The Terror (1963): Part One.

Bedeviled ravens are shrieking, a storm is raging, turbulent waves are crashing, and an elderly man moves through a castle keep as our latest feature begins already in earnest.

Apparently on a mission, this man, Baron Victor Von Leppe, will stop at nothing as he makes his way through the cobwebs, down some steps, and into the bowels of the castle, tracing a blood trail of unknown origin until he reaches a thick, metallic door.

But when the Baron pushes it open, rusted metal hinges screech, then break, and give way as a rotting corpse tumbles out and essentially falls into the audience’s lap as we crash cut to the opening credits (-- which may be Paul Julian’s best animated work yet).

We then cut to the beach, somewhere along the Baltic coast, presumably the following morning, where we spy a lone rider making his way along the waterline. This man, dressed in a military uniform, pauses to check his compass. 

Evidently lost, his compass is no help as it spins erratically and is quickly discarded. Then, he presses on as the unforgiving sun beats down upon him. For despite all the water, this man is dying of thirst.

Up on the cliffs adjoining the beach, another man watches as the rider passes by below until he falls off his steed in a delirium and lands in the sand unconscious. Here, the mystery man in black does not move to help but instead clears off, leaving the lost soldier to his fate.

But the incoming tide soon revives the rider, who then spots a woman wading in the surf near a notch in the surrounding rock formations. 

Unsure if this is an illusion in the glaring sunlight, the man calls out to the girl, announcing he has been separated from his regiment and is looking for the road to Colban. And most importantly of all, does she have any water?

The girl does not verbally respond to his hail but does lead him to a nearby brook, where the man buries his face into the freshwater. After he drinks his fill, the girl has seemingly disappeared. But then he spies her further upstream, filling a bucket with water.

Again, he calls out but gets no response. He introduces himself as Andre Duvalier (Nicholson), a Lieutenant in Napoleon's conquering army (-- which would put us somewhere around 1806). He wanted a chance to thank her, and assures that, one, he is not the enemy, and two, it’s not an act of treason to talk to him. For he is nothing but a weary, disillusioned soldier and she is the best sight he has seen in some seven months.

This gets a laugh and the girl finally speaks and gives her name, Helene (Knight). She then takes Duvalier by the hand and leads him back to the beach, near that notch in the rocks where he first spotted her. Then, as if in a trance or compelled, the girl wades into the water and soon disappears under the crashing waves.

A stupefied Duvalier moves to save her but is nearly drowned himself in the riptide. And on top of that, a hawk that has been trailing him all day suddenly attacks. And as the man tries to defend himself on all fronts, he is soon overwhelmed and once more blacks out. 

When he awakens, Duvalier is now inside a small cottage. He spots someone who he thinks is Helene, but after several blinks his vision clears to reveal it’s a much older woman tending to him. Duvalier then spots the hawk that attacked him roosting on his perch. But the elderly woman, Katrina (Neumann), swears the bird is harmless.

They are then joined by a man named Gustaf (Haze). Apparently, he was the one who found Duvalier half-drowned and brought him here. When he asks about the girl, Helene, Gustaf acts a little squirrely at the mere mention of her name; but Katrina swears there is no such person in these parts; and soon convinces their visitor, in his dehydrated condition, that what he saw was most likely a mirage.

Later, after a fitful bout of sleep, Duvalier awakes to see the hawk devouring a mouse. (Foreshadowing? You bet!) He then steps outside into the night for some fresh air, where he spots Helene. They embrace, and to Duvalier’s relief she proves real and not an illusion.

She then leads him further into the woods, staying several steps ahead of him. Suddenly, Gustaf appears and intercepts Duvalier, saving him from running into a patch of quicksand. Meanwhile, Helene has pulled another vanishing act. Here, Duvalier asks if Helene was trying to lure him to his death. And Gustaf’s response is rather cryptic, saying the girl knows not what she does and has no will of her own.

Is she insane, asks Duvalier. No, says Gustaf, insisting the girl is not crazy but has been possessed by evil forces -- and is in desperate need of Duvalier’s help. With that, Gustaf clams up, saying he’s said too much already. However, he does tell Duvalier that the answer to all his questions lie within the walls of Castle Von Leppe, and how he should go there and ask for a man named Eric, and then amscrays into the darkness.

With that, Duvalier returns to the cottage, where he sketches a charcoal portrait of Helene -- but Katrina, despite a glint of recognition, still claims to not know who this is. She also states that if he leaves now, Duvalier will be back with his regiment by dawn. But he’s not returning to his command any time soon, says Duvalier. No, he’s looking for directions to a certain castle; a castle Katrina insists has been abandoned for years.

