Director: Various
First aired: 2026
Contains spoilers
The Terror is an anthology TV series, where each season is a standalone story. Devil in Silver is season 3 and is the first in a contemporary setting. It locates itself in a secure mental health facility, and an underscoring theme is systemic failure in the US mental health services and healthcare generally. However, there is a presence in the hospital also.
 |
| Dan Stevens as Pepper |
The primary character is Pepper (Dan Stevens, Abigail, Apostle & Vamps) a mover by trade, he was in a heavy metal band, as the drummer, and wants to do drum lessons for neighbourhood kids on the side. His girlfriend, Marisol (Juani Feliz), isn’t quite onboard with buying a drumkit – which he impulse does – and their call regarding the purchase is interrupted by her physically abusive ex. Pepper gets back, ends up assaulting the boyfriend, and fighting with a group intervening – who happen to be cops.
 |
| Judith Light as Dorry |
The cops arrest him but they don’t want the paperwork and so take him to New Hyde hospital, a run down facility, whose chief doctor, Anand (Aasif Mandvi), admits him. Comply with treatment for 72 hours and he can leave, but compliance proves impossible, partly because it is made to be so - for instance he must take all his meds, but the meds knock him out so he can’t take certain doses and is thus non-compliant - and partly because his personality doesn’t handle compliance with authority well. What we have also seen is that something is haunting the hospital and is feeding on the misery of the patients.
 |
| CCH Pounder as Miss Chris |
We see very early on two presences, later revealed to be one and the same. One is tied to an apparently comatose patient and seems to be capable of assaulting patients. The other seems to be the apparition of the founding (and deceased) doctor Walter (John Benjamin Hickey). It is head nurse Miss Chris (CCH Pounder) who later identifies the presence as a duppy – which is an Afro-Caribbean spirit that is sometimes thought to attach itself to someone and feed on their vitality and emotions. Later the duppy says the hospital had once provided good eating. Interestingly the lore she offers is that they can be stalled by throwing rice they have to count, this arithmomania being very much a trope of the vampire genre, along with a need to retreat to the spirit world when the sun rises.
 |
| the duppy in Dr Walter form |
What we eventually discovered is that the duppy had attached itself to Dr Walter and became trapped in the hospital when he was murdered by an inmate. Walter was no angel, compulsively lobotomising patients, but this seems to be the influence of the duppy, which now takes his form, though his flesh often sags, offering an uncanny air. Towards the end of the season we see the duppy rip the flesh from his face to horrify the witness. He will take other forms and also communicates through payphones. With the duppy we also get vampiric possession, something akin to a vampiric ghost (the actual folklore has the duppy as the earthbound one of the two souls a person has), and the physical creature terrorising (and sometimes killing) the patients is the murderous and apparently comatose inmate when possessed. The duppy needs inviting in to a person.
 |
| the duppy in creature form |
The season isn’t long – 6 episodes in total – with a denouement that perhaps speeds at the viewer a tad quickly. However it takes its time to build the characters and Dan Stevens gives a great performance, special mention should be given to Chinaza Uche who plays Pepper’s roommate Coffee and Judith Light who offers a fantastically nuanced performance as Dorry. The scares, however, were low with the season reaching for atmosphere and perhaps pulling away from being too visceral. The UK Blu-Ray has minimal special features, consisting of a picture gallery and a very brief inside look at the season. 6.5 out of 10.
The imdb page is here.
On Demand @ Amazon US
On Blu-Ray @ Amazon UK
No comments:
Post a Comment