The Terror (1963)

I've talked before about how, when I was around four or five years old, my parents often relied on my paternal grandparents to babysit for me over at their house, while Mom and Dad worked during the day. And as I've also said, my grandmother had a good number of random VHS tapes, which was both stuff that she'd bought in order to keep me and the other kids she watched entertained, and tapes that were left behind by my older cousins after they'd stayed with her. Just about all of them were public domain and they included a tape with four episodes of The New Three Stooges cartoon show, compilations of various other cartoons, Bruce the Super Hero, which I now know was one of those "Bruceploitation" films (this one starring "Bruce Le"), and, most significantly for me personally, Godzilla vs. Megalon, starting my lifelong love of Godzilla and kaiju flicks in general. Also among them was one tape that my grandmother wouldn't allow me to watch, saying it was "too scary." I don't know if she'd even seen it herself, but the title, The Terror, was probably enough of a sign that this wasn't something a five-year old should be watching. That was actually a good judgement call on her part because, as I've said before, even though I'm a huge fan of the horror genre now, I was an easily frightened, skittish little kid. One time, I accidentally put that tape in and the first few seconds, with the crashing thunder and dark castle, were enough for me to quickly take it out of the VCR. And like so many other films I first glimpsed as a child, I wouldn't learn exactly what it was until many years later, when I was a teenager. Several Christmases in a row, my mom made the mistake of getting me those public domain DVD horror packs as presents and one of the them had The Terror. By this point, I was not only now a big horror fan, but I already knew a little bit about it, thanks to that documentary with Butch Patrick, The History of Sci-Fi and Horror. I knew that, like most of Roger Corman's movies, it came about very quickly, and starred Boris Karloff and a young Jack Nicholson. That latter bit of information intrigued me in and itself, given how I'm a big fan of both of those actors. And when I gave it a watch and saw the opening, I immediately recognized it and thought to myself, "Oh, that's what that movie was." (I would have a similar reaction upon watching John Carpenter's The Thing on VHS for the first time, as I'd seen a little bit of it when I was a young kid as well.)

Upon watching it, my impression was summed as... eh. In fact, when I first did this review, I was originally planning on making this an entry of Movies That Suck, but upon re-watching it, I realized that, while not great, it's certainly not that bad. I've seen it a couple of more times recently, as, like the other public domain horrors we've discussed this month, it now has a really good home media release (another from Film Masters, in this case), with a nice, high-def print, and it's kind of fascinating to read up on, given how random, scattershot, and improvised its production was. It's also aided by Boris Karloff, as per usual, giving a performance that it's truly unworthy of, some good production design and cinematography, and instances of Gothic spookiness and style. But, make no mistake, the sudden notice, pieced together nature of its creation is plain as day: it's a confusing, cliched, and fairly dull mishmash, with a plot that is the definition of convoluted and is often very hard, if nigh impossible, to follow.

It's 1806, and Lieutenant Andre Duvalier of the Napoleonic army has been separated from his regiment. Weary and dehydrated, he meets a strange young woman named Helene in a beach-side cove. While kind and accommodating, she suddenly vanishes after walking into the violent surf, and Andre is then attacked by a hawk that seems to come out of nowhere. He blacks out, and regains consciousness in a small shack that's home to Katrina, an old peasant woman, and her servant, Gustaf. Katrina also has a pet hawk, whom Andre recognizes as the one that attacked him, but Katrina insists that she wouldn't attack anyone. The hawk happens to be named Helene, but Katrina claims that Andre merely imagined the young woman due to his weary state. The night, he meets up with the young woman again in the forest and she kisses him, only to then attempt to lure him into some quicksand. Gustaf, who can speak, despite Katrina saying he's mute, saves Andre, and tells him that Helene is possessed. He also tells him to go to the castle of Baron von Leppe, as he will find her there. Despite Katrina's continuing to insist that there is no young woman, and warning him that he's meddling in things he should leave alone, Andre finds his way to the castle. The old Baron, Victor Frederick von Leppe, meets him at the door and, reluctantly, allows him to stay for the night. But, even though Andre saw Helene in the window, von Leppe, like Katrina, insists that no one lives at the castle besides him and his servant, Stefan. The Baron then shows Andre a portrait of Helene, but reveals that she is his wife, Ilsa, who has been dead for twenty years. After a night of strange happenings, which include his seeing Helene again, in the chapel, Andre learns that the entrance there to the von Leppe family crypt has been sealed up. Confronting the Baron, Andre learns that, shortly after he married Ilsa, von Leppe had to serve in the military. Upon returning after a year, he found her with another man and murdered her, while Stefan took care of her lover. Now, he believes that Ilsa's spirit is haunting him, as part of his penance for killing her. However, Andre, not believing in the supernatural, continues to investigate, and it's gradually revealed that there is more going on than meets the eye. 

