The Terror (1963): Part Two.

When we last left part one of our two-part retrospective on Roger Corman's The Terror (1963), thinking he could out Poe Poe, Corman had conspired to borrow actors and sets from American International's The Raven (1963) for a quick two-day shoot on another picture with Boris Karloff that he planned to flesh-out later. But who could foresee the near year long odyssey and what a strange trip the film would see before it was finally finished. 

And we'll get to that, I promise. But first, we must first catch up on the evasive and equally convoluted narrative of the picture, where a young French officer, lost from his regiment, stumbles upon a mystery surrounding a girl, a ghost, and the local Baron, Victor Von Leppe. But is it an actual haunting, or is there something far more sinister going on here? 

We start to get a few answers when Gustaf finds Helene lingering at the beach. When he refers to her as Ilsa, the girl insists her name is Helene and how “she was summoned from the sea.” Here, Gustaf (Haze) encourages her to go back, and how her soul is in trouble for … reasons. What he meant was for her to go back to the sea, but Helene (Knight) assumes he meant back to Eric. (Again, no clue as to who that is yet.) But she can do neither. She must obey the old woman, Katrina, who is apparently a witch of some magnitude.

She then gets even more cryptic, saying, “Only when the sea enters the crypt, and he and I are beneath the sea, only then will I be free.” But when Gustaf insists the Frenchman can help her, Helene says she must obey the call of the Old One, and then warns Gustaf to stop interfering -- because Katrina’s patience with him, and his meddling, has run out.

Speaking of Katrina (Neumann), we next spy Stefan (Miller) approaching the old woman’s cottage, where he spies the old witch performing some kind of arcane ritual on Helene. 

As she calls out incantations, a colored whirligig spins, mesmerizing the girl further (-- a prop borrowed from Tales of Terror, specifically from The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar segment). Katrina then summons the spirit of Ilsa and compels her to inhabit the mortal girl to carry out her vengeance. And when she does, the witch promises the Baroness that the Old Ones will soon set her spirit free -- for she has promised them a much richer prize for them to feast upon.

Once the spell is completed and Helene clears out to do her bidding, the old woman is confronted by Stefan about squatting on the Baron’s property for the last two years. Apparently, he’s been snooping around in the nearby town of Colvin, where he heard rumors about her 'special abilities', and how she was known as a heretic who made a deal with the Devil for her preternatural powers.

He then inquires about the girl, but Katrina again feigns ignorance. Here, Stefan claims to know what she’s really up to and, if she does not abandon these insidious plans and vacate the area, he will kill them both and burn the cottage to the ground. But Katrina is defiant, saying she will never leave because Eric used to live in this cottage. (Again, still no idea who that is -- yet.)

Returning to the castle, Stefan reports to the Baron (Karloff) -- not about the witch but how Duvalier still refuses to leave, and offers to get rid of him the same way he disposed of his wife’s lover. But the old man won’t let him -- not in fear of reprisals if anyone comes looking for the soldier, but because he has enough death on his conscience already.

Meanwhile, Duvalier (Nicholson) is poking around the castle, where he eventually finds the missing portrait of Helene. Then, almost on cue, invisible hands lock the door and a ghostly voice calls to him, begging for help, and to come to her immediately. But is this Ilsa or Helene? Or Ilsa as Helene? (No. I’m asking you!) 

He then follows the voice, which soon has him on the same path as the Baron, whom he tails to the master bed chamber. And as he listens through the door, he hears the old man conversing with … someone. But when he kicks down the door, the Baron is alone.

This blatant invasion of privacy is just what the Baron needed, who demands this intruder leave at once over this breach of manners. A flummoxed Duvalier agrees. But before he mounts up and rides off, Stefan agrees to finally tell him who this Eric is -- or was. Turns out he was the man who was killed after getting caught sleeping with the Baron’s wife.

As he rides away from Castle Von Leppe, Duvalier spots Gustaf on the cliffs above, waving for him to stop. Suddenly, Katrina’s hawk, most likely her familiar, attacks Gustaf, plucking out his eyes rather messily. The blinded man then plummets off the cliff face to his doom (-- in a rather spectacular dummy death plunge). 

But Gustaf isn’t quite dead when Duvalier reaches him. And with his dying breath, he compels the man to go back to the castle. For Helene loves him, he says. And he must help her because her soul cries out for release. He must go back.

And go back he does, where he spots Helene waiting at the chapel entrance. They kiss, and once again he is extremely relieved that she is real and not ectoplasm. He then promises to never leave her again, and wants to take her away from all of this madness. But the girl says she cannot leave, not until the Von Leppe family crypt has been destroyed; and with it, the dead. 

Until then, she only feels safe in the chapel, her only refuge while possessed by the dead. (At this point I double-checked my notes, which showed a doodle of my cat and the words “You’re on your own, Sparky.”)

But Duvalier, thinking she is truly mentally unstable, promises the girl that the dead cannot reach out from the grave, and how he will take her to Paris for some much needed psychiatric help. There is nothing to fear, he insists, and leads the girl to the chapel gate, where he tells her to wait while he retrieves his horse. 

