When is The Terror: Infamy on TV? Who’s in the cast and what’s it about?
George Takei and Torchwood’s Naoko Mori star in this historical fantasy series
Following on from the Arctic explorers of season one, the new setting for The Terror moves to World War Two-era Japanese-American internment camps, with a new supernatural threat combining with real-life history.
“It's a really interesting combination of history and drama, with Japanese folklore and horror elements to it,” star Naoko Mori told RadioTimes.com – but where can UK viewers see it, and what happens?
Check out everything you need to know about The Terror: Infamy below.
When is The Terror: Infamy on TV?
The historical/fantasy series is already airing on US network AMC over in America, but it comes to UK television (specifically AMC UK, available on BT TV channel 332) on Monday 7th October at 9.00pm.
Is there a trailer for The Terror season two?
There is indeed – it came out a while ago in America, after all – but if you haven’t seen it you can watch it in all its spooky glory here.
Who stars in The Terror: Infamy?
Derek Mio leads the cast as young Japanese-American man Chester Nakayama, with Cristina Rodlo playing his girlfriend Luz and Singo Usami and Naoko Mori playing his parents Henry and Asako.
Kiki Sukezane stars as Yuko, Miki Ishikawa plays Amy and Star Trek legend George Takei – whose own time in Japanese internment camps helping inspire the series.
“Not only is he a legend, he's one of the funniest, eloquent and loveliest men I know. And incredibly bright and intelligent,” Mori told us of working with Takei.
“He was imprisoned by the government at the age of five, and he was telling us stories about how he would wake up every morning, surrounded by barbed wire and soldiers.
“He would tell us these stories and what he went through. So that was a huge huge resource.”
The series also stars James Saito, Reilly Dolman, C. Thomas Howell, Reed Diamond and Hira Ambrosino among others.
What’s the story of The Terror: Infamy?
The Terror: Infamy follows the lives of the Nakayama family as they’re menaced by a shapeshifting supernatural creature called a bakemono, described in show materials as "an uncanny specter that menaces a Japanese-American community from its home in Southern California to the internment camps to the war in the Pacific."
Specifically the series is based around the experiences of Chester (Mio), who ends up in a Japanese-American internment camp then heads to World War Two’s Pacific campaign as a translator, pursued all the while by a terrifying creature.
What is the real history behind The Terror: Infamy?
Around 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry living in America were forced into internment camps in 1942, following the attach on Pearl Harbor by Imperial Japan.
This cruel policy from President Roosevelt was seemingly inspired by racism more than anything else, and in later years the US Government paid around $1.6billion in reparations to the victims and their heirs.
“This show is groundbreaking,” Takei, who was taken to such a camp with his family when he was five, said in a release.
“There have been a few movies about the internment, a few TV episodes. But they were just background for a love story. With this, we have ten episodes. That means ten hours, spread over a ten-week period to tell this story. We can go into detail.
“Right after Pearl Harbor, young Japanese Americans, like all young Americans, rushed to the recruitment centres to volunteer to serve in the US military. This act of patriotism was answered with a denial. They were denied military service and categorized as enemy alien, which was crazy. And then we were imprisoned.
“After a year of imprisonment,” Takei continued, “the government realized there's a wartime manpower shortage. And here are all these young people they could have had, but we categorized them as enemies.
"How do we justify drafting them out of a barbed wire prison camp? Their solution was a loyalty questionnaire. Can you imagine, after impoverishing you and imprisoning you for a year, they demanded loyalty, very sloppily put together.”
“It’s not generally told because it's a shameful story of America,” he said.
“It's one of the chapters that most people want to keep hidden. But I feel that this chapter of American history is probably one of the more important chapters because I think we learn more from the times that we made mistakes, grave mistakes, than from the many, many glorious chapters that we already have and know about.”