Roger Corman, of course, was legendary for making movies quickly and cheaply, most notably in how he shot virtually all of the original Little Shop of Horrors (which not only also featured Jack Nicholson but is the companion film to The Terror on that Film Masters release) in just two days. But the way The Terror came about is just unreal, even for him. By this point, he was well into his series of films based on the works of Edgar Allan Poe, and it was during production on The Raven that he got the idea for The Terror. The story I always heard was that shooting on the former finished up sooner than expected and Corman, not wanting to waste the remaining two days in the schedule, decided to shoot more footage of Boris Karloff on the sets and build a movie around it later. But, in doing more research, I've read that Corman himself described The Terror as a way of challenging himself to try to make a Poe-esque story from nothing. He got together with Leo Gordon, an actor and screenwriter with whom he'd worked before, and told him to quickly come up with a sixty-page script that, one, had to be set in a castle, and two, had to end with a flood. Rather than go to American-International Pictures, Corman financed The Terror himself (AIP would distribute it, however), which is what led to its falling into the public domain. Since his usual Poe star, Vincent Price, wasn't available, he arranged for Karloff to stick around for a little bit after shooting wrapped on The Raven. Jack Nicholson's having been in that film as well is also why he was in The Terror, and Corman put Dick Miller in just because he was an actor he could always depend on. He shot all of the scenes involving Karloff over a weekend and then, after Gordon had written the rest of the screenplay, shooting started up again three months later.

And thus began a long odyssey that would ultimately take nine months to fully complete, ironically making it one of Corman's longest productions. While Corman is solely credited as director, after the initial shooting of the Karloff material, he no longer had the money necessary to finish the movie while remaining a member of the Director's Guild. Thus, a handful of other directors had to step in and find a way to make sense of this mess, mostly through a lot of improvisation and writing on the fly (many of them are credited, but in various roles). The first was a young Francis Ford Coppola, who had worked with Corman as his assistant on a couple of other movies (notably, a member of the crew during Coppola's shoot was Gary Kurtz, who would go on to work with both him and George Lucas, including on American Graffiti and the first two Star Wars movies). According to Nicholson, Coppola went over budget and schedule, and changed the script to his own liking. One of the other directors, Jack Hill, would say that a lot of Coppola's footage was unusable, and only ten minutes' worth ended up in the finished film. When Coppola then took another 

job, he recommended Dennis Jakob as his replacement, and Corman would, in turn, use Jakob as a stand-in for Karloff in some later re-shooting. After that, Monte Hellman, who had directed 1959's Beast from Haunted Cave, which was produced by Corman's brother, Gene, was the next one who stepped in, with Hill, who'd started on the film as a second unit director and sound recordist, extensively rewriting the screenplay (Hill has said that's why he shares a writing credit with Leo Gordon). And then,when Hellman took another job, Hill stepped in as the last director, with Corman himself coming back for a little bit of reshooting at the very end, just as he was wrapping up production on The Haunted Palace. Shocker of shockers, when he cut the footage together, specifically everything with Karloff, he realized it didn't make sense, and thus, he had to shoot a scene where Dick Miller's character flat-out explains everything. It's also been said that even Jack Nicholson himself took a turn at directing, specifically the climactic flood scene, but Hill has denied this.

Before I learned of this movie and, more specifically, its title, I already knew of a movie called The Terror, which was released in 1928. I read about it in a book at my high school's library, and it was also mentioned in The History of Sci-Fi and Horror, notably because it was the first all-sound horror film ever made. That film is now lost, unfortunately, and when I first heard of this in that documentary, I thought it might be a remake, although I quickly learned that wasn't the case. Anyway, just wanted to get that off my chest.  

Even in something as muddled and scrapped together as this, Boris Karloff is still able to prove why he was one of the greats. As Baron Victor von Leppe, he initially comes across as menacing and secretive when he answers the castle door for Andre Duvalier and suggests that he seek shelter elsewhere. He only invites Andre in when he suggests that he, "Wouldn't want to inconvenience a French officer," but does act cordial as he shows him around, pays respect to the Lieutenant's own noteworthy family, and offers him some cognac. As expected, von Leppe, like Katrina, denies that there's a young woman in the castle, despite Andre having seen her. When he insists that he did see her, von Leppe shows him a portrait of his deceased wife, Ilsa, whom Andre recognizes as "Helene," while the Baron continues to insist that there is no one else there apart from his servant, Stefan. Of course, it's obvious that he knows more than he's letting on, and after the strange things that Andre experiences during his first night at the castle, it's revealed that he and Stefan are plotting to scare him off. However, von Leppe insists to Stefan that Andre must leave, "Of his own accord. We will show him the respect that his position and rank demand." But then, Andre confronts him about having seen the woman again, and demands to know why he removed the Baroness' portrait, and the emotionally tortured Baron is forced to reveal his terrible secret. Twenty years before, he returned from a year of military service to find Ilsa, a peasant girl he married after years of loneliness, having an affair. In a rage, he killed her, while Stefan took care of her lover. His soul has been shattered ever since, and he has continuously punished himself by never leaving the castle. He now feels that her spirit, who first appeared two years before, has come to relieve him of his penance, and admits that he always looks forward to seeing her. 