But Duvalier stubbornly believes that Helene must live there and is determined to see her again, even if he has to find it and her on his own. But as he rides off, Katrina warns that he is trifling in things way beyond his understanding and to clear out while he still can. 

As a case in point, Duvalier encounters a perfectly timed rock-slide while following the path along the beach, which eventually leads to a castle on the cliffs; a castle we recognize from that stormy preamble (-- and as a matte painting borrowed from The Pit and the Pendulum).

Once he reaches the grounds, he spots Helene through a window and calls out to her -- only she quickly withdraws without responding. Here, Duvalier decides to throw a little weight around, using his privileges as a ranking officer in Napoleon’s army, and demands entrance into the castle in the name of the Emperor of France. When the front door creaks open, he is greeted by the Baron himself and states his business.

Using the ruse of needing shelter for the night, the elderly Baron Von Leppe (Karloff) welcomes him into the “remains of a once noble house” where all that is left is “relics and ghosts of past glories.” 

But the Baron is cordial and summons his servant, Stefan (Miller), to bring them some cognac. (For the record, Stefan would be the same man who was callously watching the half-dead Duvalier from the cliffs earlier.)

Once the pleasantries are out of the way, Duvalier then asks to see Helene. Neither the Baron nor Stefan know who he is talking about, assuring they are the only two who live in the castle and that he is their first visitor since the turn of the century. 

But as he describes her, an internal light switches on for the Baron and he excitedly leads his visitor into another chamber, where he shows him a portrait of his late wife, Ilsa, who is the spitting image of Helene but died over 20 years ago! Maybe he just saw a ghost after all?

That night, as another storm approaches, Duvalier’s horse senses something spooky, goes berserk, breaks out of the stable, and runs away. We will assume the cause of this equine distress is the ghostly apparition moving through the graveyard outside the castle. 

Duvalier spots it, too, while closing a window before the rain hits -- and it sure looks like Helene to him, who moves silently into the nearby stone chapel.

Meanwhile, something has apparently locked Duvalier’s bed chamber door -- something inhuman as it screeches and bangs against the heavy wood, trying to get in. But when the door finally gives way, the hallway is empty. The chapel proves equally empty. Then, when he returns to the main chamber, the portrait of Ilsa is now gone, too, and someone -- or something -- has torn his portrait of Helene in two.

The following morning, the Baron and Stefan conspire on how to get rid of Duvalier without raising anymore suspicions, who has returned to the chapel and notices all the religious iconography has been removed and a door marked like a crypt for the late Baroness. He is caught by a suspicious Stefan, who demands to know what he’s up to. Here, Duvalier reminds him who the servant is here and how he will be the one asking questions.

Stefan obeys and explains how the door is a second entrance to the family crypt that’s located below the castle proper, where the Baroness was laid to rest. Duvalier figures that’s how Helene must’ve gotten out of the chapel without him seeing her, but Stefan insists that door has been sealed shut for over 20 years.

Stefan also reports that the visitor’s horse has disappeared but promises to get him another so he can leave ASAP. Curious as to why they’re so anxious to get rid of him, he finally asks Stefan about the man named Eric. When the servant refuses to answer, he decides to ask the Baron instead -- despite Stefan’s protests to just leave the poor old man alone.

But Duvalier is in a demanding mood and confronts the Baron about Helene, the missing portrait, and everything else. And if he won’t give him a straight answer, Duvalier promises to return with a company of men to tear this place down until he finds the girl!

Strangely, when he mentions seeing a woman entering the chapel, the distraught Baron suddenly snaps to and asks, hopefully, if the younger man saw Ilsa, too. But Duvalier keeps pressing, demanding to know how the Baroness died. Here, the Baron finally breaks:

Apparently, some 25 years ago, the Baron’s fiefdom was a place of prosperity. He had recently lost his first wife but soon became smitten with a young peasant girl named Ilsa. And while he could’ve just taken her, as was his privilege, he truly loved her, took things slowly, and they were eventually married. But then he was called away for some military service to help quash a rebellious faction. The Baron was gone for about a year, and when he returned unannounced, he found Ilsa in bed with another man.

Enraged, he strangled his wife, while his loyal servant Stefan killed the man she was philandering with. They then covered it up, saying the Baroness died of some malady. As for the other man, its not revealed what happened to him. (But odds are good those were his remains seen during the opening sequence.)

That was some 20 years ago. And ever since, the Baron has never left the castle, shutting everyone else out -- except for Stefan -- as a form of punishment for what he did to his wife and other myriad sins.

But now, for the past several months, he has been communing with the spirit of Ilsa, whose ghost wanders the castle grounds, saying she will help him put an end to his eternal penance and torment and find peace at last. 

