Beyond the Cycle: 8. The Terror (1963)

Oh dear.  Oh dearie dearie me.  Where to even begin with this one?  The Terror really is the stuff of B Movie legend.  If fact, it sounds more like the kind of thing film buffs would say to each other as a JOKE:  Roger Corman worked so fast that he got a movie finished ahead of schedule, and was so cheap that he insisted on filming a second movie while the sets were still up.  But it’s basically true, even if it only scratches the surface of how the end result tuned out.

First of all, yes.  The Terror was thrown into production to take advantage of the sets built for The Raven, and recycles two of its main stars: Boris Karloff and Jack Nicholson (and also Dick Miller, because if any movie of any sort was being made between 1955 and 1995, there was at least a one in five chance Dick Miller would be in it somewhere).  It wasn’t even the first time Corman had pulled a stunt like this, having already made The Little Shop of Horrors on sets left over from A Bucket of Blood.  The thing is, though, that movie was at least written before they started shooting.  The Terror?  Not so much.  Writer Leo Gordon basically slapped together enough of an outline for Corman to get two day’s worth of footage of Karloff wandering around the castle sets left over from the Raven, with the understanding that they’d film a little extra stuff to plug in the plot gaps afterwards.  And film afterwards they did, but not just “a little extra.”  Oh no.  This, my friends, is where The Terror goes from being just another Roger Corman quickie to cash in on the popularity of his other Gothic Horror flicks and truly ascends to legendary status.

One needs to understand that, while The Raven was an American International Picture through and through, The Terror was being produced through Corman’s side-hustle The Filmgroup.  Yes, AIP would distribute the finished product, but it was Corman’s money actually paying for everything, not James H. Nicholson and Samuel Z. Arkoff.  To that end, one also needs to understand that the main reason The Filmgroup existed was so that Corman could get ESPECIALLY cheep movies made outside of the unions.  This presented a problem for The Terror, which I am throughout unprepared to unravel as it involves a whole mess of union contracts and technicalities and the like.  Basically, Corman was able to direct those two days with Karloff on the set of The Raven himself, but once the time came to plug up the holes, he’d only be able to afford a non-union crew and thus not actually be able to work directly with them even if he wanted to.  Thus the rest of the shoot was to be handed off to a second director, and this is where we brush up against the other thing one really needs to understand.

Roger Corman’s reputation for making movies extremely fast and incredibly cheap is often attributed to him not really caring about the quality of his films.  That’s unfair, but also not entirely unearned, as anybody who’s seen his especially dire ‘50s output can attest.  But ultimately, the REAL secret to Corman’s efficiency was a matter of preparation and planning.  I’ve heard great tales of Corman setting aside whole days just to rehearse movies with the cast, thus ensuring they’d be able to get everything right on the first take.  After all, what REALLY kills the budget isn’t big special effects or actor paychecks, it’s having to pay the whole crew for days and days of just standing around while somebody figures out what they’re supposed to be doing.  Remember, Roger Corman didn’t go to film school, he studied to be an engineer.  It’s all about problem-solving and elimination of inefficiency, and that’s what allowed him to get as many movies made as quickly and as cheaply as he did.  But that’s there the big problem with The Terror arises.  Contrary to his own usual modus operandi, The Terror was deliberately shoved into production with very little planning, and the man who did the shoving wasn’t even going to be around to tie up all the loose ends himself.  There were a lot of chances for things to go off the rails.  And that’s before Corman hired Francis Ford Coppola to finish up the rest of the film.

Yes, THAT Francis Ford Coppola.  Like so many other future Hollywood luminaries, Coppola got his start working on Corman projects, and had only recently completed his first feature film Dementia 13 on Corman’s dime.  Once Leo Gordon had managed to write up the remainder of a script, Corman sent Coppola off with a film crew and Jack Nicholson to shoot a few days worth of additional scenes around Big Sur.  Now, hold on to your hats, because the sentence I’m about to write is utterly unprecedented in the history of human language, but FRANCIS FORD COPPOLA WOUND UP RUNNING BEHIND SCHEDULE AND OVER BUDGET.  I’ll pause for a second to allow the shock to wear off.  Now, granted, this was far from an Apocalypse Now-level debacle, at least in a big picture perspective, but for a Roger Corman production things still went really off the rails.  Coppola wound up deciding he could “improve” Gordon’s script, which honestly sounds pretty fair seeing as how part of it was written literally as it was being shot.  Unfortunately, he seemed to lose track of what had actually happened in those previously shot scenes in the process (Remember, this was the mid ‘60s.  You couldn’t just whip out a phone and watch clips of the existing scenes on command) and by the time the mountain of finished footage was delivered to Corman, it just couldn’t be cut together in a way that made sense.