Baron von Leppe is clearly not an evil man but, rather, someone who made a horrible mistake and is punishing himself for it in his own way. Also, as much as he wishes for him to leave, he forbids Stefan from killing Andre, as he suggests, saying, "God knows I have enough upon my conscience without the senseless murder of a young man who never harmed me." After that, we see him forlornly wandering the castle, desperately wanting to speak with Ilsa's spirit. At one point, he goes down into the family crypt and talks about how he waits for his own death so he can

be with her again. She does speak to him and tries to convince him to commit suicide, but he tearfully refuses, as he knows his soul will be damned. When Andre intervenes, the stress of it causes von Leppe to fall ill with what Stefan refers to as a type of seizure. Upon regaining consciousness, von Leppe, outraged when he finds that Andre and Stefan have entered Ilsa's sealed room, decides he's done with civility. He gives Stefan a gun and orders him to use it to force Andre to leave the castle, telling him to shoot him if

he resists. Ilsa then appears to von Leppe again and, by this point, he's so broken that he agrees to drown himself in the tomb, especially when she tells him that he will be forgiven for taking his own life. Unfortunately, that leads into another revelation that over-complicates things even more than they already are.

I'd be lying if I said that you can see hints of the legendary actor that Jack Nicholson would become in his performance here. It could because he was very young and green, but I think it's more a case of what he had to work with (or what he didn't, as the case me), leading to a performance that's really wooden and bland. Seriously, he barely changes his tone of voice from scene to scene, or emotion to emotion. Another problem is I don't think he fit well in Gothic period pieces like this, particularly with the elegant and florid dialogue they required him to speak. Classically trained actors like Karloff and Vincent Price could do it well, but when someone like Nicholson, who was very much of a new generation of actors and would go on to become a defining face of the New Hollywood, does it, it doesn't feel right (and let's not forget that he's also supposed to be a 19th Century soldier in the French military). I didn't think he was that good in The Raven, either, but there, he has such a minor, supporting role that you're not likely to be paying much attention; here, where he's very much the protagonist, it's plain as day. And: like Rexford Bedlo in The Raven, the character of Lt. Andre Duvalier is very straightforward and rather boring in and of himself, and doesn't grant Nicholson much to do other than play detective and try to figure out what's going on. It also doesn't help that I don't buy his infatuation with "Helene," and his compulsion to learn the truth and save her. And despite how much evidence there is that what's going on is something supernatural, it takes Andre a long time to realize it.

As he was dating her at the time, Nicholson suggested that Sandra Knight play the dual role of Helene/Ilsa. While she was likely chosen simply because it would be cheap and easy, and also because she's definitely nice to look at, I think Roger Corman made a mistake in taking Nicholson up on that. To me, she wasn't scary or mysterious, in the least, but rather, just bland, and her acting is even more stilted than Nicholson's. You could make the argument that it fits with the character of a woman who's possessed by another spirit, but I think that may be a cop-out. But more than anything, her character is so confusing to figure out. I can't tell if her physical form is that of someone who was initially known as Helene, before Katrina used her power to place Ilsa's spirit in her and send her to haunt Baron von Leppe, or if it's literally Ilsa given physical form again, with Katrina simply telling her that her name is actually Helene (what purpose would that serve, anyway?). The scene between her and Gustaf at the seaside, where he tells her that her name is really Ilsa and that Katrina lies, could be interpreted either way. But then, Ilsa's claim that Katrina summoned her from the sea, and Gustaf telling her that she must return to it, suggests that she's the possessed body of someone else who drowned, as there's no indication that von Leppe disposed of Ilsa's body in the ocean. (At the end, he opens a coffin down in the crypt to discover a body that Ilsa says is, "The part of me that loved you.") Gustaf also flat-out tells Andre early on that Helene is possessed, and a scene between her and Andre in the von Leppe chapel, where she says that she's only free in there, suggests it's the only place where Ilsa's spirit doesn't have a hold on her. And speaking of Andre, when he first met her, was that Ilsa or Helene? Given how she seems to try to lure him to his death both times, I would assume it was Ilsa, and he just got lucky that he actually met Helene at the chapel later. But, during the scene between her and Gustaf, where she talks about killing von Leppe, she smiles and seems delighted when Gustaf says that Andre can help her. So, does Ilsa not even fully know who she is? Finally, while the movie tries to suggest that Katrina's hawk named Helene is actually the woman in another form, sometimes they're in the same scene together, so that can't be the case. But then again, who knows at this point?

