EDITOR’S NOTE: The Terror was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, May 10, 1966 at 1:00 a.m., Saturday, May 24, 1969 at 11:30 p.m., Saturday, May 16, 1970 at 1:00 a.m. and Saturday, January 8, 1972 at 11:30 p.m.

In his book How I Made a Hundred Movies in Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime, Roger Corman went into detail on this film, an infamous one in his career: “It began as a challenge: to shoot most of a gothic film in two days using leftover sets from The Raven. It turned into the longest production of my career — an ordeal that required five directors and nine months to complete.”

While Corman is listed as the director, the film was also worked on by Francis Ford Coppola, Dennis Jakob, Monte Hellman, Jack Hill, and even Jack Nicholson. It all started with a rained-out tennis game, as Corman decided that since the sets were still there for two days, and he had access to Boris Karloff. Nobody really knew what the movie would be about, except that it would take place in a castle, and that Karloff had only two days to complete his part. The icon of horror had no clue that some of that would be spent in a tank of cold water.

The amusing thing is that American-International Pictures paid for the sets for The Raven, but Corman was making the film independently. He never asked if he could do it. He just started shooting. Samuel Z. Arkoff knew something was happening when, at the wrap party, all of the sets were still standing. Then again, he knew that Corman would be coming to him to distribute the movie.

Other directors came in instead of Corman, as this was a non-union job, and he was a union director. The beach scenes were shot by Coppola, along with Hill and Gary Kurtz, much of which was unusable because Coppola didn’t inform the cameraman that he was shooting night shots and then went over his allotted time. Eleven days of shooting, which was equivalent to two Corman films’ worth of shooting.

Dennis Jakob shot Hoover Dam for the water scenes — while also working on his thesis film, something Corman couldn’t get angry about, because he was doing the same thing so often — and Monte Hellman and Jack Hill finished the film. Well, then Corman thought nothing worked together and it was boring, so he went back and shot a bunch of new scenes to make the movie work together. In many of those reshoots, Jack Nicholson’s wife, Sandra Knight, is noticeably pregnant, whereas she wasn’t in the early shoots.

Meanwhile, Corman had promised Karloff $15,000 if this movie made $150,000. It didn’t. But he had another idea. If Karloff were to appear in Targets, he would get the cash. Corman told Peter Bogdanovich that he would finance his film if he shot twenty minutes of new Karloff footage, added twenty minutes of footage from this movie, and then shot forty minutes with a new cast. Bogdanovich used footage from this movie at the beginning of his film, as Karloff watches himself and proclaims the movie to be terrible.

French soldier André Duvalier (Nicholson) has left his men after a battle gone wrong and is rescued by Helene (Knight), a woman who looks just like the dead wife of a Baron. Twenty years before, after finding his wife with another man, the Baron (Karloff) killed her and had his servant Stefan (Dick Miller) kill the man he saw her with.

A witch named Katrina (Dorothy Neumann) has been sending the ghost of the Baron’s wife to torment him, asking him to kill himself and join her. That’s because she thinks that the Baron killed her son Eric, when the truth — ready for the spoiler — is that Eric killed the Baron and has gone so insane that he thinks that he is the Baron and killed Eric. By the time she learns this, it’s too late to enter the castle, and as she runs to save her son, she walks across consecrated ground and burns. Just like Shakespeare, everyone dies, except our young lovers, except that Hélène is a ghost as well, and she turns into a corpse after kissing André.

Speaking of saving money, AIP used to send its composers to more inexpensive European studios. Despite this movies small budget, Ronald Stein was able to record both the soundtrack and the score for Dementia 13 in one session, utilizing the 90-piece Munich Symphony Orchestra. Speaking of that movie, The Terror played double features with it.

So yes, this isn’t a perfect movie, but at least Nicholson has good memories of it, saying, “I had a great time. Paid the rent. They don’t make movies like The Terror anymore.”