Arctic Horror Is Having a Comeback
This article contains spoilers for The Terror and The North Water.
Of all the horrors of a 19th-century European voyage to the Arctic—noses and cheeks turned necrotic by frostbite, snow blindness, sea madness, broken bones badly knit—perhaps most ghastly was scurvy. The disease often starts with stiff limbs and ulcerating skin. Gums bleed and blacken, then engorge and protrude over the teeth or their absent weeping sockets like a dark second set of lips. This tissue is actively rotting, so living men smell dead. Odors and sounds become agonizingly, even dangerously, intense; hearing a gunshot can kill. And because many sufferers hallucinate that they are among the foods and comforts of home, some doctors called the affliction “nostalgia.”
Perhaps Mary Shelley had such grotesque agonies in mind when she set the opening of Frankenstein on the Arctic Ocean, where a sailor named Robert Walton rescues the novel’s titular doctor and learns of his black-lipped, mottle-skinned creation. It was certainly a pointed location for a novel critiquing Promethean dreams: For much of the 19th century, English ships hazarded ice floes in search of glory, profit, and an open polar sea that did not exist.
Two hundred years later, that dream is no longer a chimera—routesand and the series have been set in the region’s semi-present, while the sled dogs of the movies and haveevoked its past.
