When viewers meet Captain John Franklin (Ciarán Hinds) in the show’s pilot, he has no reason to think he’s not a modern argonaut embarking on a great colonial adventure. Sure, the two ships under his care—the Erebus and the Terror—are inauspiciously named, and their mission to locate the fabled Northwest Passage is a treacherous one now that the Arctic summer is winding down. But the only immediate trouble at first seems to be minor personal tensions between Franklin and Captain Crozier (Jared Harris) of the Terror, a sharp-tongued alcoholic whose affectionate relationship with his commander has grown strained. When the Erebus breaks its propeller on floating ice, the optimistic Franklin decides to forge ahead in hopes of reaching open water. It’s a bad gamble, and soon both ships are irretrievably stuck.

Over the next six episodes, the ramifications of that mistake echo outward. A mission to a nearby shoreline ends in a glimpse of a terrible, loping shape out in the dark, the accidental shooting of an Inuit shaman, and the capture of the shaman’s daughter, whom the crew dubs Lady Silence (Nive Nielsen). Provisions begin turning up spoiled, or riddled with bits of lead that leave crew members with splitting headaches and rotting teeth. When they can get Lady Silence to speak, she warns them in her own language of something called a “Tuunbaq,” and tells them they must leave as soon as possible. But as the elements and monster close in, it becomes clear that leaving or staying are likely to mean the same thing: death.

Survival horror is a nebulous term, and one that’s more popularly applied to video games—the Resident Evil franchise is one classic of the genre. Still, when you look at other media, you could argue that Jack London’s short story To Build a Fire and films like The Descent or Open Water are good narrative examples of survival horror. In these kinds of works, there’s never enough food—much less bullets—and no help is coming. The genre tends to cast wild environments as both lethal in their own right and as an impediment to characters facing a more actively aggressive foe.

The spelunkers of The Descent are stuck in utter darkness below the Appalachian mountains even without cannibal troglodytes; to be left alone out in the Atlantic Ocean, as in Open Water, is awful enough without sharks. When the sharks and troglodytes show up, they do so as extrapolations of the environment’s existing dangers, not as an injection of horror into an otherwise normal place. This is part of what makes The Walking Dead franchise, television’s best known member of the genre, a marginal case—a zombie apocalypse certainly counts as an environmental hazard, but it isn’t exactly a logical outgrowth of the Georgia countryside.

AMC

By paying careful attention to landscapes, however, The Terror harkens back to the tradition of setting-specific films like The Descent. As rendered using green screens and soundstages, the pack trapping the ships is subtly off-kilter, a maze of ice laid out in alien geometries. Rocky shorelines stretch away beneath empty skies; a brief dip beneath the ice-pack reveals the endless dark waters below the ships. The Arctic temperatures are a constant and deadly enemy: Characters who touch ropes or metal without gloves get the skin ripped off their palms or lose their toes to frostbite. Life below deck is accompanied by the endless creak and groan of the ice pressing against the ships’ wooden hulls. The result is an overwhelming claustrophobia, even in the middle of a punishing void.