Taking all of this in, Duvalier thinks the old man has gone mad. But the Baron reminds him that he saw the ghost of Ilsa, too; so perhaps they have both gone a little mad…

With the release of Creature from the Haunted Sea (1961), Roger Corman’s experiment in comedy-horror hybrids had officially come to an end. And after five years of producing cheap-jack genre films, the producer / director was ready to try something else -- more expensive and more polished genre films.

“The three comedies proved that I could make movies cheaper and faster in a new genre, but I was ready to move on to bigger, better movies on longer schedules and to direct more experienced actors from better scripts,” said Corman (How I Made a Hundred Movies in Hollywood but Never Lost a Dime, 1990). “The chance to do all those things came in the visually and thematically rich gothic horror genre.”

The Los Angeles Times (July 7, 1957).

But I’m not sure if this decision was reached based on growth as a filmmaker or achievable artistic merit, but a necessary means to an end to stay both relevant and, more importantly, remain solvent.

I don’t think anybody can or should deny the seismic impact Hammer Films had with the release of their three-punch combo of The Curse of Frankenstein (1957), Horror of Dracula (1958) and The Mummy (1959) when it came to genre films; and how they caused a paradigm shift in how horror films were viewed and made around the world with their bright and engaging Technicolor; the free-flowing blood and grue; the tensile cleavage; the subversive sexual context; and perhaps most importantly of all, and often overlooked, the re-engagement of adult audiences in tales of the macabre after nearly two decades of Creature Features aimed mostly at teenagers.

And in an effort to keep up, Corman, realizing these old black and white double-bills just weren’t going to cut the cheese anymore, pleaded his case with the brass at American International -- Jim Nicholson and Sam Arkoff -- to combine the budgets of their usual combos and make one expanded color feature instead based on “the often macabre [and] psychologically unsettling imagination of Edgar Allan Poe.”

“I had been reading a lot about Freudian psychoanalysis and the inner workings of the psyche,” said Corman (1990). “I felt that Poe and Freud had been working in different ways toward a concept of the unconscious mind, so I tried to use Freud’s theories to interpret the works of Poe.”

 Edgar Allan Poe.

Corman would pitch these ideas over a lunch meeting, which most likely happened in late 1958 or early 1959. True, the returns on their double-bills was waning, but Nicholson wasn’t sure if the youth market would turn out to watch a film based on some stodgy and scholastically required reading material. Meanwhile, Arkoff had his own set of issues:

“Here were my worries,” said Arkoff (Flying through Hollywood by the Seat of My Pants, 1993). “How can we turn Poe’s stories into full scripts? They’re just too short. The literati are going to be screaming that we’ve taken too many liberties with Poe if we stretch it into an eighty minute picture.”

But the brevity of Poe’s work wasn’t his only concern, which echoed Nicholson’s. “AIP has always had a monster or a beast in its horror pictures to bring audiences in. Poe didn’t have them in his stories.” (I think the closest he ever got was the homicidal primate in Murders in the Rue Morgue.) And so, he asked Corman, “Where’s the monster?”

His answer, according to Arkoff, was, “Can’t you see it? In House of Usher, the house IS the monster.” And while Arkoff felt Corman pulled that answer directly out of his ass, they eventually gave him the green light to proceed at a budget estimated between $270,000 and $300,000, depending on the source.

 (L-R) Samuel Z. Arkoff and James H. Nicholson.

The film would be nearly a year in the making (-- but still three weeks in the shooting). It was first officially announced in February, 1959, when Philip K. Scheuer reported in the Los Angeles Times (February 13, 1959) that “American International will film Poe’s Fall of the House of Usher in color as its ‘most ambitious project to date.’”

Then, in March, The Valley Times (March 2, 1959) had a blurb stating how “Malcolm Stuart of Preminger-Stuart Agency has completed a deal with Roger Corman Productions for Richard Matheson to write the screenplay titled Fall of the House of Usher based on Edgar Allen (sic) Poe’s classic of the same name.”

Richard Matheson at work.

Matheson was a strange choice. Not over the quality of his writing -- the man wrote I Am Legend, The Incredible Shrinking Man and The Legend of Hell House after all, but the fact that he wasn't much of a Poe fan. "Obviously I read his work, early on in life, but no, I was not a big fan," Matheson told Tom Weaver (Fangoria Magazine, No. 79, December, 1989). "House of Usher probably came closest to the original. I tried to stay close, but even at that I added a little romance to it ... I tried hard to get the whole flavor."

And then in late November, Louella Parsons announced in her gossip column (Davenport Daily Times, November 25, 1959), “I keep hearing about the movies American International has made or making. Goliath and the Barbarians (1959), starring Steve Reeves, is one of them. Now comes news that Vincent Price will star in Edgar Allan Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher. It rolls on Jan. 13 (1960) right here in Hollywood with Roger Corman producing and directing.” And another small blurb in the Los Angeles Evening Citizen News (December 14, 1959) confirmed the film would be shot in CinemaScope and in color.