One of the special features on the Film Masters Blu-Ray is a 44-minute visual essay by filmmaker Howard S. Berger called Ghosts in the Machine: Art and Artifice in Roger Corman's Celluloid Castle, wherein he shares some rather interesting insights and theories about The Terror. Among them is an interesting suggestion that, were it verified, would not only clear things up but add another layer of darkness and perversion to the story. Late in the film, when Andre and Stefan enter Ilsa's bedroom, which has been locked since the day she died, they find a crib,

suggesting that Ilsa had a child at some point. Though the two of them question it, it's quickly forgotten and never mentioned again, but Berger suggests that the child may be none other than Helene. His evidence is that Baron von Leppe was away for a year, which was ample time for Ilsa to become pregnant and have the child without his knowing, and also because the affair between Ilsa and Eric happened twenty years ago, which is how old Helene is said to be (and sure enough, Sandra Knight was around that age at the 

time of filming). Not only would that explain why Helene resembles the portrait of Ilsa in the castle's main room, but it also means that Katrina has forced Ilsa's spirit to possess her own daughter to enact her revenge. It's an unsettling idea, and adds even more uncomfortable layers to the movie's final revelation, but it's never confirmed, and it never crossed my mind when I watched it (nor do I think it crossed the filmmakers'), so I can't say I agree with Berger.

Katrina (Dorothy Neumann), the old woman, fares better than Ilsa, mostly because, one, her motivation is perfectly clear, and two, her performance is more entertaining. Even though she acts as a compassionate caregiver towards Andre when he finds himself in her care after he first meets Helene, it's plain as day that she's in on whatever is going on, give how she vehemently denies Helene's existence and continues doing so after Andre meets her again. She also doesn't react well to his asking where he can find Baron von Leppe's castle, insisting that no one lives there and imploring him not to go, saying he doesn't know what he's getting into. You later find out that Katrina is a witch who's been banished from her home due to her practicing black magic and has conjured up Ilsa's spirit, commanding her to torment the Baron and push him to commit suicide. In the scene where she's seen "programming" Ilsa to do this, Katrina comes off like a classic evil witch, with her cackling and devious plotting, and she also commands her pet hawk to kill those who get in her way. Speaking of which, even if that hawk is not Helene in a different form, Katrina does some to be able to see through its eyes and dispense with a potential threat, like when it suddenly attacks Gustaf when he goes to meet with Andre. During the third act, you learn that Katrina's motivation is because her son, Eric, was the Baroness Ilsa's lover, who was murdered along with her. However, it turns out that things are more complicated than that. In the end, Katrina dies a very random but not unexplained death. Andre tries to make her follow him into the chapel, but she's unable to step onto holy ground because of her pact with Satan. Thus, she's struck by a sudden bolt of lightning.

Gustaf (Jonathan Haze), Katrina's supposedly mute servant, is not only actually able to talk, albeit in a very low, raspy voice, but he also lets Andre know immediately that she's not to be trusted. After saving him from being lured into quicksand by Ilsa, he tells Andre that Helene is possessed, and directs him to Baron von Leppe's castle. He later implores Ilsa to not do what Katrina says, adding that Andre can help her, but he receives a warning from Ilsa about his continued interference, which she seems to receive from the hawk as it flies up above. (One has to wonder why Gustaf didn't just tell Andre what's really going on in the first place, why he gives enough of a crap about Helene to risk the witch's wrath, or why Katrina doesn't get rid of him sooner if she knows of his betrayal)  Gustaf ultimately gets his eyes pecked out by the hawk, then falls over the edge of the cliff he's standing on. Before he expires, he tells Andre that Helene loves him and asks him to go back to the castle and help her.

