In the early 1960s, horror was still lurching out of a decade dominated by creature features and theatrical gimmicks brought on as a response to the advent of television. The ’50s had its gems (The Fly, House of Wax, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, etc) but most of the auteurs in horror and cinema were still on the horizon. 1963’s The Terror does not herald the arrival of some artistic renaissance in horror – it is instead proof that a film is just as much trade as it is art, and that a film need not be terribly good for it to be interesting.
This B-movie thriller sits in a transitional time for cinema, somewhere between the Classical Age and the auteur-driven New Hollywood that Roger Corman himself helped facilitate and participate in. Never one to rest on his laurels, Detroit-born filmmaker Corman finished his horror comedy The Raven in 1963, and turned immediately to production of The Terror, utilizing the same sets and two of the same lead actors. Frugal reuse of sets and footage was not uncommon during his so-called “Poe cycle” of films based off original works by Edgar Allen Poe, and it was partly this reason why the films were so profitable.
This series of AIP-produced adaptations (including The Fall of the House of Usher and Pit and the Pendelum) helped to establish Vincent Price as a household name in horror and cinema, and they still make up a large part of director Corman’s legacy. While not based off of any Poe work, The Terror matches those films in tone and theme; Corman himself considers it an “honorary” member of the cycle.
The film stars the venerable horror legend Boris Karloff and a young Jack Nicholson, both transitioning with Corman from their work on The Raven. The film also stars Sandra Knight, who had married Nicholson the year earlier and was pregnant with their daughter Jennifer during the shoot (they eventually divorced after six years together).
Nicholson plays Lieutenant Andre Duvalier, separated from his French regiment during the Napoleonic wars, and speaking without so much as a whiff of a French accent. He stumbles across a beautiful woman on the beach, who leads him to drinking water and introduces herself as Helene (Knight) before disappearing into the pounding surf of the coastline. Later, Nicholson told an interviewer that he nearly drowned following her into the water during the scene.
He awakens in the hut of an old witch, who tells him that he surely must be imagining a woman of that description. But her servant Gustaf reveals to him that the mysterious Helene is a possessed spirit, and that he will find out more at the nearby castle of Baron Von Leppe. Upon arriving at the gothic stronghold, Duvalier receives a begrudging welcome from the Baron (Karloff) and his peevish servant Stefan (Dick Miller), who both flatly deny the possibility of another soul in the castle, let alone a beautiful woman.
To recount the rest of the increasingly convoluted plot would be tiresome for writer and reader, and largely pointless anyway. Nicholson himself admits in a 2011 interview that the film has “no cohesive plotline,” and Karloff called the script a “sketchy outline” of a story. Even Corman came to the same conclusion when editing the footage, going so far as to shoot an extra scene in which Dick Miller hastily and ham-fistedly explains the plot after Nicholson slams him up against a wall demanding answers.
After wheedling a hesitant Karloff into doing the film, Corman shot the lead’s scenes in just a couple days before handing off the second unit directorial duties to no fewer than five different directors (including Jack Nicholson and a 34-year-old Francis Ford Coppola). Despite shooting for 11 days, Coppola had only 10 minutes of footage in the final cut to show for it. Nicholson himself directed the climactic scene in which the leads scuffle in the crypt as the castle is flooded. There was a whole lot of talent on the set of The Terror, but its widespread improvisation, threadbare script and death-by-committee direction produced little more than a slapdash novelty of a film, albeit not without some fleeting entertainment value.
If nothing else, The Terror is interesting because the man at the helm (more figuratively than literally in this case) is a subject unto himself. Roger Corman has been a prolific force in film as a writer, director, producer and bit actor since the mid-50s. His vast filmography includes the aforementioned Poe cycle of films, along with The Little Shop of Horrors and the Death Race series.
There is an enticing sense of paradox in the career of Corman, who is still alive and producing to this day. This is a man who makes cheap movies quickly, a B-movie legend who has nevertheless won an honorary Academy Award for his “rich engendering” of film-making worldwide. He proved that it was possible to make films like Attack of the Giant Leeches and Slumber Party Massacre and still earn retrospectives at the British Film Institute, Museum of Modern Art and Cinémathèque Française.
An indelible reason why his legacy is so noteworthy is the dramatic effect he had on the young filmmakers of his time. There is a whole group of then-up-and-coming directors and actors that he mentored and introduced to audiences. Many of these went on to become household names, and some of them the architects of the New Hollywood movement that changed the industry: Martin Scorcese, Francis Ford Coppola, James Cameron, Jonathan Demme, Ron Howard, Robert DeNiro, Dennis Hopper, Peter Fonda, Sandra Bullock and Jack Nicholson are just some of the students of the unofficial “Corman film school.”
When considering the ripple effects of all these celebrated careers, it is hard to overstate Corman’s impact on the world of modern cinema. Discerning audiences rightly hold artistic value as a defining characteristic of cinema that’s worth a damn, but Corman’s career shows that there is value in “blue collar” filmmaking, and enjoyment to be had in pulp thrills. Is Corman himself an auteur? This is debatable, but his impact on the auteurs of the next several decades seems undeniable.
If you’ve ever been on a film set you’ve seen that there is no such thing as “movie magic” – everything that happens on the screen does so with the concerted work of a team of tradespeople and artists. Few filmmakers have demonstrated the utilitarian side of the industry more so than Roger Corman, who routinely produces films under-budget and ahead of schedule. He’s an independent filmmaker at heart, despite a few stints with major studios. Many of his films have done little to garner critical acclaim, but his (positive) legacy is cemented nonetheless. The Terror is a hodgepodge oddity of ‘60s horror, featuring Nicholson before his prime and Karloff about three decades after his.
Despite the head-scratching narrative and muddled execution, The Terror retains (in true Corman fashion) an undeniable midnight movie appeal because of its star power and delightfully hokey thrills. But even beyond that, a closer look at the production reveals a root system connecting so many of our favorite names in horror and Hollywood. Sometimes, you just want to play the B-sides.