Terror Camp is a fandom-led, thriller-inspired conference you shouldn’t miss

In early October, a certain sector of the internet blew up over an incredible revelation: DNA analysis had identified skeletal remains from the 1845 Franklin expedition as belonging to Captain James Fitzjames.

Also, judging by knife marks on the skeleton’s mandible, it seems as if the surviving crew had cannibalized his face.

The identification of Fitzjames’ remains is huge news within the academic community, but also to fans of AMC’s 2018 television series The Terror (itself adapted from Dan Simmons’ book of the same name). The overlap between those two groups is bigger than you might think.

Fitzjames will certainly be a topic of conversation at this year’s Terror Camp, the event of the year for the polar-obsessed and extremely online.

Terror Camp, now in its fourth year, is an academic conference that grew out of fandom around The Terror and its depiction of the Franklin expedition’s years trapped in the Arctic ice. Since then, it’s grown to encompass Arctic and Antarctic exploration more broadly, while still keeping analysis of the television series at its core. (Disclosure: One of Terror Camp’s founders, Allegra Rosenberg, is a personal friend and a Polygon contributor.)

Terror Camp is a pay-what-you-want digital conference that streams on Discord starting on Friday, Dec. 6, with panels through Sunday, Dec. 8. Registration is open until 11 a.m. EST on Thursday, Dec. 5 (though I was told that volunteers are watching the sign-up inbox and you can technically register late).

“It came out of the fandom,” historian Sarah Pickman, one of this year’s organizers, told me. “It came out of fans wanting to talk about the show, wanting to really dive into the show and do really serious analysis.”

Pickman herself was already pursuing a Ph.D. in Yale’s History of Science and Medicine program when she watched The Terror.

Since the first conference in 2020, the scope of the event has changed — and its attendance has expanded.

“[Terror Camp] has grown to encompass some people who are in academia, some people who aren’t,” Pickman told me. “All people who are just united by this amazing love for this history and really thinking deeply about how the Arctic and Antarctica are represented in media, including in The Terror.”

Friday’s keynote will feature Jessica Houston, the co-leader of a modern, all-woman Arctic expedition called Beyond Her Horizons. 

“The expedition was designed to respond to male-dominated — male- and white-dominated — narratives of Arctic exploration,” Pickman says. “It was a cohort entirely of women, including Indigenous Arctic women, collecting stories, doing artistic interventions, documenting oral histories, things like that.”

On Saturday, actors Jared Harris and Liam Garrigan, who respectively play Captain Francis Crozier and his steward Thomas Jopson, will do a Q&A and reflect on their experiences filming the show.

Sandwiched between these big-name keynotes are panels on topics as niche as they are diverse. An analysis of Tennyson’s epitaph for the ill-fated Captain John Franklin sits alongside another session discussing the relationship between queerness and cannibalism in Western media. That’s the magic of Terror Camp — it’s an example of how the fan community that originally grew out of a love for the show has transformed into a celebration and exploration of knowledge and all things polar. 

“One of the cool things about Terror Camp is that there are various structures in academia and traditional academic conferences that can be gatekeeping mechanisms,” Pickman said. “But this one is just like: If you’re interested, just show up. You don’t have to wait to try to break down the doors, to be part of a more traditional academic conversation. We could just have our own conversation here and expand the scope of people who can just unabashedly be really passionate about this material.”

I’ve attended Terror Camp twice now, and every time I’ve been stunned by the thoughtfulness of the community and the quality of the programming. It’s a truly geeky, wonderful embrace of how the love of a TV show can turn into something much bigger.

If you can’t sit in for this year’s Terror Camp, here’s a backup plan: All 10 episodes of The Terror season 1 are streaming on Netflix, Prime Video, and Shudder.