It's really interesting watching Dick Miller here, in the role of the Baron's butler, Stefan, as he's playing against type. As a favorite actor of Corman's, and later, Joe Dante, he usually played either a sleazy guy, a wiseguy, or a grumpy old man, so it's quite interesting to see him in a period piece like this as a butler, and it's also impressive how he actually manages to make himself fit within it. While you can still hear hints of it, he mostly does a great job of hiding his Bronx accent and, instead, speaks in a more refined voice befitting the character and time period. He portrays Stefan as a fiercely loyal butler who will do anything to make sure that nothing disturbs his master, including both Andre and Katrina, the latter of whom he threatens to kill if she doesn't leave the shack that she's made into her home. And while the Baron tells him not to harm Andre, you know that Stefan would most certainly kill him if he could, and he threatens to do so at the end of the film, after the Baron orders him to escort Andre out of the castle at gunpoint. The only downside to Stefan is that, over the course of the movie, he goes back and forth between acting as an antagonist towards Andre (he's first seen menacingly watching him riding along the beach at the very beginning, when there's no reason for him to even be there), and being more sympathetic, helping him search the castle and uncover its dark secrets while the Baron is laid up. Also, like I said earlier, Stefan is at the center of the big exposition dump at the end.

While I'd seen remastered, HD versions of The Terror before, it's nice that, like The Screaming Skull, The Killer Shrews, The Giant Gila Monster, and The Brain That Wouldn't Die, there is now a widely available, good-looking version of it on Blu-Ray. But, all the remastering in the world can't change the fact that, while the actual direction is fine, for the most part, the film is something of a mess in terms of technical filmmaking. For one, probably because it wasn't financed by an actual studio, and was shot

quickly and cheaply, even the remastered versions still look a bit washed out and not as lush as Corman's Poe movies (for the most part, anyway, as we'll see). And while the many nighttime interiors and exteriors aren't so dark that you can't see at all, like in the public domain releases, the blacks are still often stronger than necessary. Speaking of which, there are also a lot of obvious day-for-night scenes, which tend to make that issue worse, and because some of the daytime scenes set in the forest around Katrina's 

shack are themselves rather dim, you may find yourself confused as to what time of day some scenes are taking place. There's one scene where the establishing shot of the shack looks like it's during the daytime, but when we switch to the inside, the glimpses of the outside through the open door look like nighttime, onlu to go back to day when Andre departs for the castle. There's a similar continuity error during the climax, which is supposed to be taking place at night, but some exterior shots were 

done in the middle of the day. Another thing, in some close-ups, the camera will get right up on an actor's face, like when Andre speaks with Stefan before he leaves the castle in the middle of the movie, and when he gets him to admit the truth at the end, the latter of which was done because there was no set when they shot. That may have also been why, following Gustaf's death and Andre's return to the castle, it fades to black on a shot of him looking at Gustaf, and comes back up to a close-up of him returning on horseback (one where the shadows badly obscure his 

face; I know it's not centered, but the shot of that moment here is one of the better angles I could get on it), without doing an establishing shot. It may sound like a strange thing to complain about, but it just looks off and uncomfortable to me. The same goes for some very quick close-ups of the hawk during the attack scenes, where you can tell that, either someone is holding it by the wings or it's a stuffed prop being manipulated. And in the scene where it attacks Gustaf, you continually see it hovering in midair, before finally swooping down at him. I don't know if 

that was a looped shot of the bird in mid-flight or what, but it looks bizarre. And there are a good number of instances of obvious ADR, which was required due to the constantly changing story details. While instantly detectable due to the shift in sound quality, it works fine when someone is offscreen or  their mouth is hidden. But when their mouth is right onscreen, while it may not be as bad as some kaiju or Kung-Fu movie dubbing, it's still very noticeable. In fact, the sound quality, in general, is pretty crappy, and in some scenes, like when Andre and Helene first talk in the chapel, it gets so low and muddled that you can barely make it out

Corman's use of the sets of The Raven and, at the end of shooting, The Haunted Palace, not only gives The Terror the same flavor and atmosphere as his Poe films.(the exterior shots of the castle on the cliff, overlooking the sea and the low-angle shots of it are taken from past movies), but makes the movie feel much bigger and more expansive than its budget would've allowed otherwise. Baron von Leppe's castle is a massive building, with an enormous foyer that houses a flight of large stone steps leading down from

the second floor, a long dining room table in front of a huge fireplace, two huge rugs on the floor, a chandelier with big, red candles hanging up above the table, and furniture and paintings lining the walls. The second floor is made up of some rather dark corridors, the Baron's bedroom, the guest room, and Ilsa's old bedroom, which has been boarded up since the day she died and is covered in a layer of dust. And then, there's the crypt in the basement, which has an unearthly-looking, green glow about it, and can also

be reached through the dark, dilapidated chapel, through a door that's very old and rusted. The exteriors of the chapel, with the foggy graveyard and small, gnarled trees dotting it, are classically Gothic and something any fan of the genre will appreciate. Going back to the cinematography, there's a ghostly blue color to these exteriors, enhanced by the flashing lightning during the climax, and the corridors and chambers leading down into the crypt have highlights of purple, blue, and even red light to them, all of

which look quite good in high-definition. And for as small as the movie's production was, the scale of the flooding crypt at the end is fairly impressive (although, the supposedly huge, heavy chunks of wall that come crashing down during this sequence can be seen floating atop the water).

