The Terror

On the surface, The Terror is about starvation, mutiny, and a beast stalking the British sailors of the doomed Franklin Expedition. However, at its core, Simmons’s novel is a dramatization of the arrogance and violence of colonialism itself. Empire, Simmons suggests, isn’t only the backdrop for horror, but is the horror. The expedition is undone not just by bad luck, poor planning, or supernatural forces, but by colonial hubris.

From the beginning, the British treat the Inuit as marginal, primitive, or irrelevant. Their language is dismissed as gibberish, their survival techniques ignored, and their cosmology derided as superstition. Even Lady Silence is rendered voiceless figuratively as well as literally, since she’s treated as an object of curiosity or fear rather than as a person. The horror here is double. On one level, the erasure of the Inuit is presented as a typical colonial pattern, denying Indigenous peoples as bearers of knowledge or power. On another level, Simmons inverts this hierarchy: The very “superstitions” dismissed by the British turn out to be true. The Tuunbaq only attacks after the British shoot and kill Silence’s father. It literalizes colonial horror by embodying what the empire refuses to recognize: That the land isn’t empty but spiritually alive, and that its laws cannot be violated without consequence.

The survival strategies ignored by the expedition are also the only ones that work, as Inuit knowledge becomes the difference between life and death. Silence is the only figure truly attuned to the Tuunbaq and the spiritual ecology of the Arctic. By refusing to learn from her, most of the British are doomed. As Crozier later thinks, regarding King William Island, “the angilak qikiqtaq, or ‘biggest island,’ that James Ross had named King William Land so long ago, ignoring the fact that the natives who had told him about it had kept calling it qikiqtaq, qikiqtaq, qikiqtak” (915). Both Ross and the later Franklin Expedition deny Indigenous knowledge and lose precious time and resources in doing so. Colonialism isn’t just cruelty to others; it’s self-destruction through willful ignorance.

Another crucial strand of horror is the degeneration of European order into moral savagery. At the start, the men cling to naval hierarchy and discipline, but as the expedition falters, these structures collapse. Hunger and cold erode loyalty. Morale dissolves into mutiny, murder, and eventually cannibalism. Hickey’s rise shows how the colonial order isn’t only fragile but also ripe for inversion. Cannibalism is the ultimate horror here because of what it signifies about empire. Colonialism often defined itself in opposition to the supposedly “savage” Other; Simmons flips this script by showing the British as the ones who resort to consuming one another. The horror is in the recognition that their supposed superiority hides the brutal realities of imperialist exploitation.

Simmons suggests that colonialism is unsustainable because it denies relationship, balance, and humility. Empire sees the world as a resource and territory, not as a living system. The horror of The Terror lies in watching that worldview unravel. When stripped of supply lines, status, and ceremony, the imperial body devours itself.