural elements with the bear spirit monster, but the facts of starvation and death out on the ice were real.
“They do know that some of the crew abandoned the ships and tried to make it to civilization, and they did drag some weird things along with them (like a set of silver dinnerware) as depicted in the show.
“I can’t imagine the horror of surviving 2+ years on the ice plus a long trek across the tundra only to slowly starve to death in the middle of nowhere.”
Once again this is showing the scariest horror shows and films are ones based on real life.
Topics: Horror, TV and Film
Michael Slavin