The other directors who took up the movie mainly shot on location, with Francis Ford Coppola notably shooting at Big Sur for the beach scenes, the scenes between Andre and Helene amid the rocky shoreline, and the scene between Helen and Gustaf on the rocks overlooking the ocean. It makes for some very lovely scenery, although Jack Nicholson said he almost drowned in the strong tide and violent waves, likely during the scene where he gets attacked by Katrina's hawk after Helene disappears into the surf. Monte

Hellman shot some scenes on the cliffs at Palos Verdes Peninsula, such as Stefan watching Andre during the opening and Gustaf's death scene. Another shooting location was Point Lobos State Natural Reserve, likely for the scenes in the forest around Katrina's shack. The inside of the shack, which I'm sure was done back at the studio, is a very confined space, filled with shelves of bottles, herbs, tools like a magnifying glass, and, most notably, a colorful, zoetrope-like lamp, a recycled prop from one of the stories in Corman's Poe anthology film, Tales of 

Terror, and which Katrina uses in the scene where she performs black magic on Helene. And finally, Dennis Jakob is said to shot some material at Hoover Dam, which was used for cutaways when the Baron pulls the lever that floods the crypt at the end.

Going back to The Terror's connection to the Poe movies, it may not be directly adapted from any of his works, but it is thematically similar to some of them, specifically in the idea of someone being haunted by their deceased wife's vengeful spirit (Roger Corman had himself already tackled this theme when he did the story of Morella in Tales of Terror, and he would later adapt Ligeia for his final Poe movie). It also follows the same, basic formula that Corman had established and, for the most part, had followed with 

the series: a huge manor that's falling apart, representing the fractured mindset of its occupants; the master of the house being especially mentally unhinged; a dashing young man who arrives and ends up uncovering some dark secrets; a lovely young woman whom he becomes enamored with and tries to save from the unenviable existence she's leading; and a climax that sees the manor being partially or completely destroyed.

The opening credits sequence is pretty cool, playing over a montage of painted imagery of an ancient dungeon and torture chamber, with hooded figures either crouching up against or chained to a wall, standing around, holding whips, or, in the case of one, hanging by a noose. These images are complimented by bits of very limited but memorable animation, such as a shadow creeping across the floor, one of the figures withering away to a skeleton, a grinning skull appearing within one's dark hood, and the stone

pillars becoming crumbled and overgrown in a series of dissolves, all while a bird continually flies and swoops back and forth through the frame. There's one instance where an animated hawk flies right at the screen and suddenly turns into a woman, seemingly tying into the idea that Helene turns into Katrina's hawk. Also, speaking of Helene, there are some noteworthy visuals that accompany her in the film itself. When Andre first awakens in Katrina's shack, he initially sees Helene, only for her image to blur

and be replaced with that of the old witch. And when she appears to the Baron down in the crypt during the climax, they use an optical effect that distorts her body but keeps her head perfectly clear, making her come off as all the more ghostly. Finally, while we're still complimenting the movie, I would like to give some kudos to the makeup effects and special props used. Specifically, I'm talking about the decomposing skeleton that pops out during the opening (the moment itself and build-up to it may make no real sense but it's still a good-looking prop), the gruesome  

sight of Gustaf's pecked out eyes (even though Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds that same year kind of took its thunder with a similar moment, it's still a very grisly image for a movie from the early 60's), the body that the Baron finds in the crypt at the end, Katrina's burning body after she's struck by lightning, and Helene decomposing at the very end, which is achieved through a series of lap dissolves and looks especially nasty.

However, that's about the extent of the compliments I can give The Terror, as, while the story behind its inception is interesting, it also serves as an example of why making a movie in this choppy, piecemeal manner is a terrible idea. As we've already talked about, because the story was made up and rewritten as filming went along, it's all over the place and piles on so many different plot-points and twists, from the revelation of what happened to the Baroness, to her spirit being under Katrina's control and attempting to

drive the Baron to suicide, that it will make your head hurt. And then, near the end of the movie, there's one more reveal: Stefan tells Andre and Katrina that the Baron is, in fact, Eric, the Baroness' lover and Katrina's son. While the real Baron did kill his wife, Eric not only killed the Baron in the ensuing struggle but, for some reason, took his place and has been pretending to be him for the past twenty years. Moreover, he's come to actually believe that he is the Baron! So Katrina, in plotting to get revenge for her son's death, has just driven him to commit suicide. It'd

be deliciously ironic, if it weren't so confusing. Even more so, going back to Howard S. Berger's suggestion that Helene is the result of Ilsa and Eric's affair, it would mean that, not only is Katrina, in essence, using her granddaughter's body and the soul of Helene's mother to damn her own son, but that Eric, in his mentally taking the Baron's place, has developed romantic feelings for his daughter! Again, if that notion had been verified, I could've given the movie more credit for being so twisted, but as it stands, not so much. And one other thing: during the climax in the crypt, Ilsa's spirit reveals that she knows this is really Eric she's condemning, yet blames him for her death, even though it was the Baron who killed her.