But when he turns away, lightning flashes, thunder cracks, and when he looks back the girl is gone!

Meanwhile, inside the castle, the Baron opens a secret entrance to the family crypt and approaches his wife’s sarcophagus. Then, the spirit of Ilsa appears (-- or is it Helene pretending to be Ilsa? Again, asking you!), who says, “You know what you must do. Or we can never be together.”

Now, from what I could piece together from all the cryptic shenanigans from Katrina, Helene, and even the Baron himself, the old man, if he truly loves her, must seal himself inside the crypt and then flood it, breaking the spell, ending their endless torment and sealing them together forever in a watery grave for all eternity. But that would mean the Baron would be committing suicide, and his soul would be damned to eternal perdition for committing such a mortal sin. Is this what Katrina wants?

Regardless, right now, that’s the only thing holding up this final ritual these past few weeks as Ilsa / Helene keeps pressing the issue on this suicide pact. This explains why the Baron was excited to learn that someone else saw the ghost of Ilsa, too, meaning he wasn’t going crazy and his beloved was telling the truth about spending the afterlife together.

Thus, the Baron finally relents but before he can act, Duvalier, who was once again tailing him, finally managed to get that secret entrance open. He throws the Baron aside to get to who he thinks is Helene, but she has once again pulled a disappearing act. He then moves to help the Baron, who has suffered some kind of seizure.

After putting the old man to bed, Duvalier asks Stefan to accompany him to the chapel, determined to prove this was no ghost at all and show how Helene escaped from the crypt through the chapel entrance. But the door refuses to budge; the hinges having long rusted shut. Well, so much for that theory.

The two men then spot a light behind the window of the Baronesses’ chamber, which has been sealed shut since the night she was murdered. Even the Baron won’t enter it, says Stefan. They rush to the room, which is locked, and only the Baron has the key. And so, over Stefan’s protests, Duvalier breaks it down and enters, where he makes a startling discovery: a baby’s bassinet. Did the Von Leppes have a child?

But before he (or the viewer) can ask any further questions, the Baron interrupts them at gunpoint. He then hands the pistol over to Stefan and orders him to escort Duvalier off the premises -- and to shoot him if he resists in any way. This he does. Escorts him, I mean, not shoots him.

Once they’re gone, the Baron looks upon his wife’s bed, the scene of the crime, saying, “I am weary” and how his soul cries out for relief. Here, Ilsa answers him, reminding that there is only one way to end his torment, promising he will be forgiven for taking his own life, just as he took hers.

Meanwhile, outside, in a lightning flash, Helene once again appears in the cemetery, which was the distraction Duvalier needed to punch out Stefan and disarm him. But when he reaches the cemetery gate he finds not Helene but Katrina, who is there to see all of her schemes finally come to fruition.

Thus, as all the pieces come together, Duvalier seizes the old witch, who happily confesses as to why she’s been driving the Baron to the unpardonable sin of suicide. Apparently, Eric was her son. And for killing him, her vengeance will be knowing the Baron’s soul will burn in hell for all eternity after she dupes into killing himself.

Back inside the castle, the distraught Baron appears ready to finally go through with Katrina’s endgame. He’s locked himself inside the crypt and is currently prying open Ilsa’s sarcophagus, just as ‘the ghost’ instructed.

Outside, Duvalier works to bring an end to this madness when the witch admits to weaponizing Helene as a puppet in her machinations. He then lets her know she aimed the girl at the wrong person. It was Stefan, not the Baron, who killed Eric 20 years ago.

But even that was a lie as Duvalier and the witch confront Stefan, who finally admits to what really happened on that fateful night: the Baron really did kill Ilsa when he caught her with Eric, he says, but then a fight ensued between the two men and, well, it turns out Eric killed the Baron. 

And so overcome with grief and madness over what he had wrought, Eric assumed the Baron’s identity and holed up in the castle, where he has been living with his guilt ever since. In his mind, Stefan insists, Eric is the Baron Von Leppe!

Here, Katrina’s happiness knowing Eric was still alive all along is short-lived as it sinks in that the old witch has just orchestrated her own son’s suicide -- and it might already be too late to stop it! They quickly split up. Stefan will try to access the crypt through the castle, while Duvalier and Katrina will try to break in through the chapel.

But when Duvalier tries to pull the reluctant witch inside this holy place, divine retribution comes from above as Katrina is struck down by a flash of lightning from the heavens and her body burned to ash for her blasphemes.

Inside the crypt, the Baron has finished opening Ilsa’s tomb, revealing a veiled figure. Helene / Ilsa then appears and cajoles him into opening the sluices, which will bring water in from the sea and flood the crypt. Once that is done, she instructs him to lift the veil in the coffin, revealing the desiccated corpse of the Baroness.

As the Baron recoils in horror, Ilsa, through the possessed Helene, declares “I have damned you as you have damned me” and how “the only part of her that ever loved him lies rotting in that tomb.” As for her spirit, the Dark Ones will free her once they’ve claimed his soul -- which will be any minute now as the floodwaters start to rise.

