The Terror (1963)

When I was very young, most likely around the age of five, I was often babysat by my grandmother at her house while my parents were working during the day. Somehow, she had ended up with a lot of VHS tapes, no doubt from my older cousins who often stayed with her as well. Among these tapes were old episodes of The New Three Stooges cartoon show, Godzilla vs. Megalon (I have her to thank for my lifelong love of Godzilla and Japanese monster flicks in general), tapes that were compilations of various cartoons, mainly public domain ones, and a Bruce Lee movie that I'm now sure was one of the many "Bruceploitation" films. Also among the many VHS tapes there was this movie. This was one of the few tapes that my grandmother wouldn't allow me to watch. While she had probably never seen it herself, the title The Terror was probably enough of a sign that this was not something a five-year old should be watching. That was a good deduction by her because, even though I'm a huge fan of the horror genre now, I was an easily frightened little kid. One time, I accidentally put this film in by accident and the first few seconds with the crashing thunder and dark castle were enough for me to quickly take the tape out of the VCR.

The Terror ended up as one of those odd films that I got a brief glimpse of as a child but wouldn't learn exactly what it was until many years later. Several Christmases in a row, my mom kept making the mistake of getting me those various public domain movie packs as presents and one of the them had The Terror among many other films. By this point, I had become the big horror fan that I still am today and I had learned a little bit about The Terror because it was mentioned briefly in a documentary hosted by Butch Patrick that was simply titled The History of Sci-Fi and Horror. I knew that it came about very quickly, as did most of Roger Corman's films but this was exceptionally quick and cheap, and that it starred Boris Karloff and Jack Nicholson and that idea in itself intrigued me seeing as how I'm a big fan of both of them. I also knew that this film was not the first to have this vague title. There was another movie called The Terror released in 1928 which was the first sound horror film ever made (these movies have nothing to do with each other, though). Anyway, I gave this movie a watch and when I saw the opening, I immediately recognized it and thought, "Oh, that's what that movie was." (You must realize that at just five years old, I wasn't able to comprehend movie titles yet.) My impression of it was basically just... eh. I was going to make this an entry of Movies That Suck but after watching the movie again in order to do this review, I don't think it's that bad. At the same time, though, it's nothing spectacular either. It's just a confusing, overly-plotted, cliched, and fairly dull mishmash of a movie whose spontaneous production idea worked against it greatly.

In 1806, a soldier from the Napoleonic army who has become separated from his regiment meets up with a strange young woman on a beach. Several mysterious events happen after he meets up with her, including her vanishing and him being attacked by a hawk that seems to come out of nowhere. He blacks out from the attack and regains consciousness in a cabin inhabited by an old woman and her supposedly mute servant. She also has a pet hawk that just happens to have the same name as the young woman but she claims that the young woman never existed and that the soldier merely imagined the whole thing due to his weary state from traveling for so long. The soldier, however, meets up with the woman again and is told by the old woman's servant to go to the castle of Baron Von Leppe in order to find out the truth. The soldier eventually arrives at the castle despite the old woman's protests and when he meets the old baron, it becomes clear that he is hiding something. The soldier is shown a portrait of the young woman and the baron reveals that she is his wife, who has been dead for many years. From there, the soldier takes it upon himself to find out what the baron is keeping secret from him and who, or what, that mysterious young woman is exactly.

Roger Corman has always been legendary for making films very quickly and cheaply, having made the majority of the original Little Shop of Horrors (which is also featured Jack Nicholson) in just two days but the way The Terror came about is just unreal, even for a Corman film. By this point, Corman was well into his cycle of directing lavish films based upon the works of Edgar Allan Poe. Having finished The Raven (which also starred Boris Karloff and Jack Nicholson) sooner than expected, he decided not to waste the remaining days and quickly came up with this film. He shot all of the scenes involving Karloff in just four days but left it to the second unit crew to finish the movie. With a story being created around those scenes of Karloff while the film was already being shot, it ended up being largely improvised and took nine months to fully complete, ironically becoming one of Corman's longest productions. In fact, even though Corman is solely credited as director, there were five others: a young Francis Ford Coppola (only ten minutes of his footage ended up in the finished film), Dennis Jakob, Monte Hellman, Jack Hill, and even Jack Nicholson himself took a turn at trying to make sense of the film. It was also filmed primarily on the sets of The Raven and The Haunted Palace, the latter of which Corman directed after filming the bulk of this movie. The reuse of those sets adds to the feeling that Corman intended for this movie to have the same flavor and atmosphere as his Poe films. In fact, many do consider this to be part of his Poe cycle, even though it's not based on anything that Poe created.

