Karyn Kusama on Why The Terror: Devil in Silver Believes “Daring to Care” Is Always Worth the Effort

By the end of The Terror: Devil in Silver Episode 2, it’s clear the horror isn’t just coming from whatever is stalking the halls of New Hyde.

It’s coming from the institution itself.

That’s something executive producer and director Karyn Kusama understood immediately when she stepped into AMC’s latest installment of The Terror anthology. 

Across the first two episodes, Kusama establishes New Hyde not simply as a creepy psychiatric facility, but as a place shaped by neglect, bureaucracy, and the terrifying ease with which people can lose their humanity inside a broken system.

And yet, even with demons lurking in the shadows and genuinely unsettling moments unfolding at every turn, Devil in Silver never loses sight of the people trapped inside it.

Speaking with TV Fanatic, Kusama opened up about blending grounded emotional storytelling with supernatural horror, directing unforgettable cast performances, and why the series ultimately believes that daring to care is still worth the risk.  

You started out more in grounded drama, but you’ve lately moved into genre programming. What led to that shift?

Even when I started with a drama as my first feature, I think I was always interested in genre films. I think there’s so much that you can do with metaphor. And so there are so many things you can push in a genre film that wouldn’t work in a grounded drama.

What I really loved about Devil in Silver was that it was a little bit of both. 

It was, I hope, a pretty accurate and emotionally grounded depiction of a psychiatric unit that has been neglected over time and underfunded by the state, combined with some supernatural elements that, I think, in today’s world, I’m constantly asking about. 

So, you know, the notion of evil as a concept felt worthy of investigation.

The opening scene of Devil in Silver, and I’m running this after the first two episodes, really sets the tone for the creep factor. And I’m wondering what your priorities were in directing that moment to make the audience feel as unsettled as it actually felt.

Well, one of the biggest things that came across on the page was the sense that these kinds of incidents were nothing new. 

And so the sense that this was just another horrifying moment in the history of this hospital that people have to kind of endure and move on from very quickly in order to survive it psychologically. 

And so that window into what must be the terrible set of circumstances for the patients, along with the toll it might take on the staff, was part of how we looked at that opening.

We really wanted it to feel like a place that no one would want to land at. 

Mission accomplished.

Thank you. 

Most of the story is confined to New Hyde. And it’s obviously incredibly claustrophobic, and you can’t imagine being locked in there as an employee or as a patient. 

But how did you approach directing that space versus the few moments that we get to see of it, especially Pepper outside trying to survive his normal life?

I think the hope was that we could see in Pepper that he had very, very approachable, very familiar hopes and ambitions for himself. 

You know, he wanted to be a little bit better off next year than he was this year, like the most simple kinds of concerns that many of us hold near and dear. And that, in some respects, you could say is an American concern, but just kind of a human concern.

We just hope our circumstances get better. And so with that, I wanted to just sort of depict a modest working-class life.

And then depict New Hyde as the product of a kind of bureaucratic, institutional approach to humanity, that people can be penned and controlled like herds of cattle. 

I hope it has a real, disturbing, claustrophobic, unsettling feeling, because when Pepper lands at this institution of New Hyde, the hope is that the audience feels, on the one hand, on his side, but also, wow, that could have been me, right? Like any of us could land at a place like this.

And if we do, what would it be like to have most of our freedoms instantaneously taken away from us? So that was the challenge: to sort of figure out how to set up enough of a real-world outside to make landing at New Hyde feel catastrophic.

And then we have the characters who’ve been there for what seems like their whole lives. Judith Light, in particular.

We can tell that she’s seen some things. I absolutely loved the scene, the We Are the Buffalo scene, which is genuinely unsettling and a great performance.

Her performance really carries that. What’s your approach to directing moments like that that feel so intense without relying on any of the traditional horror elements?

My hope is that, by working with actors, we get to a place where the performance pulls the audience in and feels alive and real. And with an actor like Judith, she has so many skills at her disposal. 

She has so much depth of feeling for that character, Dory, that it was really about just working with her instincts in terms of what she was bringing to that particular scene and modulating it at times.

But really just paying attention to the rhythm and cadence and flow of that scene. She brought so much to it.

Also in The Terror Season 3 Episode 2, you have Steven Root, who’s kind of bringing a little more of the maybe oblivious and comedic aspect to it. How do you not lose the tone that you’re achieving with some of these scarier, darker elements by bringing in somebody like him?

Yeah, what an incredible actor. What I love about him, and all the actors, actually, is that no one played it for comedy. Although there was a kind of grim comedy inherent in much of it, they played it straight.

They just played it very, very grounded. And so Steven was a great example of taking the character at face value and believing he’s helping them. You know, he’s not coming with a diabolical agenda.

He thinks they’re going to actively discuss classics in book club, and that that’s going to be a constructive use of everyone’s time, when clearly there’s stuff happening among the patients that is deeply unsettling. 

And so he was just a great example of one of the kind of actors we were looking for who could play comedy effortlessly and never look down on the character. You know, always appreciate something about the character that they were playing.

Those scenes were so fun to shoot, so fun.

And my last question for you is, we also see at the end of the second episode, what happens when you dare to care? And I wonder how that plays out through the rest of the season? How does that speak to what terror is yet to come?

You bring up such a great, unsettling point about the series and how it reflects on the world we live in. The whole series is about daring to care and how that can come with tremendously dire circumstances. But I hope the series is also attempting to imagine that it’s always worth caring.

And so, yes, a lot of really bad things happen over the course of the series, tragic things. There’s also room for hope and room for escape and freedom and liberation because of that very care that you mentioned. 

So I hope that viewers will stick around for all the different ways that that plays out over the life of the series.

And I hope it really sparks conversation. 

Me too, me too. 

That’s always the best thing from these long-form series, that you can see something from a new perspective.

Totally agree. Thank you so much, Carissa. It was so nice to talk with you.

Don’t miss our other The Terror: Devil in Silver coverage, including interviews and episodic breakdowns of the episodes as they drop on Thursdays on AMC+ and Shudder.