Here, the Baron panics and tries to close the sluices but Ilsa / Helene moves to stop him. And as the waters rise further, Stefan manages to break into the crypt, jumps into the water, and tries to separate them as the walls crumble all around them allowing more water to rush in.

Meanwhile, Duvalier manages to pry open the door in the chapel. But by the time he reaches the crypt, it is almost completely filled with water. He dives in, retrieves Helene, and carries her to safety, leaving Eric and Stefan to drown for their sins.

He then carries Helene up the huge wooden staircase (borrowed from The Haunted Palace), through the chapel (also borrowed from The Haunted Palace), and into the cemetery (also borrowed from The Haunted Palace), where he sits her up against a tree to recover from her long ordeal, insisting that she is safe now and it’s all over. 

The beatific Helene serenely smiles, happy to be free of the witch’s curse at last.

But when Duvalier leans in for a kiss, he suddenly recoils in horror. Helene’s face is slowly melting away, and continues to slough off until all that is left are her skeletal remains. 

Apparently, she was a ghost all along after all, which brings us to…

Though officially not part of Roger Corman’s famed Poe cycle, The Terror often gets lumped into it by default. And while it was built piecemeal from scratch, given the obvious Poe influences and motifs -- Annabel Lee is an obvious influence, as are parts of Ulalume and To One in Paradise -- when combined with the films schizophrenic nature, a haunting dreamlike quality, wrapped around another tale of madness and doomed love from beyond the grave, The Terror might just be the most in-tuned Poe film Corman ever produced. 

And he almost didn’t. Finish it, I mean. Not that he didn’t try. See -- after shooting for those two days with Karloff (--some reports said it was actually three days), the film was shelved for about three months as Leo Gordon finished up the script at long last, which Corman paid him about $1600 for.

But by then, Corman was gearing up to head to Europe to follow the Grand Prix circuit and film The Young Racers (1963) for AIP; and so, to save money he decided to shoot the rest of The Terror non-union. And to those ends, he first approached his production designer, Daniel Haller, to take over stewardship of the film. But Haller was too busy working on Diary of a Madman (1963) and Operation Bikini (1963).

And so, Corman would charge his newest production assistant, Francis Ford Coppola, to assemble a crew of college students from UCLA and USC, including Jack Hill and Gary Kurtz, and sent them off to Big Sur for a couple of days with Nicholson, Knight, Haze, Neumann, the hawk, and the horse to get some needed scenes along the beaches and cliffs there.

Francis Ford Coppola.

But once they reached their destination, Coppola got it into his head to rewrite the script and “improve” the story, giving him the excuse to shoot whatever the hell he wanted to. And then, eleven days later, after he almost drowned his leading man in the surf (-- more on this in a sec), he returned and cut his footage together only to find out he'd neglected to tell his cameraman that some of those scenes needed to be shot day-for-night, rendering the majority of his efforts useless because it did not match the original footage at all; and his changes to the narrative made a jumbled and already confusing plot nearly intractable.

“With The Terror, Roger took the sets from another production he filmed and a flimsy premise and quickly concocted to shoot some sequences starring Boris Karloff and Jack Nicholson,” said Coppola (Nashawatay, 2013). “However it made little sense, and so Roger kept trying to shoot footage that could fill out what he had and perhaps make a feature film out of it. I went for a while to see what I could do. [But] I was very uncomfortable with the assignment and eventually left and was replaced by a string of others.”

Said Nicholson (Corman, 1990), “I think Roger went wild with Francis because no one ever went over budget and he was supposed to be up there for three days and we stayed eleven or something like that. We all thought we’d be machine-gunned -- or fired forever out of the business.”

As for nearly drowning, “I was supposed to go out into the water to find Helene,” said Nicholson. “This was Francis’s idea. I went out into the big f@cking arch up there in Big Sur. This is wintertime and there’s no stunt doubling. I had been a lifeguard so I wasn’t that afraid but that arch is quite a ways out. The water never gets deep so I sort of crouched down to my knees so that when the first white water wave hits me, it did not hit me in the dick but all over. ‘Cause the water was freezing.”

Turns out that would be the least of the actor’s worries. “The water knocked me under. When I went under with Duvalier’s huge Fifth Chasseur uniform on, I felt I couldn’t stand up. I was pinned to the ground from the weight of this uniform. I had that split second of panic because I was a ways out already. I came flying out of there and just threw that f@cking costume off while I ran, freezing to death.”

“I didn’t get Jack Nicholson,” said Coppola (Nashawatay, 2013). “I felt he was very smart, but I didn’t grasp his style of acting. Obviously, I was wrong.” As the apocryphal story goes, this acrimony might’ve stemmed from a scene Nicholson botched. They had spent the entire day catching butterflies that were destined to be released as Nicholson and Knight ran through a field of flowers. Not realizing it was their only take, as the crew unleashed the swarm, Nicholson started flapping his arms around, ruining their one and only take because there was no time to round up the insects again, which Coppola thought was very unprofessional.