Vincent Price.

Now, a sizeable chunk of the film’s exorbitant budget (in AIP terms) went to Price -- most reports put his salary at $100,000 plus a $1,000 weekly stipend, which Price later admitted to spending most of this per diem on pieces of art for his ever expanding collection.

Before filming, Price published a book, I Like What I Know, which he termed a “visual autobiography.” Here, he told the story of his life and career through the prism of his greatest passion, fine art, and his collecting and advocacy for the same over the last 48 years (and counting). He had also recently completed an exhausting barnstorming tour around the country to bring his love and passion to the masses.

“I am scheduled to do 50 one night stand lectures all over the country on a subject I hope will be interesting and stimulating to the listeners as the research has been for me,” said Price (The Oakland Tribune, August 31, 1959). “I plan to talk about art and education in the light of contributions made by three famous Americans: Whitman, Whistler and Tennessee Williams.” And by the time the tour was done, his book had entered its fourth printing.

Thus, 1959 was a very busy year for Price. He starred in five films -- The Big Circus (1959), The Bat (1959), Return of the Fly (1959), and two bangers for William Castle, House on Haunted Hill (1959) and The Tingler (1959). And then Jim, Sam and Roger were able to coax him into starring in their massive product upgrade. And it proved to be a wise investment.

Said Corman (1990), “In Vincent I found a man of cultural refinement for Usher. He was a first-rate actor and a handsome leading man who had a distinguished career. I felt audiences had to fear the leading man but not on a conscious, physical level based on strength. I wanted a man whose intelligent but tormented mind works beyond the minds of others and who thus inspires a deeper fear.”

Shooting would last three weeks, and Corman was extremely pleased with the results. “Dick Matheson, an accomplished science fiction and fantasy writer, gave me a well-crafted, literate script, and Vincent’s performance was brilliant.”

“Roger would always tell me my scripts were too long and that I had to cut them down,” Matheson recalled to Chris Nashawaty (Crab Monsters, Teenage Cavemen, and Candy Stripe Nurses, 2013). “So I’d cut them down. And then when they were shooting they’d call and say it was too short. That was frustrating.”

As for Price, the actor told J. Philip di Franco (The Movie World of Roger Corman, 1978), “I was really impressed with Roger. He has sort of a lot of pretensions towards psychoanalysis or whatever you want to call it -- all of that psychic reasons and psychoanalytic stuff. I think he was a student of that. There was a great deal of talk about Freudian methods, but it was also very helpful because Roger was trying to get an idea across.”

(L-R) Vincent Price and Roger Corman.

At one point, Price was a little confused over his lines, and one line in particular: “The house lives, the house breathes.” He wasn’t sure what that meant. Corman explained those lines were extremely important and the sole reason the film was even getting made, by anthropomorphizing the house into a menacing malediction -- at least on a subconscious level. And to his credit, Price sold the hell out of it. “When you do a picture like that in fifteen days, you’re working your ass off,” said Price.

But even Corman would admit the real star of the film was probably his production designer, Daniel Haller. Haller had been working with Corman since War of the Satellites (1958), and his deft touch with spit and bailing wire added a lot of weight to those threadbare productions.

 Daniel Haller and friend.

Said Corman (1990), “Dan Haller went over to Universal and for $2,500 bought stock sets and scenery -- large, well-built units we couldn’t otherwise afford. Dan would have a trailer right on the set and be there around the clock while the crew built the sets for Usher. He’d sketch things on the back of the script or even on napkins as we’d sit at night and have a drink to discuss the look of the film. We were working with standing units and we designed big sets.”

Even before filming started, there was a lot of hashing out on what to call the picture. Price told Hollywood columnist Erskine Johnson (March 12, 1960) that he was responsible for the film’s eventual title -- well, at least saving it from what it could’ve been. Said Price, “When they wanted to call it The Haunted House of Usher -- one fellow even suggested I Was a Teenager in the House of Usher -- I said I wouldn’t do the film, that it was ridiculous. Now it’s all Poe and I think the picture should have tremendous appeal.”

And so, they just shored it up a bit and would call it House of Usher (1960). Then, when filming was completed, as the release date loomed, Nicholson and Arkoff did something they had never done before: they held a critics screening for one of their pictures.

“Edgar Allan Poe’s House of Usher was considered by the great author his finest story. Producer-director Roger Corman has managed to squeeze out the last drop of suspense and terror from the famous Poe classic and the result is a motion picture masterpiece of the macabre,” reported the Jackson County Floridian (October 6, 1960). 

