Directed by: Roger Corman
Starring: Boris Karloff, Jack Nicholson, Sandra Knight, Dick Miller, Dorothy Neumann, Jonathan Haze
STORY
Lost and separated from his regiment, young French Lieutenant André Duvalier wanders along a desolate coastline searching for his way back to civilization. Exhausted and alone, he suddenly encounters a beautiful young woman named Helene. She seems to appear from nowhere, offers almost no explanation for who she is and then vanishes as mysteriously as she arrived.
Duvalier cannot forget her.
His pursuit of the mysterious woman eventually leads him to the isolated castle of Baron Victor von Leppe, played by the legendary Boris Karloff. The aging Baron lives surrounded by shadows, secrets and memories of a tragedy that occurred years earlier. When Duvalier sees a portrait of the Baron’s late wife, Ilsa, he makes an astonishing discovery.
She looks exactly like Helene.
There is only one problem.
Ilsa has been dead for twenty years.
The deeper Duvalier ventures into the mystery, the stranger the castle becomes. Baron von Leppe seems tormented by the past. His servant Stefan guards secrets of his own. A mysterious old woman named Katrina appears to know far more about Helene than she admits. Death seems to surround everyone who gets too close to the truth.
And Helene continues to appear.
Is she a ghost? A living woman? A supernatural messenger? Or is someone manipulating Duvalier and the Baron for a much darker purpose?
What begins as a young soldier’s fascination with a beautiful stranger gradually becomes a Gothic nightmare involving murder, betrayal, witchcraft, revenge and a terrible secret buried inside the castle.
The Terror brings together two horror legends at very different points in their careers. Boris Karloff was already immortalized as one of the greatest figures in horror history. Jack Nicholson, decades before becoming one of the most celebrated actors in American cinema, was still a young performer finding his way through Roger Corman’s wonderfully inventive world of low-budget filmmaking.
The result is eerie, atmospheric and sometimes wonderfully strange. A lonely castle. A dead woman who may not be dead. An aging Baron haunted by his past. A young soldier determined to uncover the truth.
And absolutely no one in this castle is telling the whole story.
AIN BACKSTAGE SECRETS & AINTOIDS
THE MOVIE THAT BEGAN WITH LEFTOVER SETS
Roger Corman had recently completed The Raven with Boris Karloff, Vincent Price and Peter Lorre when he realized that the elaborate sets constructed for the production were still available. Rather than let those sets disappear unused, Corman decided to make another Gothic horror film while he still had access to them. The Terror grew out of that opportunity and became one of the most unusual productions of Corman’s career.
BORIS KARLOFF STAYED BEHIND
After finishing The Raven, Boris Karloff remained available to Corman for a very limited period. Corman rapidly filmed Karloff’s material for the new movie while the sets were still standing. What began as an attempt to create a film quickly eventually became something much more complicated.
THE MOVIE THAT REFUSED TO BE FINISHED
The Terror may have begun as a fast production, but finishing it became another matter entirely. Additional material was filmed over an extended period as Corman and his collaborators attempted to turn the footage into a complete story. The project ultimately stretched across months, becoming one of the most famously unconventional productions associated with Roger Corman.
HOW MANY DIRECTORS DOES IT TAKE TO MAKE ONE HORROR MOVIE?
Roger Corman receives the official directing credit, but several filmmakers contributed additional material during the extended production.
Among those who worked on portions of The Terror were Monte Hellman, Jack Hill, Dennis Jakob and a young Francis Ford Coppola.
Even Jack Nicholson reportedly directed material for the picture.
That means a movie conceived as a quick Gothic horror production became an extraordinary meeting place for filmmakers who would go on to have remarkably different careers.
FRANCIS FORD COPPOLA BEFORE THE GODFATHER
Years before The Godfather, The Conversation and Apocalypse Now made Francis Ford Coppola one of the most celebrated directors in American cinema, he was learning filmmaking inside Roger Corman’s low-budget operation.
Coppola worked on additional material for The Terror during the movie’s long and complicated production.
Corman became famous for giving young filmmakers opportunities to work, experiment and learn by actually making movies. The list of people who passed through his filmmaking world would eventually become astonishing.
JACK NICHOLSON BEFORE JACK NICHOLSON
The Jack Nicholson audiences see in The Terror is years away from Easy Rider, Five Easy Pieces, Chinatown, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and The Shining.
Nicholson had been working in low-budget films and television while developing his career, and his relationship with Roger Corman became an important part of those early years.
Here he plays the romantic young lead, Lieutenant André Duvalier, wandering through a Gothic nightmare opposite one of horror cinema’s greatest legends.
BORIS KARLOFF MEETS A NEW GENERATION
The pairing of Boris Karloff and Jack Nicholson makes The Terror especially fascinating today.
Karloff had become a screen legend more than thirty years earlier through Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein. Nicholson was still years away from the performances that would make him one of Hollywood’s defining actors.
The Terror places those two generations together inside the same crumbling Gothic castle.
BEHIND THE CAMERA
Roger Corman produced and directed The Terror, with Leo Gordon and Jack Hill credited for the screenplay. John M. Nickolaus Jr. served as director of photography, Stuart O’Brien edited the film, Daniel Haller handled the production design and Ronald Stein composed the musical score.
The picture was produced by The Filmgroup and released through American International Pictures.
AINTOID: LADY OF THE SHADOWS
The Terror did not always have its wonderfully simple final title.
AFI records the film’s working title as Lady of the Shadows.
Considering the mysterious woman who repeatedly appears and disappears throughout the story, it is an unusually appropriate description of the movie that eventually became The Terror.
AINTOID: SANDRA KNIGHT AND JACK NICHOLSON
Sandra Knight, who plays the mysterious Helene, was married to Jack Nicholson at the time.
The couple had married in 1962, making the strange Gothic romance between Duvalier and Helene a movie pairing between the real-life husband and wife.
AINTOID: CORMAN’S HORROR WORLD
The Terror arrived during Roger Corman’s extraordinary run of Gothic horror pictures in the early 1960s.
Its castle interiors, ominous atmosphere, decaying aristocracy and obsession with a beautiful dead woman make it feel closely related to Corman’s famous Edgar Allan Poe films.
But The Terror is not an Edgar Allan Poe adaptation.
It is an original screenplay by Leo Gordon and Jack Hill, even though its Gothic imagery makes it feel perfectly at home beside Corman’s Poe cycle.
AINTOID: DICK MILLER RETURNS
Dick Miller, credited here as Richard Miller, plays Stefan, Baron von Leppe’s servant.
Miller became one of Roger Corman’s most recognizable recurring actors, appearing in numerous Corman productions and eventually building an extraordinary career as one of Hollywood’s most familiar character actors.
Jonathan Haze, another regular member of Corman’s filmmaking circle and the star of The Little Shop of Horrors, also appears in The Terror as Gustaf.
AINTOID: KARLOFF HAD QUITE A 1963
The Terror was not Boris Karloff’s only encounter with Roger Corman’s world in 1963.
That same year Karloff appeared alongside Vincent Price and Peter Lorre in Corman’s The Raven. He also joined Price, Lorre and Basil Rathbone in The Comedy of Terrors.
More than three decades after Frankenstein transformed his career, Karloff remained one of horror cinema’s most unmistakable presences.
AINTOID: THE OFFICIAL RELEASE
The Terror opened in Los Angeles on September 25, 1963.
It was released through American International Pictures and appeared on a double bill with another low-budget horror film from an emerging young filmmaker, Dementia 13.
That film was directed by Francis Ford Coppola.
DATE RELEASED
September 25, 1963
COUNTRY RELEASED
United States