“When we got back to town, Francis tried to blame me for going over budget,” said Nicholson (Corman, 1990). “Of course, he didn’t know that I was pretty close with Roger, from having worked with him and being in Jeff Corey’s classes. Roger didn’t believe I was to blame. Neither was Francis, really … He hadn’t worked with Roger that much so he hadn’t had the disdain for any kind of production expense burned into his system yet. So he went ahead and just did whatever he wanted.”

All told, after all that time and effort, about ten minutes of Coppola’s footage made it into the finished picture. “It didn’t exactly mesh with what I had shot,” said Corman (1990). “But it still looked pretty good.” Also, the film was still nowhere near being completed.

Meanwhile, more time passed as Corman and Coppola went to Europe to film The Young Racers. And upon his return to the States, as he geared up to shoot X! The Man with the X-Ray Eyes (1963) for AIP, Corman continued to work on The Terror, patching it up a little at a time.

Needing some second-unit footage of rushing and cascading water to enhance his soggy climax, Corman needed someone to make a quick trip to the Hoover Dam for some inserts. By now, Coppola had finished a whole other picture for Corman, Dementia 13 (1963), and had moved on to bigger pastures. But he did recommend a fellow UCLA student, Dennis Jakob, for the job, who took the assignment but then essentially disappeared for three days.

When he finally came back, Corman quickly sussed out he had been played, and how Jakob had used his equipment to shoot his thesis film on top of the ten-minutes it took to get the gushing water. 

Annoyed initially, Corman soon realized Jakob basically did to him as he had so often done to many others and let this slide. In fact, he was a little proud of him. “How could I get angry?” said Corman (1990). “He was doing to a certain extent what I had done with AIP and other companies -- he was finding a way to beat the system and do his movie.”

Monte Hellman.

And besides, Corman would later press his novice filmmaker into service as Karloff’s double as he tried to shore up the climax for a film that still wasn’t finished and still didn’t make a whole lot of sense. Of course, Jakob looked as much like Karloff as Kathy Wood’s chiropractor resembled Bela Lugosi in Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959). But, enh, what are ya gonna do?

More time passed, and in his latest effort to salvage things Corman next turned to Monte Hellman, who had directed Beast from Haunted Cave (1959), and Jack Hill, who was charged with rewriting the entire script to try and match-up all the jumbled footage that had already been expended on The Terror.

“I was in the cinema department at UCLA with Francis Coppola, and we worked together on some student films,” said Hill (Nashawatay, 2013). “I actually had worked with Francis on some nudie films he made, like The Bellboy and the Playgirls (1962). I’m not ashamed to admit that. It was something to do. And then Francis went off to work for Roger, and I followed him. Roger had a great knack for finding talented people who were willing to work for practically nothing and would do anything to get going. He was the only game in town for that.”

Hill had assisted Coppola on adapting Nebo Zovyot (alias The Sky Beckons, 1959), a Soviet Sci-Fi epic, into Battle Beyond the Sun (1962), an American Creature Feature, including the battle between two ‘giant’ monsters inspired by human genitalia. And he would punch up Dementia 13 before its release on Corman’s orders, adding another ax murder.

As for his work on The Terror. “I was recording sound and doing various odd jobs on the picture, and we shot up at Big Sur. The problem was when we got back and looked at the footage, you couldn’t make sense of it. So Roger hired me to write a new script, which would use as much of the footage Francis shot as we could. And then he got Monte Hellman to direct what I had written.”

And so, Hellman would shoot even more footage to help bridge all the gaps. Here, Hill basically changed the tenor of the entire movie with the big twist on the witch’s motivations that would help resolve everything when The Terror was finally finished -- which it still wasn’t, and it really didn’t.

Jack Hill.

See, Hellman shot for five days before having to leave for the Philippines due to prior commitments on Back Door to Hell (1963), which meant Hill got promoted to the director’s chair to keep filming even more inserts.

By now, Knight was pregnant and showing -- and the rumor was her and Nicholson’s baby was conceived during the shoot at Big Sur to give you some scope on how much time had passed since filming began on this magnum opus. This would explain why some of her scenes were shot from the waist-up only or she was etherally blurred out from the breasts on down with some Vaseline on the lens; and why everyone’s hair and sideburns don’t match-up from scene to scene.

And sharp eyes will note, sure enough, several scenes were indeed shot on the sets of The Haunted Palace (1964), including everything in the cemetery, the chapel, the stairway to the crypt, and the massive gnarled tree near the graveyard, where Vincent Price’s character was burned alive, for The Terror’s final final twist as Helene melts away.

Here, Corman paid his Haunted Palace crew to stick around once they wrapped for the day and snuck Nicholson, Miller, Knight and Neumann onto the sets. These scenes were lit and shot by Floyd Crosby, and it kinda makes you wish he’d shot the whole thing. It’s both eerie and beautiful. Eerily beautiful.