Boris Karloff was one of those actors who was always awesome no matter how subpar some of his movies tended to be and this is no exception. He gives the confused character of Baron Von Leppe his all, coming across as initially menacing but later becoming pitiable when he reveals the terrible secret that many years ago, he returned from a year of military service to find his wife having an affair and in a rage, killed both her and her lover. His soul has been shattered ever since and he also has not set foot out of his castle since the tragedy. He now feels that he's being haunted by her spirit as punishment for what he did but also admits that he looks forward to each time her spirit appears to him. You do get a sense that Von Leppe is not an evil man but just someone who made a horrible mistake and is now paying for it in his own private way due to his emotional torment. He's also smart enough to know that he has enough on his conscience for killing his unfaithful wife and refuses to kill the soldier, as much as he wishes him to leave. By the end of the movie, though, the torment of his wife's spirit is so much so that he agrees to drown himself in her tomb, to be with her as well as perhaps as atonement for his crime. Like I said, Karloff is great but even he can't save the confusion surrounding his character and the plot in general, which I will elaborate on shortly.

I would be lying if I said that you can see hints of the great actor that Jack Nicholson would become in his performance here. It's no doubt due to the fact that this was at the beginning of Nicholson's career and he was very young and inexperienced as well as the material he had to work with here not being the best but to me, his performance comes across as really stilted and bland. When he speaks the type of elegant and florid dialogue common in period pieces like this, it just comes across as not being natural to me. Classically trained actors like Karloff and Vincent Price could do it well but when a modern, edgy character actor like Nicholson does it, it just doesn't feel right in my opinion. Nicholson also just doesn't seem to know what he's doing (although, again, that's no doubt due to the unorthodox way this film was created) and he barely changes his tone of voice when he's acting here. It also doesn't help that his role of Andre Duvalier doesn't grant him much to do other than try to figure out what's going on. I never bought his infatuation with the spirit of Von Leppe's wife or hers with him for that matter. I hate ragging on Nicholson this much since the guy is an awesome actor and I do love watching him most of the time but here, his inexperience and the lack of good material doesn't make for a memorable performance.

I didn't find Sandra Knight to be that interesting as the ghost of the dead baroness, Ilsa (renamed Helene in her spirit form). To me, she wasn't scary or mysterious, just bland. She is nice to look at but her acting is so uninteresting and stilted, not to mention that her character and dialogue are so confusing and cryptic, that I couldn't care less about what she does Von Leppe or Duvalier. Read this exchange between her and Duvalier: "I am possessed of the dead." "You're a warm living woman. Who has told you these things?" "The dead." I rest my case. I did think that Dorothy Neumann fared better as the old woman who is revealed to be a witch and is controlling the ghost in order to torment the baron as revenge for killing her son i.e. the late baroness' lover. I wouldn't say she was scary and her exact methods don't make a whole lot of sense but I did think her character was kind of interesting, even though you know she's in on it from the first scene with her. Jonathan Haze is also fine as the witch's supposedly mute assistant, Gustaf, but he has nothing to do except talk in a raspy voice and tell Duvalier what he must do to find out the truth about the mysterious young woman as well as try to get Helene to resist the witch's control and go to Duvalier for release. One wonders why Gustaf didn't just tell Duvalier what was really going in the first place or why he gives enough of a crap about Helene to risk the witch's wrath but whatever. He also dies a particularly gruesome death when his eyes are pecked out by the witch's pet hawk (you have to wonder if whichever director did that scene took some inspiration from Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds, which came out the same year) so at least goes out in a memorable way.

Finally, I have to mention Dick Miller in the role of the baron's butler, Stefan. Miller has been in over a hundred movies, having been a favorite actor of Corman's as well as being in every single one of Joe Dante's films and usually, he plays either a sleazy character, a wiseguy with a tough Bronx accent, or a grumpy old man. It's amazing to see him in a period piece like this as a butler and it's even more amazing when he actually manages to make himself fit into this type of movie. He does a great job of hiding his distinctive Bronx accent and instead, speaks in a more refined voice befitting the character as well as the time period the film takes place in. He also manages to do something with his character and, in my opinion, makes him kind of memorable. He portrays Stefan as a fiercely loyal butler who will do anything to make sure that nothing disturbs his master, including this nosy young soldier and the old woman who is living in a nearby cabin that she shouldn't be. Even though the baron tells him not to harm Duvalier, you get the feeling that Stefan definitely would kill him if he could, particularly at the end of the film when the baron orders him to escort Duvalier out of the castle at gunpoint and tells him that he will kill him if he comes back. It's also revealed that Stefan isn't telling all that he knows about the death of the baroness, which leads to him dropping a bombshell on the old witch near the end of the film. It's a shame that Stefan dies in the film's climax because I really did like him. In fact, I will say that Miller is my favorite part of this movie, more so than Karloff. I really enjoyed Miller showing a side of his acting talent that he didn't get to that often and I wish he had.

