麻豆传媒

Prod. David Kajganich
AMC

Dir. Johan Renck
HBO/Sky TV

I AM not the kind of person who likes to be scared. I wouldn鈥檛 voluntarily go to a haunted house, and when I watch horror movies, I tend to scrunch up into a ball and peer through my fingers like a child. I have even been known to scream in cinemas.

But, surprisingly, I haven鈥檛 been able to tear myself away from two completely terrifying recent TV shows. The first is the aptly named The Terror, a dramatisation of a mysterious 19th-century Arctic expedition led by naval officer John Franklin.

On this ill-fated voyage, two British ships and the 129 men aboard them vanished while seeking the fabled North-West Passage, a stretch of water that runs through the icy seas off the northern coast of Canada, linking the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.

It is full of executive producer Ridley Scott鈥檚 signature style: ominous music leading to jump scares. These make me shrink into the cushions on my couch. It is a show that plays on our fear of the dark and the unknown terrors that it holds.

The vastness of the Arctic makes for stunning aerial shots of the frigid sea that evoke a feeling of extreme isolation. Interior and exterior shots are taken from above, as if you are looking down on history, but the show doesn鈥檛 let the viewer off the hook 鈥� you also get up close and personal with the terror these men felt in the face of a wilderness they had the hubris to try to tame.

鈥淭hese are stories that are driven by stubborn attitudes, by superiors who insist on keeping to a doomed path鈥�

贬叠翱鈥檚 Chernobyl, a docudrama about the 1986 catastrophe at the nuclear power plant of that name, pulses with a different kind of horror. For the viewer, of course, it is very much a terror of the known.

The depiction of the head-in-the-sand approach to the infamous reactor meltdown in what was then part of the USSR, and the effects of vast amounts of radiation spewing onto a nearby town for days, is so frustrating that I was screaming at my television for entirely different reasons.

This time it was the gentle cinematography and the quiet, simple moments that horrified, because I knew what the characters didn鈥檛.

In one scene, a few hours after the explosion at the plant, a young family joins their neighbours outside to watch the glow of the fire against the night sky as if attending a fireworks display.

Flakes of ash begin to fall slowly around them, touching their cheeks and clothing and settling on their baby鈥檚 skin. The children of the neighbourhood look gleeful to be hopping around on a sand spit, playing in the falling 鈥渟now鈥�. They couldn鈥檛 know that they were dancing to their doom. But I did, and was sick with horror.

In both these dramatisations of real stories, things start badly and get worse. Both stories are driven by a stubborn push through insurmountable trouble 鈥� by superiors who insist on keeping to a doomed path. And for what? For the sailors, it is a dream of glory. For the politicians involved in Chernobyl, it is blind patriotism.

The scariest part of both tales is that these actions and motives aren鈥檛 that difficult to empathise with. I鈥檇 like to think that if I found myself sailing into icy waters or facing the heat and radiation of a failed reactor, I would be smarter than these people were. I hope I would turn back, or call for help, or at the very least try to put the preservation of life before the tantalising taste of victory.

But in reality, I don鈥檛 know if I would. Maybe that is the scariest part of all.