When Hill slapped all the extant footage together, and re-dubbed a lot of the dialogue to make it work, lip-syncing be damned, Corman screened the rough-cut of this patchwork, Frankenstein’s Monster of a film. It still didn’t make any sense, but he felt it was almost to the point of being releasable with just a few more tweaks.

“I cut all the other director’s footage together. We all had interpreted the story differently and it showed," said Corman (1990). "I saw two things working against it. There were some gaps in logic; and frankly, it struck me as a little dull. Leo and I had made up a story in one afternoon that made sense but it had no spark. It all seemed so predictable.”

And so, to help knock some shock value into this morass of a narrative, Corman sent Hill to shoot the rather graphic scene where the hawk tears out Gustaf’s eyes to punch up the film’s horror quotient. Originally, Gustaf was to be lured into the quicksand by Helene. And then the two of them hammered out that other final twist in the narrative.

“The Baron was not the Baron,” recalled Corman (1990). “After catching his wife in an affair with Eric, there was a fight but Stefan mistakenly killed the Baron -- not Eric -- and for 20 years Eric posed as the Baron. In his mind, Stefan explains to the astonished witch and Duvalier, Eric is the Baron Von Leppe.”

The Spokane Chronicle (September 17, 1963).

Of course, that means the witch has been hoisted by her own petard, trying to force her own son to commit suicide due to this mistaken identity to accomplish her devious endgame. “Or something to that effect,” admitted Corman. “This was a long time ago.”

And so, Corman once more settled into the director’s chair for one more day of shooting, brought in Nicholson and Miller for a scene where Duvalier, through threat of violence, demands that Stefan literally explain the overcooked plot and reveal just what in the hell was going on in this fakakta movie. And then he threw Miller, Nicholson, Jakob and a stand-in for Knight into the water and blasted them with a fire hose to punch-up the climax, which finally wrapped The Terror at long last.

“When we did the flood scenes, I had to dive from the stairs leading to the crypt into two and a half feet of water, which is why that dive looks a little funny,” said Nicholson (Corman, 1990). “And by then, Sandra was like seven, eight months pregnant and her body was obviously different. And there I was, carrying her upstairs, soaking wet, with her very pregnant.”

“We got a double for Boris Karloff who doesn’t look anything like him,” said Hill (Nashawatay, 2013). “And the water is pouring into the dungeon of this castle, and all the rocks from the castle set are floating in the water. It’s really funny.”

Now, in those original two days of shooting, Karloff would spend some time in the water, too, for the film’s climax. “Roger nearly killed me on the last day,” said Karloff (source IMDB). “He had me in a tank of cold water for about two hours.” Still, the actor had few regrets about the film or its harried production. “The sets were so magnificent. And as they were being pulled down around our ears, Roger was dashing around with me and a camera, two steps ahead of the wreckers.” And he agreed with Hill, saying, “It was all very funny.”

Alas, spending all that time in the cold water for The Terror, and filming in a damp, chilling fog for the Wuderlak segment in Mario Bava’s Black Sabbath (alias I tre volti della paura, 1963), had a detrimental effect on the aging actor, sending Karloff’s already declining health into a bit of a tailspin that he would never recover from. I mean, if you look at him between this and Die, Monster, Die! (1965), filmed two scant years later, you could hardly believe it was the same person.

All told it took nine months, two days, and five directors to complete The Terror (Corman, Coppola, Hellman, Hill and Jakob). Almost six directors as Nicholson claimed since everybody else in the whole damned town had a hand in this picture, he should’ve had a shot at it, too. As Nicholson said (Corman, 1990), “They don’t make movies like The Terror anymore.”

Here, I will pause to discuss the enigma of Jack Hale, who is also listed on the IMDB as another possible sixth director on the film. I can find no other trace or reference to him in any interviews, compendiums, or commentaries on the film on what exactly he contributed. Further digging shows The Terror as his only screen credit, which leads me to believe the IMDB got their wires crossed and it has just proliferated from there. (If anybody knows different, feel free to let me know in the comments below.)

And if anyone deserves a credit as an additional director on The Terror that would be Mark Griffiths. See, in 1991, with the proliferation of Home Video, Corman was starting to regret not keeping up with renewing the copyrights on his past films. The Terror was one such lapsed title; and so, he charged Griffith to round up Miller, the only returning cast member, to shoot 12 more minutes of footage to rescue the film from public domain hell.

Meanwhile, back in the day, when The Terror finally finished shooting, was edited together, and handed over to Ronald Stein, his magnificent score not only holds this leaking ship together but takes the audience by the hand and dares them to keep up. In fact, I kinda prefer the scores Stein did for The Premature Burial (1962), The Terror, and The Haunted Palace over Les Baxter’s scores for House of Usher (1961), The Pit and the Pendulum (1961), Tales of Terror (1962) and The Raven (1963).

Mention should also be made, once again, of the outstanding work done by Paul Julian on the opening title sequence, where he takes us on a tour of a ghastly dungeon and its devious denizens. 

Julian was a veteran animator who had worked as a background artist for Leon Schlesinger in the 1930s and ‘40s. He would later add to the iconic look of the adaptation of Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart (1953) and would collaborate with Chuck Jones and Karloff on the TV-version of How the Grinch Stole Christmas (1966). 

