Thursday, 23 January 2025

The Terror (1963)

Director: Roger Corman
Writers: Leo Gordon and Jack Hill
Stars: Boris Karloff, Jack Nicholson and Sandra Knight

Index: The First Thirty.

The Terror is one of those movies that’s a lot more interesting than it is good. Then again, it really had no business being any level of good, given that it was shot on the sets of The Raven during the two days Roger Corman had before they would be torn down, the same two days he had the continued use of Boris Karloff.

He didn’t have a script, just a vague idea, so had Karloff and a few other actors do generic things like walking down hallways or through doors and, of course, talking to each other, as people do, so a writer could conjure up a story around it later. The idea was coherent enough, at least, to have Karloff spend a few hours in a tank of cold water for the finalĂ©.

That writer was Leo Gordon, a co-writer of The Cry Baby Killer. Once his script was written, Corman brought in another director to shoot everything else, because he was union and he didn’t have the budget to shoot extra footage according to union rules.

More footage was needed but that director had taken another job, so a friend of his shot some scenes. Then a fourth director took care of some exterior shots, a fifth supposedly took care of the rest but a sixth shot the last day. A two day shoot therefore ended up taking nine months and the results are about as coherent as you can imagine, with creative input from all of those different people.

The good news is that they were really good people. Corman hired nobodies because they were cheap, but a ridiculous amount of those nobodies became somebodies. Like almost the entire New Hollywood roster in the seventies.

The nobody directors? Francis Ford Coppola was the second. Dennis Jakob, who edited The Doors and Apocalypse Now, was the third. Monte Hellman, director of Two-Lane Blacktop, was the fourth. Jack Hill, director of cult films such as Spider Baby, The Big Doll House and Foxy Brown was the fifth. Jack Nicholson was the sixth.

That’s a crazy amount of future talent right there and it’s not surprising that some genius rubbed off on this picture. Sure, it doesn’t hold together very well, because it’s a lot of genius from individuals doing things in isolation that were patched together in a form that isn’t that coherent across eighty minutes. But it’s worth watching anyway just to catch the moments.

Of course, it’s also rather familiar, especially if we’ve just watched The Raven. Yes, that’s the castle of Dr. Scarabus with the same waves on the shore outside. That’s Karloff, looking a bit older here than the week before. And there’s Nicholson, now in historical army uniform, on the beach, falling off his horse, dehydrated. He is woken by the tide, very thirsty indeed.

Fortunately, there’s a young lady there who can take him to fresh water. And then vanish into thin air. He finds her again but she walks into the sea and vanishes into thin air again as he tries to save her. He’s promptly attacked by a hawk that we should clearly see as her, then wakes up indoors. She’s there too, where she kisses him and, yes, vanishes into thin air.

As you can imagine, it’s all very mysterious and artsy and the mood is one of the strongest aspects of the film. However, the story is such a loose one with enough holes that it’s almost worth ignoring it, but I should mention it.

Let’s just say that the young lady is Helene, except she’s also Ilse, the wife of Baron Victor Frederick von Leppe, and she’s been dead for twenty years. “For a ghost, she’s a very active young woman,” points out Lt. Andre Duvalier in a suitably flippant comment that isn’t true to the tone of the film as a whole.

This isn’t the horror comedy that The Raven was. It’s an atmospheric ghost story that was Corman’s attempt, after five Edgar Allan Poe adaptations, to create something in that vein that was entirely original. Its many problems tie to consistency and coherence and grew out of the film’s highly unusual creation. Had the story been written and directed in one go, the result would have been far more impressive. It feels like the sort of revenge Poe would write.

Of course, Andre is Nicholson’s character, a soldier in Napoleon’s army who was separated from his unit. Helene or Ilse or whoever she is is played by the lovely Sandra Knight, who was also Mrs. Jack Nicholson at the time.

Other characters include Stefan, the Baron’s servant, who provides plenty of screen time for Dick Miller; Dorothy Neumann as Katrina, the witch mastermind behind what little story we have; and Jonathan Haze, fresh from The Little Shop of Horrors, as village idiot Gustaf.

While the story is obviously the weak point of the film, it’s almost appropriate that it feel so incoherent, because The Terror plays well as a sort of fever dream. I’m pretty sure that we aren’t supposed to think that it’s all a product of Lt. Duvalier’s dehydration or maybe even a form of combat shock, but it’s really not hard to do so. In fact, it makes more sense that way because it’s all very dreamlike.

I’m not sure which director brought in the green and red lighting, but that makes for an effective mood. Many of these scenes feel just a little off, but in a good way. Does that make it more nightmarish than dreamlike? Maybe.

It’s also a particularly important picture for Jack Nicholson. However much or little he got to direct on the final day, he appears to have got some time in the director’s chair, which he hadn’t been given before. Before that point, he also played what’s arguably his first lead role.

Sure, Karloff is top billed because of course he is, but Nicholson plays the lead and gets the most screen time of the precious few actors in the picture and that he’d had thus far in his career. He played the title character in The Cry Baby Killer and the most prominent character in The Wild Ride, but were they true leads? Not like this one, they weren’t.

Lt. Duvalier also gave him opportunity to be more than just an entitled teenager or out of control young adult. Karloff may have the best monologue, forced into telling the tragic story of his wife, but Nicholson has plenty to do. He gets to be noble and polite and demonstrative and angry and investigative. He gets the girl but loses the girl because she was dead long before he came along and that makes for quite a horrific final scene too.

What’s most important, of course, is that he is firmly up to the challenge. He didn’t always impress in his early movies, with his potential more obvious than his success. Here, he’s not the star that he would become, but he proves more than capable of leading a film that has Boris Karloff in the cast. That’s no trivial feat.

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