And so, feeling there was nothing for it, Corman hired ANOTHER director to do ANOTHER round of shooting.  His time, the director for hire was Monte Hellman, who did a whole bunch of stuff around Hollywood but these days is probably best known for being a producer on Reservoir Dogs.  And wouldn’t you know it?  Hellman ALSO decided the script needed changing on the fly.  Under his watch, Jack Hill (soon to be of Coffy and Foxy Brown fame) was brought in to helm yet more rewrites, looking to undo much of Coppola’s changes and to bring the end product back into line with the original Corman footage.  And, of course, Corman still wasn’t satisfied with the results.  He must have thought they were finally on the right track by this point, though, because once Hellman was finished, Corman sent Hill back out to do yet ANOTHER round of shooting as the director himself.  And even THAT wasn’t the end of the director revealing door, because Hill wound up having to leave the shoot early, resulting in Jack Nicholson apparently running things for a day or two.  Oh, and somewhere in the middle of all this, Coppola’s buddy Dennis Jakob was also hired to go do some second unit stuff… during which time he apparently spent most of his time using Corman’s crew to shoot his own student project for UCLA.  Ya can’t make this stuff up.

And somehow, SOMEHOW, even after going through FIVE other directors and literal MONTHS of shooting, Corman still wound up having to finish the film himself.  Yes, the little side project that Corman tried to throw together during the leftover time on one film shoot was ultimately completed during the down time of an entirely different film shoot.  In a final, desperate attempt to tie all the different incarnations of the story into a single, unified whole, Corman ended up setting aside a bit time time in the midst of filming The Haunted Palace to shoot a quick scene of Jack Nicholson and Dick Miller literally explaining the plot to each other.  Seriously, all it needs is for somebody to look directly out at the audience and ask “Okay, everybody all caught up?  PLEASE say this all makes sense!”

But no, not it doesn’t make sense.  To the shock of literally no one, the end product of the single longest and most tortuous production of Roger Corman’s entire career turned out to be a muddled, aimless, confusing mess.  And that’s exactly what makes it fascinating.  Make no mistake, trying to watch The Terror under conventional movie-watching conditions is an exercise in absolute self-torture, but watching it as an act of forensic investigation is actually very compelling.  A weirdo like me can get a lot of fun out of keeping track of all the dropped plot points and trying to work out which version of the plot which scene was filmed under.  Really eagle-eyed viewers could easily make a drinking game out of all the continuity errors between scenes shot months (and directors) apart.  And before you ask, no.  I have absolutely NO idea who actually directed what on a shot-by-shot basis.  All I know is that the shots where Karloff is onscreen are by Corman, and even THAT depends on whether or not there’s a stand-in or not.  The Terror is straight up the cinematic equivalent of watching a train on fire wreck into a sinking ship that’s also being hit by a crashing plane.  It’s the kind of amazing disaster you just don’t see very often.

