The Terror: Devil in Silver: Dan Stevens and Creators Break Down the Finale's Carnage

SPOILER ALERT: This post contains spoilers from the finale of The Terror: Devil in Silver, now streaming on AMC+ and Shudder.

New Hyde may be history, but the evil that once called it home has a new host.

In the final episode of AMC+ and Shudder's The Terror: Devil in Silver, the staff and residents of New Hyde Psychiatric Hospital fled for their lives during a storm that unleashed a few threats on them. First, Pepper (Dan Stevens) threw himself on the proverbial sword to go toe to toe with the demonically controlled ghost of Dr. Walter (John Benjamin Hickey), who was desperate for a new vessel as he felt the walls of New Hyde coming down around his eternal prison.

In the end, Walter knew exactly how to hitch a ride out of New Hyde. First, he jumped into Anthony (Hayward Leach), Pepper's son. When he attacked Pepper, the formerly lacking father finally saw a way to save his son and those he has come to love in this unexpected pit stop at New Hyde. So he accepted Walter's spirit — the demon taking the form of Walter, that is — into his own body, one that was riddled with shame and anger, aka the perfect pressure points for an evil leech.

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Although many of the residents and the cops didn't make it out alive — having been massacred by the hulking, bulging-eyed Arnold, who was the previous vessel for Walter — Pepper, Anthony, Miss Chris (CCH Pounder), and Loochie (b) were among the survivors. In the end, Pepper was remanded to a halfway house to continue his treatment with a new outlook on life. As he told Anthony, who willingly came to visit him, he was excited about the possibility of living for someone else. He was happy to continue to work on himself, especially now that he had an extra passenger in his body. In the final seconds, it was confirmed that an angry, parasitic Walter was in Pepper's ear trying to unlock his dark side. But Pepper was determined to keep him at bay.

"Every day is going to be a battle, but that is life and that's the lesson, and he can't run from it anymore," Stevens tells TV Guide. "It's always going to be there. It was always there. But it was harming him, it was harming others. Now it's about finding that harmony with that."

It was a rather hopeful ending, given the dark nature of the series, and Stevens believes Pepper camee out the other side with a lasting epiphany.

"You have to hold your problems within you and learn to accept them and integrate them and sort of move through life with that as part of your identity rather than trying to cut it out," Stevens continues. "There is certainly an emotional culmination to the journey of this show, for what is on the surface a sort of monster horror. But Pepper's inner demons were as haunting as anything exterior."

However, the series' setting in the hospital has always been a metaphor for the harmful healthcare system that most would call its own form of an American horror story. That final faceoff with Arnold's possessed, warped body is further proof of it.

"We have a monster roaming the wards killing patients, sure, but the real monster of the system does it with paperwork, with underfunding, with willful neglect," Stevens says. "It's the same result. It just has better PR."

Writers and showrunners Chris Cantwell and Victor LaValle, the latter of whom wrote the book on which the season is based, wanted to dig into that metaphor but not leave the audience with too much dread coming out of the finale. They didn't want a fairy-tale ending, per se, but rather, what LaValle deems the realization that "each of us is tested every day to be the best version of ourselves."

"One of the things that we felt very early on was that we didn't want to tell a hopeless story," LaValle says. "For all the absolute carnage that a lot of the characters go through and for the ones who don't even make it out, we didn't want to put you through the ringer and at the end tell you to go cry alone. People want to see change is possible. Hope is possible. Things can change for people if they're willing to wrestle with their demons."

Pushing Pepper to that threshold was key for Cantwell and executive producer Karyn Kusama.

"We need to see how much a man like Pepper can endure before he's ready to own up to his flaws and maybe the help he needs, and the ability to say to someone, 'I'm sorry,' and actually mean it," Cantwell says. "It's a hell of a lot for a guy like Pepper and a man in the 21st century to do that. That was a very potent part of the story for Karyn and for me."

LaValle adds: "It's showing himself and other people like Pepper that you can embrace a new way of being, a more vulnerable way of being, a kinder way of being that it isn't any less masculine and it isn't any less powerful to apologize to your son for the ways you failed him. I think you're surprised when you see Pepper in a year and he's like, 'Have you ever heard of this Nine Inch Nails band?'
What I'm saying is at least he's been dragged into a '90s way of thinking, with his music and with his vulnerability."

More on The Terror:

• The Terror: Devil in Silver review: Dan Stevens electrifies AMC's horror anthology
• Dan Stevens reveals why he wanted to walk the hellish hallways of The Terror

The scene at the end of the episode, where Pepper beared his soul to Anthony in this new chapter in his life, almost didn't close out the series. Originally, there were discussions on where to put what Cantwell calls a "quiet, fragile piece" of Pepper's soul. In the writers room, they discussed him saying some of those things to Loochie throughout the finale, but ultimately, they couldn't dance around to whom it should be directed.

"I still remember, it was kind of an epiphany in the room that he should say this to the man, to his child, that it was meant for," Cantwell says. "That's when it clicked. We just felt like it was the most powerful, dramatic statement for the character to go through all of this so that he can have that conversation with his son. That, to us, was the reason for the show to happen."

But what about the malevolent spirit that now shares a meat suit with Pepper? Did it — as Dr. Walter, who performed 813 lobotomies and has spent the last 50 years hoping to take its show on the road — find what he wanted in Pepper? Cantwell and LaValle like to think that Pepper is making himself more inhospitable by the day.

"The devil, or whatever this essence is, feeds on anger and rage and pain and agony," Cantwell says. "So if Pepper has allowed that to dissipate, what is there left for the devil to feed on inside him? There's a version of this where whatever that thing is starves to death. That could take 30 years. Pepper might be celebrating his 70th birthday and Dr. Walters is but a whisper. But he's in it for the long haul. It's hard work."

The Terror: Devil in Silver is now streaming on AMC+ and Shudder.