The movie is also filled with stuff that's either left unresolved or just plain makes no sense. The opening  is a prime example. The Baron comes downstairs and proceeds down into the basement, following what seems to be a trail of blood drops on the floor (some of these shots are repeated later on. He opens a door, and a nasty looking skeleton pops out at the camera, before cutting to the opening credits. While one could assume in retrospect that this may be the real Baron's corpse, you never find out for sure, as it's never

referenced again. Something that doesn't seem to have any possible explanation, though, is when Andre and Stefan see a strange light up in the Baroness' room, which has been sealed off since her death and nobody, not even the Baron himself, has entered it. And when they go up there and break down the door, there's no indication of what that light was or why it seemed to be intending to draw them up there (it's also light in that room, when it was pitch dark through the window). And though it does have an explanation,

Katrina's death also happens very quickly and randomly: Andre tries to make her come with him into the chapel, but she warns that she can't set foot on hallowed ground because of her pact with Satan and attempts to run away, only for a bolt of lightning to strike and burn her to death. I think we can assume that was God punishing her for her evil deeds, but if it was that easy, why not just do that in the first place? Did she really need to step onto holy ground before facing divine punishment? Also, despite the explanation, Katrina's muffled shouting of it at Andre may go over some viewers' heads, making what happens feel all the more bizarre.

This is more of a combination of poor acting and obvious ADR in some cases, but some of the dialogue is laughably bad and most of it comes from Andre and Helene/Ilsa, with Jack Nicholson and Sandra Knight struggling with their lines and the eloquent cadence of the period. It starts from the beginning, when Andre first meets her. When he finds her again after she momentarily disappears, he tells her, "I'd like a word with you. You never said goodbye to me. In fact, you never even said hello. It isn't an act of

treason to talk with me. I'm a weary, disillusioned soldier, and you're the only pleasant sight that I've seen in seven months. Go ahead, it's permitted for you to laugh." Then, that night, when he meets her again, he has this gem, "Hello. I was afraid you'd drowned." She touches his face and he says, "So, you are real. I started to think... Who are you?" And after Gustaf saves Andre from being lured into quicksand, he has this genius observation: "Quicksand. The girl was trying to kill me." Finally, when he first arrives at Baron von Leppe's castle, Andre has these two lines:

"Surely, I made enough noise to awaken the dead," and, "With all respect, Baron, for a ghost, she's a very active young woman." There's also a monotone conversation between Ilsa and Gustaf on the cliff, overlooking the sea, with exchanges like, "Ilsa. Ilsa." "Ilsa? The name sounds strange to me, here by the sea," and, "It is an evil thing. You must no do it, Ilsa." "I must obey the old woman." 

A real doozy, though, is this one, between her and Andre in the von Leppe chapel: "I've waited for you so long." "I've been searching for you, to help you. But you wander in strange places, at strange hours." "You're really here. "Of course, I'm here. And I'll never leave you again." "Never? When the night comes, I get cold. My arms and my shoulders get cold. I don't like the night. I want to be free of it." "You are free." "Only in here, in this holy place." "No. Everywhere, with me." And then, "The crypt. It 

must be destroyed, and with it, the dead." "Don't speak of the dead anymore. You're with me now." "I am possessed of the dead." "You're a warm, living woman. Who has told you these things?" "The dead." "In Paris, they're doing wonderful things to discover the nature of the mind. I'll take you there. There are doctors who can free you from this..." "From the dead?" "The dead cannot reach out from the grave. You must come away with me, now." "No, I'm afraid. The night." "There is nothing to be afraid of." (If you're keeping score, the word "dead" was said six times in just around a minute.) Andre then kisses her and says, "You see? Love me, and there is no fear." "Yes, Andre. I do love you." "Then come away with me."