And yeah, I know I’ve barely even mentioned the acting or plot of The Terror, and can you blame me?  How can you read that insane sprawl of behind the scenes chaos and not just know in your bones that the story’s going to be nonsense?  Jack Nicholson wanders up to a castle where Boris Karloff lives, and a whole lot of Gothic Horror nonsense happens.  There’s some stuff about witches and hauntings and weird psychobabble, but despite no less than five separate attempts to tie it all together, it never really gels into a single coherent plot.  It probably doesn’t help that, by 1963, Corman and company were visibly getting Gothic Horror fatigue, or at least Edgar Allan Poe exhaustion.  At first, I was going to say The Terror is what would happen if you fed all the Poe movies to an AI and told it to generate a script, but that’s actually not fair.  The Terror really does attempt to break away from a lot of the more tired Poe cliches, with absolutely NO ONE getting buried alive for once.  Vast swaths of the film take place outdoors, presumably just to give the movie a look distinct from the interior-bound Poe movies.  Heck, the one condition Corman gave to Leo Gordon other than “write something that uses the castle set” was to have the climactic set piece be a flood, explicitly because he was getting sick of using the same “barn on fire” stock footage very time one of these movies ended with something burning down.  Admirable ambitions, to be sure, but with all the handing off of half-finished footage and writing on the fly, this is clearly one instance where sticking to a familiar formula is the best thing they could have done.  At least then everybody would have been on the same page, well-worn as that page might have been.

And even setting all the conceptual and technical issues aside, The Terror is not well-acted at all.  God bless Boris Karloff, he’s certainly trying, but he’s got nothing to work with here.  Like, I’ll say that a lot, but it’s literally the case here.  In scene after scene, he genuinely has no idea what he’s supposed to be doing because that part of the script hasn’t been written yet.  He’s still better than Jack Nicholson, though.  Yeah, he’s a legend now, but back in 1963 Nicholson was just some unknown kid who honestly seemed to have a brighter future as a screenwriter than an actor.  I don’t think he would have been up to the task of carrying an entire film as leading man even under the best of circumstances, let alone the absolute chaos that The Terror turned out to be.

So, do I recommend The Terror?  If you’re a morbidly curious fan of grind house cinema at it’s most dysfunctional, then definitely.  And if you’re a rabid devote of the Corman Poe Cycle proper, then I guess you owe it to yourself to sit through The Terror at least once.  If nothing else, it is kind of the final missing piece to that puzzle.  I doubt it’s an accident that the remaining Poe flicks Corman made after this (and even immediately before it) try harder and harder to shake up the formula in one way or another.  The Terror, to the extent that it can ever be discussed outside of it’s backstage drama, is an example of that formula trying to cary itself on autopilot.  It’s also a damning example of why so many people seemed willing to decide that formula had run its course.

Actually, I tell a bit of a lie there.  People DO still talk about The Terror beyond just the drama of getting it made, but only in the sense of the drama that followed AFTER it got made.  Infamously, The Terror is pretty much the only reason Peter Bogdonavich’s debut film Targets got made, both because Corman wanted a movie that would use clips from The Terror as sock footage, and because Boris Karloff was tied up in some post-film legal wrangling.  I’ve heard a lot of conflicting reports over what exactly happened, but it seems that Karloff’s pay for The Terror was conditional on the film reaching a certain level of profitability.  Normally, where Roger Corman is involved, a movie can’t help but turn a profit, but between The Terror’s insane production process and the utter disappointment of the end result, it floped hard enough for Karloff to never actually get paid for his two days on set.  Eventually, Corman relented, but only on the condition that Karloff would do Targets.  Now, I worry that the full implications of this will be lost on a lot of people, because actors getting screwed over in Hollywood is hardly a new story.  However, it is very VERY rare for me to hear about any such story involving Roger Corman.  Yeah, the guy’s a legendary skinflint, but he’s generally completely honest about it.  He wouldn’t have anywhere near the loyalty he does from his past associates if he didn’t (I’ve literally seen Jack freaking Nicholson start crying over how much Corman means to him).  So the fact that a movie could be such a disaster that even THIS guy felt the need to resort to Hollywood Accounting to try and limit the damage is a testament to the sheer scope of what a disaster it truly was.  And if you’ve got the patience for sit through it, I’d say The Terror is a disaster worth witnessing at least once.

And there you have it!  Another year, another explosion of rants and ramblings about silly movies!  Will I do it again next year?  Honestly, I dunno.  I kind of wound up scraping the bottom of the barrel to come up with enough movies that more or less fit my “vaguely connected to the Poe Cycle” mandate.  I dunno, we’ll see what happens next year.  If nothing else, I know I had fun writing these, so I hope SOMEBODY out there had fun reading them!