The Los Angeles Times (July 22, 1960).

The Terror was eventually released by American International in late May, 1963, where it usually played on a double-bill with Coppola’s Dementia 13. A nice touch was a blurb on the promotional campaigns that read “No one will be admitted while the coffin is being opened.” Alas, I have no idea what the "D-13 Test" was to gain entrance to its co-feature. Reviews were … mixed.

“It is something, in color, called The Terror, which it most certainly is,” said Bosely Crowther (The New York Times).

The Fremont Tribune (November 11, 1963).

“Karloff is greatly aided in The Terror’s presentation by the stately and elegant sets, dark passageways opening out variously into underground crypts, rusted hinges creaking in the night air, the sound of dashing ocean surf near a graveyard, and a beautiful ghost who wafts eerily in and out, sharing the old castle with him,” said The Orlando Sentinel (December 29, 1963).

“The Terror is a spooky exercise in celluloid chills, starring Boris Karloff, that old terror himself, who spreads the creeps deftly,” said Margaret Harford (Los Angeles Times, September 28, 1963). “Karloff’s professional status as an actor and bogeyman helps fire the slow, lazy plot.”

The Pittsburgh Press (December 16, 1963).

“Producer Roger Carman (sic) has made a great thing of Edgar Allan Poe in horror pictures and usually his shows have some quality in the field of the macabre. But The Terror is wooden, slow-moving and boring,” said Myles Standish (The St. Louis-Dispatch, September 15, 1963).

Over the years, given its haphazard production history, and the resulting patchwork, and sometimes contradicting, narrative, The Terror has earned a rather dubious reputation -- even among hardened Corman fans. But its reputation has been solidifying lately, and there is a small knot of rabid devotees who claimed to have been fans of the fractured flick all along.

Not me, though. However, I am starting to come around. I first encountered The Terror like many others on late night TV, where the lateness of the hour, when combined with the anachronistic flourishes, found the film to be quite loopy and kinda terrible. But nearly everything I found to be a detriment then, I find to be meritorious now.

From the opening jump scare, to Julian’s creepy credits, to Duvalier’s delirium, the audience has already been knocked onto its back foot. Add in the contrasting directing styles and different quality in the lighting and camerawork from scene to scene, we never really recover as things never settle into a groove and Corman drills into our subconscious.

And as things get even more surreal and dreamlike, and, yes, convoluted, things just seem odd or slightly off -- from the blood red candles to Helene’s constant disappearing act. And as we try to retain our balance, you start getting into the parts that were completely dubbed over with a hatchet, making you wonder if perhaps this was some kind of foreign film.

To me, the whole sections in the woods concerning Katrina and the cottage bring to mind those kooky Soviet fantasy films of the 1950s and ‘60s like The Sword and the Dragon (alias Ilya Muromets, 1956), which Corman would import, dub over, and release in 1964; The Day the Earth Froze (alias Sampo, 1959); and Jack Frost (alias Morozko, 1964), especially the bit about the dancing Baba Yaga.

While watching, I encourage you not to do the math on the dates of Ilsa’s portrait and the date on her grave marker -- unless the portrait was done posthumously. Or how the markings on Duvalier’s horse changes from scene to scene. (Before and after Stefan got him a new one.) Or how the heavy stones of the castle’s foundation float on the water during the climax. Or dwell on the fact that the breech-loading pistols everyone carries around haven’t been invented yet (-- or so the internet tells me, so, yeah).

But on this latest rewatch, the only egregious plot-hole I could recall was when Duvalier asks the Baron about Eric before he even knew there was an Eric involved in the plot in the first place. He should have no idea who that is yet. But then, as I was grabbing vid-caps, I saw that Gustaf had told him about Eric before he went to the castle in the first place and I totally missed it. So, never mind.

As for the late mistaken identity twist within the twist, it works well enough if you don’t think about it too hard. A flimsy excuse, sure, but under these circumstances we can let it slide -- even though it does open a whole new can of worms.

Now, I honestly don’t know how it got stuck in my head over the years that Eric and the Baron were brothers, but it was etched pretty deep inside my brain despite there being no actual evidence of this in the film. Can’t remember if it was in a review of yore or a misremembered recollection by Corman but this notion of siblings became so ingrained that I'm still confused whether they were or not as I type this up. (I swear I just rewatched this thing. TWICE.)

Of course, with Eric being Katrina’s son, that would make the Baron her son, too, which monkey-wrenches everything. So, never mind again AGAIN.

And then, as we try to unravel the conundrum of Helene and Ilsa, things get even more confusing. Was Helene an innocent peasant girl brought under the witch’s thrall? Acting against her will? Or was she some kind of water sprite summoned from the ocean to do the witch's bidding? Or a conjured simulacrum? Was she a transmogrified version of Katrina’s hawk? A shapeshifter? A chimera? They share the same name after all. Legit questions all, with no real answers as the film stubbornly refuses to make up its mind on which was who and whatnot.