The biggest problem with the movie is that, because the story was made up as filming went along, the plot is all over the place and peppered with so many twists that it will make your head hurt. Near the end of the movie, you find out that Karloff's character is not Baron Von Leppe but, in fact, Eric, the baroness' lover. The real baron was killed along with his wife and Eric, for some reason, took the baron's place and has been pretending to be the baron for so long that he's come to believe it himself. So the old witch, in plotting to get revenge for her son's death, has just driven her own son to commit suicide. I also can't get it straight whether Helene is really the spirit of the baroness or not. Did the witch resurrect Ilsa's spirit and rename her Helene (if so, why did she rename her) or is this the spirit of a woman who just happens to look like the deceased baroness? I guess it is indeed the spirit of Ilsa but I still don't understand the purpose of renaming her. Also, she seems to know that the man she has condemned to suicide is, in fact, Victor but she's blaming him for her own death. I'm thinking, "It was the baron who killed you, not your lover!" That's just bad writing right there. On top of all of that, the witch's pet hawk is also named Helene. So, can the spirit Helen change into a hawk? You would think so since in the first scene between Duvalier and Helene, she vanishes and then the hawk comes out of nowhere and attacks him. But at the end of the movie, the hawk is seen flying above the castle while the spirit is down in the basement, trying to drive the baron to suicide and Duvalier also sees it flying away in the last scene while Helene's body is decomposing in front of him. So is that hawk a symbol of the witch's control over the spirit? See what I mean when I say that the plot of this movie is convoluted as all get out?

There's also stuff in this movie that just makes no sense. The opening scene is a big example. It shows the baron coming down the stairs in the main part of the castle and then proceeding down into the basement (a shot which is repeated several times, I might add). He follows what seems to be a trail of blood drops on the floor deep into the cellar, opens the door, and a nasty looking skeleton pops out at the camera. It then cuts to the opening credits. What was that? You never find out because it's never brought up. The witch's death is also random as can be. When she, Duvalier, and Stefan try to get down into the crypt to stop the baron from killing himself, she refuses to go into the mausoleum that leads down into it because of her association with the forces of darkness and attempts to run away. Out of nowhere, a bolt of lightning strikes her and she burns to death. Again, where did that come from? Was that God punishing her for her evil deeds? If so, why didn't He do that long before then? Before that when Duvalier and Stefan search the late baroness' room, they find a crib that seems to suggest that she had a child at one point and they even question it. But that plot-point is completely disregarded and never mentioned again. Finally, this is a minor nitpick but I don't quite get why Helene decomposes at the end of the film if she's a spirit instead of a reanimated corpse. I'm probably thinking too hard on that score, though. Again, when you learn of the hodgepodge way this film was constructed, it's not so surprising that there's a lot that doesn't make sense but it's still really distracting.

As many before me have mentioned, for a movie called The Terror, it's not really that terrifying. If you're scared by people walking around in dark corridors and cemeteries a lot, this will be the scariest movie on Earth. Granted, those kind of slow scenes can be tense and scary but when the plot around them is so confusing and the payoff isn't worth it, I tend not to care about the movie's attempts at atmosphere. During the scenes where Jack Nicholson is doing just that in this movie, I just felt bored, not scared or interested in what was going on. While the Gothic sets and cemeteries are lush and do lend some class to the film (that is, if you can see them since this film's public domain status makes it difficult to find good quality prints of it), it's not enough to keep this movie from being a convoluted bore most of the time.

The music was composed by Ronald Stein, who composed the music for many of Roger Corman's films as well as many other B-movies in the 50's and 60's. It's not surprising why he was never able to break out and compose music for bigger movies because his music for The Terror, while not horrible, is just typical. It's just one of the most uninspired, run-of-the-mill horror scores I've ever heard. I can't tell you about any standout pieces of it because it's just not memorable. As monotonous as the score for The Screaming Skull, at least I was able to comment on it. This is instantly forgettable.

Roger Corman produced and directed a lot of movies in his career. Some are cheesy fun, some are actually very classy and well made, some are downright horrid, and some are just forgettable. The Terror is an example of the latter in my opinion. It is interesting to see Boris Karloff and Jack Nicholson onscreen together and the story behind how the movie came about is interesting but other than that, the movie is honestly not worth the 79 minutes it takes to watch it. The unorthodox way the film was constructed resulted in a confusing, convoluted plot that makes the movie too tricky to get into and destroys any atmosphere the Gothic sets could have created. If you're a fan of Roger Corman and you haven't seen this or you want to watch the movie yourself to try to figure out what it all means, be my guest. I, however, doubt I will ever watch this movie again. Corman has made dozens of movies that I enjoy much more than this. It's just confusing, dull, and worst of all, forgettable.