The Great Falls Tribune (July 7, 1960).

And John Ward of the Atlanta Journal (July 1, 1960) said, “This is one to be seen, not read about. The evil and suspense in Poe’s masterpiece has been captured with surprising exactness in House of Usher.”

“House of Usher must be considered a better than average horror film -- if that’s saying much. It certainly contains all the hokum necessary for a fright film: the huge ancestral mansion, falling into decay midst the mist of the moors, replete with cobwebby secret passages, a sub-cellar burial crypt, creaking doors, guttering candles, ghostly apparitions and the old family retainer, all filmed in glorious color and CinemaScope,” said Betty Martin (The Los Angeles Times, July 21, 1960).

 The Sidney Telegraph (November 23, 1960).

“The Poe original has been romanticized in the screenplay by Richard Matheson, further enhancing it for the bulk of viewers, without losing too much of the haunting quality of the tale," Martin continued. "The settings are lavish and the color photography of Floyd Crosby is flamboyant. Roger Corman, who produced and directed the film for AIP, has handled the production well enough, managing a fair amount of suspense throughout.”

Meanwhile, in Cleveland, “Here is a tale with such superb terror drama possibilities that I am sure it has been produced on the screen several times before, but probably not half so well done as it is now under its abbreviated title,” said W. Ward Marsh (The Plains Dealer, September 10, 1960). “The use of color, deep-dyed and heavy, adds to the weirdness of this ghostly, ghastly tale of madness and woe which came from a mad mind and a life of woe. The film is beautifully mounted … as a horror-terror drama House of Usher has been very well done. Take a stout heart with you and leave the children at home.”

The Los Angeles Times (July 22, 1960).

In rebuttal, we have Mae Tinee (Chicago Tribune, October 6, 1960), “There are coffins and cobwebs, squeaking doors and moaning voices, plus lurid color, but this adaptation of the Poe classic is a tiresome bore … In its attempts to underscore its would-be eeriness, the film crawls along at a snail’s pace. It adds up to 79 minutes of nothingness.”

And Eugene Arche of The New York Times (September 15, 1960) was equally unimpressed, saying, “The ‘fall’ has been omitted from the film version of The House of Usher, but not the pitfalls. American International, with good intentions of presenting a faithful adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe's classic tale of the macabre, blithely ignored the author's style, and fell right in Poe's prose style, as notable for ellipsis as imagery, compressed or eliminated the expository passages habitual to nineteenth-century fiction and invited the readers' imaginations to participate. By studiously avoiding explanations not provided by the text, and stultifying the audiences' imaginations by turning Poe's murky mansion into a cardboard castle encircled by literal green mist, the film producers have made a horror film that provides a fair degree of literacy at the cost of a patron's patience.”

Regardless of the critical reviews, the film was a smash hit, bringing in over $1.5 million domestically. 

"I don't think they planned to make a 'respectable picture,' it just turned out that way because I wrote a very good script," observed Matheson (Fangoria, 1989). "Maybe they wanted to go classy with Edgar Allan Poe, but if it had turned out like Attack of the Crab Monsters (1957), I don't think they would've cared that much. As a matter of fact, from what I understood, they were totally thrown off by the fact House of Usher did so well. It was running all summer. [But] the very fact that American International could make something with some semblance of quality and still make a lot of money -- I don't think that ever occurred to them."

And with that kind of return, a “sequel” was definitely in order. “The Poe cycle was never designed as a series,” said Corman (Franco, 1978). When AIP initially asked him for a follow up, he contemplated adapting Masque of the Red Death next but, in the end, “I chose The Pit and the Pendulum (1961), primarily because I felt I could get a very interesting climax to the film.”

And this would serve as a template for the rest of the Poe Cycle. “The stories obviously lent themselves to cinema, and this, to a certain extent, has determined the way we did the rest of the Poe films,” said Corman. “Most of the short stories were only two or three pages long. There were really fragments -- wonderful fragments. The method we adopted was to use the Poe short story as a climax to the motion picture, because a two-page short story is not about to give you a ninety-minute picture. We then constructed the first two acts in what we hoped was a manner faithful to Poe.”

AIP could only muster a budget of $200,000 for The Pit and the Pendulum but Corman was able to stretch that by reusing the sets from House of Usher after a quick Haller makeover. He also reunited most of the cast and crew, replacing Mark Damon and Myrna Fahey with John Kerr and Barbara Steele in the cast with a returning Price. The results were even better than the first film, earning over $2 million in box-office receipts. (I know that final freeze frame has haunted me for years!)

