The Terror (1963)

Helene: The crypt! It must be destroyed, and with it the dead.

Andre: Don't speak of the dead anymore. You're with me now.

Helene: I am possessed of the dead.

Andre: You're a warm living woman. Who has told you these things?

Helene: The dead.

Roger Corman wanted to produce and direct The Terror, starring an aged Boris Karloff and a young handsome, and just-on-his-way-up Jack Nicholson, in just two days. Like Little Shop of Horrors, he wanted "make a film out of nothing." The gothic chiller ended up taking NINE MONTHS to complete, but it was worth every frame.

Nicholson plays a young soldier, lost from his regiment, named Andre Duvalier, who is riding a horse, half-delirious from hunger and thirst, through the surf at the edge of the water. A strange young woman, Ilsa (Sandra Knight), comes forth to rescue him. She disappears in the surf under a cove, and he's afraid she's drowned.

He passes out, only to be revived and brought back to the hovel of an old witch woman named Katrina (Dorothy Neumann). her weird, hoarse, can't-speak-above-a whisper servant (Jonathan Haze) has saved Andre. But, being who he is, "I want to know where the girl went." He draws her picture.

He makes his way to the castle he thinks she may have disappeared to. Boris Karloff, playing Baron von Leppe shows him a portrait of the girl, telling him, "She's been dead twenty years." Nicholson/Duvalier doesn't buy it, but he remains polite and cordial if a little miffed. Dick (credited here as "Richard") Miller plays the Baron's manservant, Stefan.

The ghost of Ilsa, the Baron's late wife, visits, coaxing him into suicide. Nicholson creeps around a lot, trying to ascertain where the weird, ghostly, womanly voices may be coming from. The Baron reveals a rather terrible secret. The hoarse, weird, whispering manservant of Katrina gets killed in a really cool scene by a trained hawk.

There's an unaccountably stupid twist ending. The whole castle von Leppe floods. Rocks fall from the ceiling. We have a graveyard set that looks like it could have been drawn for a Vampirella comic. The witch gets it by Act of God: a lightning bolt and then burned to DEATH. This is a great, great scene. This film is not replete enough with cruel, ungodly deaths.

Ilsa/Helene is the daughter of Katrina, the lover of someone named Eric who was killed twenty years ago. There is a magic "hypnomirror" that revolves and causes Helene to be possessed by the ghost of Ilsa. Jack Nicholson doesn't seem to mind. (Nicholson has reportedly been, his entire life, a womanizer, and has had two thousand or so sexual conquests. Or so he claims.)

The final denouement may strike the viewer as incredibly stupid. or laughable. No matter, the film is perfect somehow, making it on atmosphere alone. The plot is deceptively simple, and there is no real "story" to get in the way, as Joe Bob Briggs used to say. On the whole, you don't have to stretch your brain much to follow or think about The Terror. You just sit back, crack open a cold one (no pun) and thrill to the necromantic obsession of the aged, perpetually outraged Baron Karloff, and get a good gander at Nicholson, who is so handsome here you need to wear blinders to view him in any sort of human proportion.

The whole thing, somehow, seems borrowed from Poe. Maybe a better comparison would be "Dark Shadows," which it, for some strange reason (perhaps the kitsch gothic sets and costumes) reminded me of. Will you enjoy it? Hell yes, you will! Does it make a lot of sense?

Does anything?

(I'm trying to think of one scene that really stands out, the one I liked the most. It HAS to be the old witch Katrina, stepping onto "consecrated grounds." Because of her devilish pact to send the Baron to aitch-e-double-hockey-sticks, that's a big no-no. A bolt of lightning strikes her, and she bursts into flame. Just like the end of The Bad Seed (1956), only there, the lightning strikes a tree and topples over on little homicidal Rhoda. Here, it actually fricassees the nasty old crone. And then, there's the bleeding, melting face, but, as confusing as I've tried to be, I feel I've already given away too much.)

The Terror can be viewed on YouTube