Or were they two completely separate entities all along? The actual ghost of Ilsa and the duped Helene, working to the same ends. I kinda like to think so -- Ilsa for her own revenge, and Helene for Katrina. Adding fuel to this notion was Sandra Knight’s pregnancy. As filming dragged on, remember, she was nearly eight months pregnant while shooting these later inserts and her body showed this -- in her face, breasts and tummy. But strangely enough, this physical change kinda allows you to separate the heavier Ilsa from the lithe Helene. (Not a judgment, just an observation.)

And if the film makes one major strategic blunder, among a storm of minor ones, it’s introducing the notion that the Baron and Ilsa had a child, a plot thread that was ripe with opportunity only to be immediately left to wither and die on the vine.

Imagine if Helene had been their daughter. Or Eric and Ilsa’s daughter. (The Baron was gone for a year, remember.) And after her mother’s death, the crazed Eric and Stefan sent her away to be raised in the nearby village, where Katrina eventually finds her, unaware that this was most likely her own granddaughter, whom she forces into her gaslighting scheme, gets her possessed by the spirit of her own dead mother, Ilsa, to kill her father, who winds up being Katrina’s son and not the man she wanted to kill in the first place. I mean, holy shit. Think about it, won’t you? Thank you.

And then there’s that final scene, where I have my own pet theory as to what really happened.

Now. It’s my contention that when Duvalier jumped into the water, he didn’t pull Helene out of the flooding crypt but was duped by the ghost of Ilsa to pull her dislodged corpse out of the water. And once they were outside and they kissed, the spell was broken, revealing it was her rotting corpse all along, which promptly disintegrated once Ilsa’s spirit left this mortal coil.

Of course, that would mean the real Helene was still inside the crypt, where she most likely drowned like a trapped rat alongside the Baron and Stefan, which would compound this unfolding tragedy even further. Again, just a theory.

Alas, I fear some mysteries of The Terror will never, ever be resolved and its secrets will be taken to the grave. And that’s okay, honest. All told it’s a pretty good ghost story. And any film that can breed this kind of conjecture and discussion is A-OK in my book. Because if nothing else, the one thing The Terror isn’t, is boring. At times nonsensical, obtuse, and and extremely frustrating movie watching experience, sure, but never boring.

The film looks beautiful, despite of who knows how many different cameraman were involved. Hill deserves a lot of credit for stitching this all together. And Corman, too, for sticking it out till the bitter end. The fact that it makes THIS much sense is a minor miracle all on its own. The Terror should not work at all, and yet it does.

Helping matters in front of the camera was a small but rock solid cast.

After his heyday in the 1930s and '40s, Karloff was enjoying a mini-revival in the 1960s, and he brings a lot of weight to the role of the morose Baron Von Leppe, balancing out his younger co-stars. The sadness and weariness from the weight of the guilt his character has carried for two decades is palpable.

His knees and back were shot at this point and he was crippled with arthritis but, ever the trooper, there he was, marching endlessly up and down those halls and up and down those stairs and being drenched in water, wrestling with the others. And the scene where he and Duvalier discuss which one of them is mad is a tour de force by the veteran actor.

Nicholson wasn’t quite there yet, but he was definitely getting close. There’s a naturalness to his actions and reactions, which were about to make him famous. And this clash of acting styles between he and Karloff only added more frisson to these proceedings.

Sandra Knight was really quite good, too, as Helene / Ilsa, and I’d be curious as to why she gave up acting two short years later. She would give birth to their daughter, Jennifer, before the film was released but she and Nicholson would be divorced by 1968.

Dorothy Nuemann, as I said earlier, was a regular for both Corman and American International. She had appeared in Teenage Doll (1957), Carnival Rock (1957), Hot Rod Gang (1958) and The Ghost of Dragstrip Hollow (1959); and Nuemann, who was a dead ringer of the Wicked Witch of the West herself, Margaret Hamilton, played another witch for Corman in The Undead (1957).

And while she would later be typecast as a daffy old biddy, she’s all in here as the conniving Katrina, relishing every moment as she spits out her venomous epitaphs like a cat. We’ll just assume a slowing of the aging process was involved with her deal with the Devil, explaining how the older Karloff, 25 years her senior, could possibly be her son.

The tight cast is then rounded out by Corman regulars Dick Miller and Jonathan Haze. Unfortunately, for every Nicholson, Robert DeNiro and Pam Grier, there was a Miller and Haze in the Corman factory, who never quite made it -- though they probably should have judging by their performances here. Those guys knew how to play a scene no matter what the circumstances.

“It was very strange and we played the weirdest of characters,” said Hayes (Stapleton, 2011). “Dick Miller played a livery butler with a New York accent. And I played a guy who was an assistant to a witch. In the beginning of the film, I’m a deaf mute. And then halfway through the film they decided they didn’t have an ending and they’d better make me talk.”