Corman would later explain, as the series progressed, how he was able to expand those budget dollars to their limits, exponentially, by recycling or building on top of what came before. “If we had the same $20,000 art department budget for a second picture, and we had, say, $20,000 worth of sets stored from the previous film, you now have a $40,000 design.”

And so, they kept adding on to their medieval sets. “All studios gave you free access to their scene docks and we put together some great, big-looking sets from columns, arches, windows, and furniture from all over the place,” said Corman (1990). “Then we saved everything from each picture and stored it in [our] scene dock. So if anyone looks at these Poe films back to back, they’ll see some sets and specific units reappearing.”

Now, after two successful Poe features, Corman felt he was being cheated on his promised percentages. And to make up the difference, he decided to make his own Poe picture for the Filmgroup -- the company he had started with his brother, Gene Corman, using the same props and rented sets.

“It just so happened that the folks at Pathe Labs wanted to start their own distribution outfit,” said Mark Thomas McGee (Fast and Furious: The Story of American International Pictures, 1984). “They figured a Poe / Corman movie would be a fine way to start. They offered to grubstake Corman on terms sweeter than AIP’s.”

Thus, Corman struck a deal with Pathe to make The Premature Burial (1962). Nearly everyone involved on those first two Poe pictures would return: Haller on the production design, Harry Reif decorating the sets, Marjorie Corso providing costumes, and Floyd Crosby on camera. Noticeably absent was star Vincent Price and screenwriter Richard Matheson.

Ray Russell and Charles Beaumont would replace Matheson. Meanwhile, Corman had wanted Price to star in this latest vehicle, too, but he had signed a lucrative exclusivity contract with AIP; and so, he settled for Ray Milland as a reasonable substitute.

But as cameras were set to roll, Corman spotted Nicholson and Arkoff wandering onto his set unannounced -- and both sporting Cheshire grins. Apparently feeling a little territorial, they had managed to strong-arm Pathe into selling them their interest in the picture. Initially, Pathe called their bluff, with Poe being in the public domain, until Arkoff threatened to take all of AIP’s lab work somewhere else to be processed. With that, they relinquished and signed the film over.

And so, that’s how The Premature Burial would become the third AIP Poe Picture, which brought in another $1.5 million.

Corman, Matheson and Price would tackle three Poe short stories in the next film, Tales of Terror (1962), an anthology, covering Morella, The Black Cat and The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar, and added Peter Lorre and Basil Rathbone to the cast. Price and Lorre would return for The Raven (1963). Joined by Boris Karloff, it was the most ambitious and far-flung of the Poe films to date, where two dueling sorcerers battle it out for supremacy as the link between the source material and the finished film was stretched well beyond credulity -- but again, audiences didn't seem to mind.

While filming The Black Cat segment for Tales of Terror, as Price and Lorre got hammered on the Amontillado, the sequence took on a comical bent that went over extremely well with audiences. And so, the decision was made to infuse The Raven with the same kind of humor throughout, which, unlike the other adaptations, was based on a poem.

“After I heard they wanted to make a movie out of a poem, I felt that was an utter joke, so comedy was really the only way to go with it,” Matheson told Lawrence French (The Making of The Raven, 2012). And he told Nashawatay (2013), “By the time we got to The Raven, I couldn’t take them seriously anymore. I had to give it a more comedic touch.”

The Grand Island Independent (May 4, 1963).

Also added to the cast were Hazel Court (as the bewitching Lenore), Olive Sturgess, playing Price's doting daughter, and Jack Nicholson, playing Lorre’s idiot son. Said Nicholson (Corman, 1990), “Roger gave me one direction on that picture: Try to be as funny as Lorre, Karloff and Price. I loved those guys. I sat around with Peter all the time. I was mad about him. They were wonderful.”

But the feeling wasn’t necessarily mutual. Lorre reportedly couldn’t stand Nicholson. And all three veteran actors would ride him constantly with cries of nepotism, thinking Jack and Jim Nicholson were related. (They weren’t.) And Karloff was having trouble adjusting to Corman’s fast pace and all the ad-libbing done by Lorre.

“Low budget movies in those days weren’t like today,” Nicholson testified in Alex Stapeleton’s documentary, Corman’s World: Exploits of a Hollywood Rebel (2011). “Nobody was trying to make them good. There was a real emphasis on the price. You kinda just went around the sound-stage, one take on everything. This was just the way Roger worked. And we didn’t argue with him. And we were delighted to be working.” 

Meantime, feeling Poe was getting a bit played out, Corman then convinced AIP to switch gears and do an adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft’s The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, which would also be adapted by Charles Beaumont.  

Meanwhile, as filming on The Raven neared its third and final week, with this being the alleged last Poe film, Corman got to talking with Haller about the impressive castle sets and set dressing they’d accumulated over the years, and how it was such a shame that they were about to be dismantled for good at the end of the following week.