Even an old pro like Dick Miller wasn't immune to some of this dialogue, like when he asks Andre, "So, must you intrude on the dead as well as the living?", and, "Lieutenant, please, don't involve yourself in these dead matters. There is nothing here but an old man and his decaying memories. I beg of you ,leave him in peace!' There's even a bit of looped dialogue that, initially, sounds like the characters contradicted themselves. When Stefan confronts Katrina early on and asks her how long she's been living in the shack,

she answers, "Only two months," and he says, after he admits he's done some inquiring about her, "You have lived here slightly more than two years." At first, I thought that latter line just totally flew in the face of the first, but then, I realized that what Stefan meant is that's how long she's actually lived there. But, given how random and contradictory this movie often is, can you really blame me for being confused?

Above all else, not only is The Terror not in the slightest bit terrifying (unless you're scared by scenes of people walking around dark corridors and cemeteries), but it's just plain boring for the most part. While slow scenes like we have here can certainly be tense and scary, especially if the atmosphere works, it doesn't matter when the plot around them is so confusing, and the payoff lackluster or even anticlimactic. Even worse, because they had no idea what the story would be when they made it, these

scenes tend to go on and on and on, amounting to little more than padding. During Andre's first night at the castle, he's in his room, when a gust of wind comes through the window and blows out his candles. When he looks out the window, he sees Helene enter the chapel. He tries to leave his room, only he finds he can't open the door, and then, he hears bizarre sounds and sees shadows coming through the bottom of the door, then hears something apparently pounding on the other side. Approaching the door 

with a gun, he finds that it's now open, and this leads into him leaving his room and, oh, so slowly, wandering around the castle, heading out onto the grounds, entering the chapel, where he finds no sign of Helene, and then heading back inside the castle and to his room. All told, this scene goes on for about six minutes, and we still get more like it later on. During the second act, for instance, Andre wanders around the second floor, looks in the Baron's room, then sees the Baron himself go into the room, and bursts in on him when he hears him seemingly talking to 

someone, only to find nobody else in there. It's not as long as that previous sequence, but still not exactly interesting. After Andre leaves the castle, only to return and have that scene with Helene in the chapel, we watch as he follows the Baron down into the crypt, which only takes around two minutes but feels so slow, regardless. And, of course, that's followed shortly by him and Stefan searching the castle and grounds, before the Baron tells Stefan to force Andre to leave for good. The Gothic sets and cemeteries may be cool and lend the film some class, but they only go so far when the onscreen action isn't interesting.

What's more, when something faster-paced does happen, it's often either confusing in concept, not that well-shot or edited, or a combination of both. This applies to Andre fighting off the hawk in the surf during the opening; the hawk attacking Gustaf, which suffers from the one-two punch of dark, day-for-night photography and very close in, rapidly-edited action when the hawk is flogging his head; and especially the climax, which is just a chain of randomness and uninteresting action. You have the revelation about

the "Baron's" identity, Katrina's sudden death, Stefan and Andre trying to break into the crypt from different spots, the Baron and Ilsa struggling with each other as the crypt is flooded, Andre saving Ilsa/Helene, while the Baron and Stefan are drowned, and the ending, where she decomposes in front of Andre after he's kissed her.

Like many of Roger Corman's films during this period, the music score was the work of veteran B-movie composer Ronald Stein. While he was able to create some memorable scores during his career, with a standout being the work he did for The Haunted Palace, his music for The Terror, while not horrible, is very uninspired and run-of-the-mill, with no part of it standing out whatsoever, except maybe some eerie, ethereal music in some scenes, such as when Andre and Helene are in the chapel. Not all of the music was Stein's, though, as Les Baxter, who scored most of the Poe movies, also contributed to the score (they likely just reused some of his pieces from the past). 

Regardless of what you may think of The Terror, I would encourage you to seek out that visual essay from the Film Masters release, as it does make for a very unique take on the movie, with Howard S. Berger drawing a parallel between the movie's construction and the principles of filmmaking in and of itself. But, as much as I can appreciate his takes, it doesn't make me enjoy the movie itself any more. It's certainly not without its merits, as you have Boris Karloff, as usual, giving a great performance, Dorothy Neumann being quite entertaining, and Dick Miller successfully playing against type; nice-looking Gothic sets and instances of atmosphere; some good instances of color, opticals, and makeup effects; some thematic ties to Roger Corman's Edgar Allan Poe series; and the story of the unorthodox way in which the movie came about is very fascinating. But, that said, the latter resulted in a confusing, convoluted plot that is just too tricky to get into, with story elements that are either left unexplained or simply don't make sense. On top of that, Jack Nicholson gives a really bland and uninteresting early performance, Sandra Knight is equally wooden, there are numerous technical issues and continuity errors, the music score is forgettable, and big chunks of the movie consist of people walking around the castle, looking for answers to a mystery that is not engaging. Because of its public domain status, it's likely that you've already seen this movie, but if not, I would only recommend it to hardcore fans of Corman and Karloff, and Nicholson completionists.