B-Movies with Marg: The Terror

Welcome to the latest installment of B-Movies with Marg. Tonight, I bring you the 1963 horror film "The Terror" staring two actors you've actually heard of for once: Boris Karloff and Jack Nicholson! Based on the poster below, I'm sure you can tell that in "The Terror", spooky screen legend Karloff played some kind of spider monster, trapping his victims in a horrifying web of death! 

Nope.

Actually, Karloff was not even remotely creepy, and quite unlike a spider monster. He played a reclusive Baron, mourning his long deceased bride, haunted by her ghost. His derelict castle is in... some country, maybe on an island. His only companion is Walter from Bucket of Blood, who plays his butler. One day, a Napoleonic soldier played by Jack Nicholson is riding along the beach near the castle when he sees a beautiful young woman sort of... in a cavern in the sea. It's boner city when he sees her, and she tells him her name is Helena before disappearing into the surf. 

There is he on the beach.

He tries to save her, nearly drowning, eventually being saved by a mute named Gustaf who isn't so much a mute as just a guy who whispers. Gustaf takes Andre (that's his name) to be fixed up by an old crone named Katrina. She's a witch, with a bird. Katrina tells him that the bird's name is Helena, but there are no girls in these parts. Of course, something spooky is afoot. Andre eventually ends up at the Baron's castle, sees a portrait of the dead Baroness and it looks exactly like the girl he saw! (Or Cher. I thought it looked like a portrait of Cher.) Apropos of nothing (he seriously didn't even seem interested), the Baron reveals to Andre that he killed his young wife 20 years before in a jealous rage after finding her in bed with some other man, a dude named Eric who he had his butler then dispose of. Anywho, Andre doesn't really believe in ghosts but eventually figures out that creepy Katrina is controlling the girl, and making her haunt the shit out of the Baron. 

She's hangin' around in a crypt. 

 It is very obvious that Katrina must have some kind of vested interest in the Baron and that whole situation to be going to such witchy lengths to torture him, and they wait far too long to reveal (shockingly? no...) that she is Eric's mother, set to take her revenge on the man she believes killed her son.  The real twist (spoiler!) comes at the end of the film, when the butler reveals the absolutely ridiculous truth. Two men fought over the Baroness that fateful night 20 years earlier, yes, and only one man survived. However, that man was not the Baron! Boris Karloff was in fact playing Eric the other man all along! Tipped crazy by the guilt of defending himself, Eric's mind decided that he was in fact the Baron. For some reason, the Baron's loyal manservant thought this was an okay deal and stood by the insane imposter ever since.

"I'm Eric!" (he never admits this in the film, it is all told by exposition)

The icing on the cake is when you realize that director Roger Corman and writers Lee Gordon and Jack Hill expected anyone at all to buy that Katrina played by the then 49 year old Dorothy Neumann was the mother of 76 year old Boris Karloff. I simply howled with laughter at the reveal.

The trailer, as you can see above, is just delightfully inaccurate. Those are the best kinds. The scene with the corpse falling out and scaring someone? That's part of the opening credits. Someone - poor whispering Gustaf - does get their eyes pecked out by Helena the bird, but of course, the Baron didn't send her to do any such thing. He's just a man... not even a real Baron!

I've spent a great deal of time dissecting the plot, mostly to make sense of it in my own head. There are still unanswered questions, like what exactly Helena/The Baroness really was... she was some girl possessed by the dead as per Katrina's powers, but she was also a ghost... and at the end, a decaying corpse. 

Gravy = decay. 

There's a lot of great campy moments, like when Andre tells the Baron, in a very American accent, "I'm a soldier of France!" Suuure you are, Jack. Also, for those with a keen eye, some nice historical inaccuracies - such as the use of a revolver in 1806 (No, I admit it, I am not that clever, Ben spotted it, and I looked up the history of those guns). Jack Nicholson did a serviceable job as Andre, though without much indication of the performances to come later in the decade. His then-wife (then-pregnant, as well) Sandra Knight was equally okay as the girl - the two show little chemistry. Boris Karloff has a tragic story of type-casting (which while not demonstrated in the film itself, certainly showed up in the marketing), but the most notable thing about him in "The Terror" is the realization that how he moved (especially going down flights of stairs), truly did make him an inspired choice to play Frankenstein. 

 As a fascinating note on the production itself, Corman filmed principle photography with Karloff in his trademark way, just four days. Filming continued for several months afterward however, and Corman allowed several others to sit in the directors chair for different scenes. They included screenwriter Jack Hill (he went on to direct exploitation pictures), star Jack Nicholson, and none other than Francis Ford Coppola.

Marg
@acuteinsomnia

Previously in this series: The Last Woman on Earth, A Bucket of Blood,  Creature from the Haunted Sea, The Wasp Woman, and Attack of the Giant Leeches