Of course this wouldn’t be the last AIP Poe film -- in fact, they weren’t even halfway done yet. Hell, the brass at AIP were so Poe-addled by this juncture that they rebranded the forthcoming Lovecraft film, against Corman’s wishes, as The Haunted Palace (1963); a title sniped from another Poe poem; even adding several narrated lines to open the film as a kind of forced-fit framing device. 

They would do the same for Michael Reeves’ Witchfinder General (1968), passing it off as The Conqueror Worm. And don’t forget War Gods of the Deep (alias City in the Sea, 1965), Spirits of the Dead (alias Histoires extraordinaires, 1968), and The Oblong Box (1969).

But Corman would only officially handle two more Poe pictures before finally burning out on the genre. However, The Masque of the Red Death (1964) would be filmed in England with brand new sets built at Elstree Studios, and Tomb of Ligeia (1964) would eschew sets all together and be shot entirely on location.

But those sets would get a reprieve, at least for a little while longer. While Corman was in England, Haller would trot out those flats once again for Jacques Tourner’s The Comedy of Terrors (1963) and Don Weis’ The Ghost in the Invisible Bikini (1966).

And so, there they were, still working on The Raven, with Karloff and Price suspended on wires, floating around, hurling imaginary eldritch blasts at each other, Karloff tired of everyone’s ad-libbing, Price freaking out about the python wrapped around his neck, Lorre cursing out Nicholson, while the titular bird shat all over everything, when Corman hit upon an idea to squeeze one more film out of the sets before they broke for the weekend, with one more week to go.

Then, when a scheduled tennis match on that Sunday got rained out, Corman had a hole in his schedule and enough time to scheme and cement this idea for another whirlwind, two-day feature. He’d done it before on The Little Shop of Horrors (1961). Could he do it again? Well, sort of.

"I was getting so familiar with the standard elements of Poe's material that I tried to out-Poe himself and create a Gothic tale from scratch,” said Corman (1990). And not only that, but to once again complete the majority of principal photography on said film in just two shooting days, using The Raven's castle set on the sly before they tore it all down.

 (L-R) Aaron Saxon, Peter Lorre, Roger Corman.

In retrospect, Corman said he undertook this nigh impossible task for the mere challenge of it, but I have a feeling at least part of the reasoning was to pull one over on AIP and make another movie for himself using the sets they paid for. 

Now all he needed was a script. And for that, Corman called up Leo Gordon and asked if he had anything with a castle in it for sale. He didn’t, so Corman invited him over for a brainstorming session to get the ball rolling on a new script that needed to be completed in less than a week.

Leo Gordon.

Now, Gordon was an actor, a screenwriter, and a convicted felon, who had served five years in San Quentin for armed robbery -- for when he tried to stick-up a bar and got shot several times by the police while being apprehended.

After his sentence played out, he took up acting as a profession; and with his hulking frame and brutish demeanor, Gordon set off on a nearly 40-year career as a Hollywood tough guy and heavy, where he infamously backed-down John Wayne during the production of Hondo (1953), when his character was shot on screen during the climax and pitched forward, causing Wayne to step on director John Farrow’s toes, calling for a cut, and then started lecturing Gordon on how people fell backwards when they’re shot at point blank rage. To which Gordon pulled-up his shirt, showed off his scars, and said when he got shot getting those, he pitched forward. End of discussion.

Gordon turned to screenwriting in 1956, first for television, and then wrote his first feature for Corman two years later, Hot Car Girl (1958), which was followed up with The Cry Baby Killer (1958), The Wasp Woman (1959), and Attack of the Giant Leeches (1959). And now, he was tasked with coming up with something for The Terror (1963) after he and Corman hashed-out a few details on that rainy Sunday:

The gist of the story would revolve around a young officer in Napoleon's Army, lost along the Baltic coast, who winds up pursuing a mysterious woman to the castle of the elderly Baron Von Leppe, who claims the woman was nothing more than the spirit of his long dead wife, and then supernatural shenanigans takeover from there.

What that all entailed was up to Gordon, as long as he had it done by the following Monday. And Corman’s only demand was that the climax involve the castle being destroyed in a flash flood instead of the usual cleansing fires of his other Poe pictures. “I just couldn’t burn another castle down,” said Corman. “And while Leo wrote, I wrapped The Raven.”

As for the cast, well, turns out the sets and crew wouldn’t be the only thing pilfered from The Raven. First up, for the Baron, he got Karloff to stick around for two more days of shooting for $30,000 and a percentage of the new film’s profits; plus a deferred bonus of $15,000 if the film went on to make over $150,000 at the box-office.

