AMC’s “The Terror: Infamy” opens with a young Japanese American woman serenely applying makeup before stabbing herself.

It’s a gut-punch of a scene — exactly what co-creator Alexander Woo wants to convey in the horror anthology series.

“The strategy has been to use the vocabulary of Japanese kaidan — or ghost stories — as an analogy for the terror of the historical experience,” says Woo, 47, citing films such as “The Ring” and “The Grudge” as examples. “So in feeling all those things [viewers] feel when they watch a scary movie — palms sweating, heart beating fast — it gives them access into the plight of the Japanese Americans in our show.”

“The Terror: Infamy” (Mondays at 9 p.m.) is a 10-episode historical horror/drama that follows Chester (Derek Mio), a young Japanese American who, along with the rest of his family, is forcibly relocated to an internment camp in California following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. The mysterious young woman (Yuki Morita) from the opening scene haunts them throughout the rest of the story.

Woo says there’s a reason the series is titled “Infamy,” the key word in President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s famous “day which will live in infamy” speech to Congress following the Pearl Harbor attacks.

“We’re turning the word ‘infamy’ on its head here,” he says. “What FDR referred to as an attack by the Japanese government on US soil now has two more meanings: one is this infamous act of the US government upon its own people, and [the second] is the character whose history is also infamous and who haunts the show.”

The acclaimed first season of AMC’s anthology series, called “The Terror,” starred Jared Harris (“Chernobyl”) and mixed history with the supernatural, following a doomed British Arctic naval expedition in the 1840s. George Takei, who co-stars in “The Terror: Infamy” as a community elder, acted as a consultant on the second season, providing Woo with insight about his own experience. The “Star Trek” legend lived with his family in a Japanese American internment camp in Arkansas for three years, from age 5 through 8.

Woo says that one of the most important things he learned from Takei is that it wasn’t all doom and gloom — despite the grim subject matter.

“We asked him, ‘Is there something that people get wrong when they do filmed representations of the internment?’ and we were told, ‘They make it too miserable,’ ” he says. “What he meant, of course, was that it was a grossly unjust act and there was a great deal of sadness and misery — but it’s also the story of resilience and resourcefulness.

“These people who were imprisoned in the middle of nowhere persevered and made a home out of this prison,” he says. “So visually, what we’ve tried to do in our show is to take this place that is barely structures of any kind at the beginning — because the camp hadn’t really been finished when they got there — and then slowly, over the course of the season, the garden is nicer, the barracks are made into a home.

“It’s a testament to the resilience of people [such as Takei’s father], who said, ‘We’re going to make a home for our children out of this misery.’ ”