Added Nicholson (Stapleton, 2011), “By mistake Roger occasionally made a good picture once in a while. I was never in it, but that was as much my fault as the next guy. To this day no one knows the plot of The Terror. And when you see the picture now, and god forbid I don’t want to encourage anyone to see it, I throw Dick Miller up against this door. And Dick Miller tries to explain the entire picture in one speech. It’s the only film I defy anybody to explain because there is no story arrived at,” said Nicholson, laughing. “Hopeless. All of it.”

The release of The Terror and Dementia 13 would also bring an end to The Filmgroup experiment in self-distribution. Brother Gene Corman left in 1963 to work for 20th Century Fox and the company was shuttered not long after. (Again, almost the entire Filmgroup catalog wound up in the public domain because Corman was too cheap to pay the fees to keep them copyrighted properly.) Corman would regroup and try again, and find much more success, when he formed New World Pictures in the 1970s.

Of course, even after The Terror was finally done and finished its rounds on the drive-in circuit, Corman still wasn’t done beating more content out of its corpse.

The Kansas City Star (October 27, 1963).

Remember that deferred bonus Karloff’s agent had negotiated if The Terror made more than $150,000? Well, Karloff sure did. But after cooking the books to prove that it never reached that threshold, the actor’s agent saw through this duplicity and demanded that his client be paid the $15,000 owed him.

Here, after a little back and forth, Corman agreed to pay the money on the condition Karloff gave him two more days on a future film. The idea, and stop me if you’ve heard this one before, was to take 20-minutes of existing footage from The Terror, and then combine that with 20-more minutes of new Karloff footage, plus 40-minutes with some other actors and, ta-dah, another cheap Karloff picture to release. And to pull this off, Corman turned to his latest assistant, Peter Bogdanovich.

This, of course, resulted in Targets (1968), which, to me, is the best film Bogdanovich ever made. And that is saying a lot -- The Last Picture Show (1971), What’s Up, Doc? (1972) and Paper Moon (1973) on his resume.

And to make that scheme work, Bogdanovich and his partner, Polly Platt, hit upon the idea that Karloff’s character was a fed up horror movie actor who announces his retirement, feeling he was a dinosaur about to go extinct with the meteoric impact of the true life, ripped from the headlines terrors unleashed by mass murderers like Charles Whitman and Richard Speck.

Thus, the plot for Targets would be rather meta as they contrasted “the illusion of horror” of Karloff’s Gothic cinematic trappings with the “real horror” of unmotivated murder. As to how he managed to pull all of that off so brilliantly? Well, that’s another long but fascinating production story for another day. 

As for the rest of our players who contributed to The Terror, Francis Coppola would move on to Warner Brothers, right about the time Seven Arts took over, and made You’re a Big Boy Now (1966) and Finian’s Rainbow (1968). He would then form his own independent studio, American Zoetrope, and make The Rain People (1969), where, like his old mentor, he helped launch the careers of his college buddies George Lucas and John Milius. 

In the aftermath of The Terror, Monte Hellman and Jack Nicholson would head off into the desert for a couple of existential westerns with The Shooting (1966) and Ride in the Whirlwind (1966). Nicholson would then join up with Bob Rafelson and The Monkees on the script for HEAD (1968), which led to Easy Rider (1969), where he officially broke out. And Hellman would continue his existential journey by trading one kind of horsepower for another in Two-Lane Blacktop (1971).

Jack Hill, meanwhile, would stick around with Corman for a while as a film doctor, but would also branch out with things like Spider-Baby (1967) and The Swinging Cheerleaders (1974). And he would be instrumental in helping establish Corman’s New World Pictures by venturing to the Philippines for The Big Bird Cage (1972) and The Woman Hunt (1972). And Daniel Haller would finally get his shot in the director's chair with two H.P. Lovecraft adaptations for AIP -- Die, Monster, Die! (1965) and The Dunwich Horror (1970).

As for their fearless leader, after finishing The Masque of the Red Death (1964) and The Tomb of Ligeia (1964) for AIP, Roger Corman was officially burnt out on Edgar Allan Poe and was once again ready to move on to something else -- something more contemporary. And that something came from an article he'd read in LIFE Magazine about the funeral for one of the Hells Angels, which led to shift in gears with The Wild Angels (1966); and he would tackle the burgeoning drug scene by dropping some acid and making The Trip (1967). 

Now. Contrary to popular belief, no one was on acid while making The Terror; and none would be required to make it to the end of the picture either. No.

If it's been awhile since you've watched this film, or need an upgrade on your old Alpha Video discs, I highly recommend the recently released version of The Terror by Film Masters (2024). The film is remastered and looks great, and it includes a rousing and informative commentary track by C. Courtney Joiner and Steve Haberman and an excellent supplemental featurette by Howard Berger and Kevin Marr (alias The Flying Maciste Brothers) of the long lost and lamented Destructible Man.

As I’ve said before, and will continue to repeat, with a lot of Roger Corman features, the stories of their production usually prove more interesting and entertaining than the films themselves. 

And while The Terror definitely qualifies, the gap in quality between those oft-told tales of slapping and dashing it together and the utter surrealistic sandwich of a film they wrought gets smaller and smaller with each and every viewing.

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