Corman held-over Jack Nicholson from The Raven, too, as Lt. Andre Duvalier, who suggested using his then-wife, Sandra Knight, to play Helene, who may or may not be the ghost of the Baroness Ilsa Von Leppe.

Knight had co-starred with Robert Mitchum in Thunder Road (1958). That same year she would play the teenage monster in Richard Cunha’s outright baffling Frankenstein’s Daughter (1958). 

She would also appear in Corman’s Poe-Lite Tower of London (1962), a historical picture about Richard the III (Price) being haunted by those he tortured and killed to become King of England; and Blood Bath (1968), Corman’s Americanized version of Operation: Titian (1966), which he actually turned into three pictures if I’m remembering things correctly: Portrait in Terror, Track of the Vampire, and Blood Bath.

The rest of the small cast would be rounded out by several of Corman’s stock players, with Dick Miller as the faithful butler, Jonathan Haze as a local peasant who knows too much, and Dorothy Neumann as Katrina, who holds the key to this unfolding, not quite yet written, and very confusing mystery.

Unfortunately, Gordon blew his deadline. And so, as filming began on The Terror, the script was far from complete -- basically nothing more than a vague outline. And as the two day marathon of shooting drew to a close, pressed for time, Corman didn’t even slate his shots anymore and just kept the camera rolling as his cast of characters moved down hallways, went up and down a staircase, had several circular conversations, or opened and closed a bunch of doors and a stubborn portcullis.

In a later interview (source IMDB), Karloff commented on the filming of The Terror, saying, “Corman had the sketchiest outline of a story. I read it and begged him not to do it … I was in every shot, of course. Sometimes I was just walking through and then I would change my jacket and walk back.”

Said Nicholson (Corman, 1990), “I believe the funniest hour I have ever spent in a projection room was watching dailies for The Terror. You first saw Boris coming down the long hallway in the Baron’s blue coat. Then he’d move out of the shot. Then I’d come down the hallway, and after I cleared the frame, Sandra would come down the hallway. Then it was Dick’s turn looking weird in his black servant suit. And then Boris would come down AGAIN, this time in his red coat. All of this shot as if in one continuous take with no cut.”

Remember, this was all being done on the sly, as no one had bothered to inform or ask permission from AIP. “Most directors can’t pass a pretty woman without wanting to put her into a picture, let alone wanting to do anything else with her. On the other hand, Roger Corman also seemed to have an equally powerful inability to pass a terrific motion picture set without wanting to shoot a film on it,” said Arkoff (1993).

Arkoff became a little suspicious that something was up at the wrap party for The Raven, noting that the sets were still standing. “Those sets were normally dismantled right away,” said Arkoff, who told Jim Nicholson, “Something’s fishy here.”

And so, a leery Arkoff returned to the studio that Monday morning. “I suspected I’d find Roger there, and I was right.” And it wasn’t just that Corman was using their sets that pissed Arkoff off as he investigated further. “He was busily shooting, using a clapboard that read American International Pictures: The Raven,” noted Arkoff. And then, “I realized he was not only shooting on our set, but charging it to The Raven’s production costs!”

(L-R) Roger Corman, caught in the act, and Sam Arkoff.

Caught in the act, all Corman could do was smile and shrug. “He was noticeably embarrassed but still kept his poise,” said Arkoff. “If it was anybody but Roger, I might have called the police. But Roger is Roger.” 

And that was how The Terror suddenly became a co-production between The Filmgroup and American International Pictures.

The end goal here for Corman was to get whatever he could during those two days, finish up with Karloff, and then shelve the footage until the script could be solidified; and then finish filming piecemeal on some other set -- most likely the forthcoming The Haunted Palace; then plug that into the original footage and, ta-dah, The Terror would be complete. A good plan, and a solid plan, which was about to go staggeringly awry. 

How awry did it go? Well, to find out, you'll have to return for Part Two of our Two Part After-Action report on The Terror, Fellow Programs, where not one, or two, nor three, or four, or five (allegedly) but six (allegedly) different people had a hand in the nearly year long journey to complete a two day film. Stay tuned!

Originally posted on July 6, 2024, at Confirmed Alan_01. 

The Terror (1963) The Filmgroup :: American International Pictures / EP: Harvey Jacobson / P: Roger Corman / AP: Francis Ford Coppola / D: Roger Corman, Francis Ford Coppola, Monte Hellman, Jack Hill, Dennis Jakob / W: Leo Gordon, Jack Hill, Roger Corman / C: John M. Nickolaus Jr., Floyd Crosby / E: Stuart O'Brien / M: Ronald Stein / S: Boris Karloff, Jack Nicholson, Sandra Knight, Dick Miller, Dorothy Neumann, Jonathan Haze