Movies & TV The Terror: Devil in Silver The Terror: Devil in Silver Co-Showrunners & Director Talk About Filming in a Former Prison Victor La Valle, Christpoher Cantwell and Karyn Kusama talked to Reactor about their upcoming AMC+/Shudder series By Vanessa Armstrong | Published on April 3, 2026 Photo Credit: Emily V. Aragones/AMC Comment 0 Share New Share Photo Credit: Emily V. Aragones/AMC If you’ve seen the trailer or the opening scene for The Terror: Devil in Silver, you’re familiar with New Hyde mental institution—the foreboding place where most of the show takes place. On the series and in Victor LaValle’s eponymous book the show is based on, New Hyde is in New York. In both, it is also a major part of the story; a representation of there being something wrong with the system and situation the characters face. I could almost smell the corrupted dankness of New Hyde when watching it on screen, and for good reason: the show was shot on location at an abandoned correctional facility (and former VA hospital) in Staten Island. “The sense of claustrophobia and the sense of neglect in the space was the building block for us,” director Karyn Kusama told me in an interview. “There was definitely a spiritual and olfactory energy in the place that was very real.” LaValle, who I talked to in a separate interview with co-showrunner Christopher Cantwell, agreed that when he, Cantwell, and Kusama first walked in, they all said, “This place is horrible. It’s perfect.” It was so perfect, in fact, that they had to spruce it up, or else, as Cantwell joked, “If we just went in and shot it as is, people will be like, ‘I do not want to spend thirty seconds in this place.’” In the end, the production team had to repaint and restructure some of the building and then rough it up a bit. The crew, Cantwell explained, had to “bring it back to life and then bring it down just enough, and the added bonus was there’s seventy years of history in the walls of that place… and the psychic residue of that is present.” “It’s not meant to be sensible…” Photo Credit: Emily V. Aragones/AMC The building’s convoluted hallways also amplified the tone and themes of Devil in Silver. “If anyone from the crew got left behind or wandered down a different direction, [they] got lost,” Kusma said. “You can actually feel it in the design of it, that it’s not meant to be sensible—it’s not meant to lead you to an obvious exit… we didn’t have to work very hard to create that, that was just real. And so a lot of the times it was like we were having the uncanny experience that probably mirrored in some psychological way, Pepper’s experience, which is, ‘Wait, I was just in this hallway. But wait, is this the same hallway or a different hallway?’ It just looks exactly the same.” She added, “If there is a such thing as a space holding hopelessness, that was part of this space itself, and so we were really able to work with that and hopefully give the audience a little bit of a window into what Pepper and his fellow patients in that facility are feeling.” The location and the characters, in fact, are the two major elements LaValle wanted to make sure carried over from his novel. He also wanted to make sure the characters weren’t portrayed as evil, but victims of a larger system, which is represented by New Hyde on the show. “My feeling is that much of the time [in stories set in mental institutions], either the patients or the staff are treated as monstrous or inhuman or something like that. I definitely did not want was for us to fall into that trap… I felt like I had to make that declarative statement somehow. And everybody was like, ‘Yeah, we get that. Of course, we’re not going to do that.’ And I was like, ‘All right, great. Then let’s make a show.’” You can watch the show they made when The Terror: Devil in Silver premieres on May 7, 2026, on AMC+ and Shudder.[end-mark] The post <i>The Terror: Devil in Silver</i> Co-Showrunners & Director Talk About Filming in a Former Prison appeared first on Reactor.