Dan Stevens Says The Terror: Devil in Silver Blends Horror With “Warmth and Humanity”

Whether it’s isolation, history, trauma, or systems that fail people, the fear always comes from something deeper, and The Terror: Devil in Silver continues that tradition in unsettling ways.

Dan Stevens stars as Pepper, a man who finds himself trapped inside New Hyde psychiatric facility while trying to understand whether the horrors unfolding around him are supernatural, psychological, systemic — or all three at once. 

But as Stevens explained during our conversation, the series isn’t just interested in monsters lurking in the hallways. It’s also interested in the demons people carry with them — and the systems that decide who gets discarded.

Speaking with TV Fanatic, Stevens opened up about Pepper’s journey, balancing horror with humor, and why Devil in Silver offers something audiences may not have seen before.

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Hi, Dan, how are you?

How’s it going? Yeah, good.

Good, good. So let’s talk The Terror.

Please.

Pepper enters this story convinced that he doesn’t belong in this system. Why was that the right lens to introduce the audience to this story?

Great question. I think, you know, the idea of wrongful incarceration is such a haunting one. It’s such a classic one, and it offers such a contained, claustrophobic environment for storytelling. 

I think what’s interesting about our version of that genre is that Pepper is not an innocent. He’s not arriving completely blameless. He is just being treated horribly by this moment, but he’s got his own demons to fight.

And there’s obviously a literal demon in the hallways. There are inner demons. And then there are also the demons of the system, the American healthcare system, and how we treat mental illness, battling both at the same time.

What I enjoy about genre is that it builds on those classic tropes. And it’s like, okay, well, this is a man who’s in the wrong psychiatric institution, but how is ours going to be different? What are you going to see [in Devil in Silver] that you’ve never seen before?

And that’s always a fun question to answer while you’re making a show like this.

So what are we going to see that we haven’t seen elsewhere?

I knew you were going to ask me that. Alongside an actual monster hunt? An existential journey and a social critique. Those three things sort of braided together with warmth and humor and humanity, as well as gore, horror, and suspense. That’s a pretty unusual package.

I love how Pepper’s pretty much put through the wringer almost immediately. You have to get pretty physical, not only with your acting but also with battling these demons. What was it like to shape that character while still keeping him rather grounded?

It was certainly a fun character to sort of bring together this idea of a faded rocker, who, you know, was rather impulsive and sought to solve things with violence. He hadn’t really done the work, as they like to say these days. 

So to put him through the wringer with these demons —literal and figurative — was a fun mill to put him through  as an actor, and realizing what needed to be done. But it was very physical, and I was increasingly beaten up.

I looked and felt worse as the show went on, which is exactly what we wanted.

And Pepper’s constantly being told, in one way or another, that his understanding of what’s happening isn’t reliable. So how do you approach that tension?

That’s part of what we want to engender in the audience there. You’ve got Pepper, who is not quite sure what’s happening and feels the injustice of it very keenly. But we want to be taken along for the ride, figuring out the puzzle as we go.

And Pepper is sort of doing that as well. Like, what the actual hell is happening here, you know? And I think that’s a fun dynamic between the audience and the protagonist to go on.

And as both the lead and an executive producer, how involved were you in shaping the tone of the series, especially balancing the psychological and supernatural elements?

I’m a small part of a much bigger machine, but it was very fun to lend my shoulder to the wheel in terms of the kind of tone we wanted to strike. And I think having someone like Karyn Kusama, who is one of the great horror directors of our time, to direct that first block and set the tone was great.

The way that it was cast really brought an unexpected warmth and humor and humanity to this kind of story that could have been quite sort of bleak and stark — it still is quite bleak and stark, to be honest. 

But the cast was so fun and funny, and brought such real character to their work that it somehow sort of elevated it from being just a gloomy, grim dirge to something that was much more sort of fully fleshed and alive.

And it was really delightful to foster and encourage that. We’re not here to be relentlessly serious for six hours, and actually bringing humor into horror is something that I really enjoy.

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Thanks for your time today and for representing rock fans everywhere with your Iron Maiden t-shirt. Rock on, man. Thanks, Dan.

[flashes devil horns] Thank you!

The Terror: Devil in Silver premieres on Thursday, May 6, on AMC+ and Shudder. We’ll have episodic reviews along the way, so clickity click to bookmark our show page with Grow!

The post Dan Stevens Says The Terror: Devil in Silver Blends Horror With “Warmth and Humanity” appeared first on TV Fanatic.