Roger Corman had Boris Karloff for two days and a castle set that was about to be torn down, so he shot first and worked out the story later. The result is The Terror, a 79-minute gothic ghost story with a very young Jack Nicholson in a Napoleonic uniform, five different directors behind the camera and a plot that changes its mind twice. It shouldn't work. Half the time it doesn't. I still had a better evening with it than with most modern horror, and it costs nothing to watch because nobody put a copyright notice on it. The link to the full film is further down. If you like this kind of thing, our free classic movies page has the others we've written up, and the horror label is where this one sits.
Key facts
| Title | The Terror |
|---|---|
| Year | 1963 (released by American International Pictures on June 17, 1963) |
| Director and producer | Roger Corman, with uncredited work by Francis Ford Coppola, Monte Hellman, Jack Hill and Jack Nicholson |
| Writers | Leo Gordon and Jack Hill |
| Stars | Boris Karloff, Jack Nicholson, Sandra Knight, Dick Miller |
| Music | Ronald Stein |
| Genre | Gothic horror, ghost story |
| Length | About 79 minutes in the Internet Archive copy (Wikipedia lists 81) |
| Colour | Yes, original colour |
| Free to watch? | Yes. It's in the US public domain (no copyright notice in the credits) |
Watch the full movie free on the Internet Archive
Opens the film's page on archive.org (colour, 720p). No account needed.
What is The Terror about?
It's 1806. Lieutenant André Duvalier, a French officer who has lost his regiment somewhere near the coast, is riding along an empty beach when he sees a young woman standing by the water. She won't tell him her name at first. She gives him water, smiles at him and then walks straight into the sea. He goes in after her, gets knocked flat by the surf and attacked by a hawk, and wakes up in a hut belonging to an old woman called Katrina, who tells him there was never any girl.
André doesn't believe her. He follows the trail to a crumbling castle on the cliffs, where Baron Von Leppe lives alone with one servant, Stefan. The Baron doesn't want visitors. But when André describes the girl, the old man goes very quiet and shows him a portrait of his wife, Ilsa. She has been dead for twenty years.
From there it turns into a ghost story about guilt. Ilsa keeps appearing. She wants something from the Baron, and it isn't anything good. Katrina clearly knows more than she's saying, and Stefan has his own reasons for wanting André gone. I'll stop there. The last twenty minutes pile on a couple of reveals and a flood, and they're more fun if you don't know them going in.
My review: messy, gorgeous and oddly hard to stop watching
Let me get the bad news out of the way. The story doesn't hang together. You can feel the seams where one director handed over to the next. Characters explain the plot to each other in long speeches near the end, and that's because Corman shot those speeches months later to patch the holes, which he admits in his memoir. Dick Miller's hair changes length between scenes. If you need tight plotting, you'll be annoyed.
What it has instead is mood, and plenty of it. The castle interiors are the leftover sets from Corman's The Raven, and they look far more expensive than this film had any right to be. Deep blues, purple velvet, candle smoke, cobwebs on everything. The exteriors were shot along the California coast at Big Sur and Palos Verdes, and the beach scenes in the first ten minutes are honestly beautiful: green cliffs, a rock arch with the sea crashing through it, a girl in a white blouse who won't look back. The Los Angeles Times called it "spooky" back in 1963 and praised the "excellent photography and settings" while grumbling about the "slow, lazy plot". Sixty years later that's still a fair summary.
Karloff is the reason to stay. He was 75 and worked on this for two days, and he still gives the Baron a real weight. There's a moment where he stands in front of the portrait and you can see how worn out the man is. He doesn't play a monster here. He plays a guilty old man who's been waiting twenty years for the bill to arrive.
Nicholson is the odd one. He's stiff, a bit flat and clearly wasn't sure what kind of film he was in. Which is fair, because nobody was. But it's a kick to see him this early, six years before Easy Rider, running around in a French uniform that Marlon Brando had worn in Désirée. Sandra Knight, who was married to Nicholson at the time, is very good as the girl. She barely talks, and that's what makes her unsettling.
So is it a good film? Not in the normal sense. It's a good watch, though, especially late at night with the lights down. I'd put it somewhere between a guilty pleasure and a real curiosity.
Best scenes (no big spoilers)
- The beach (around 6:45). André meets the girl. Ten minutes of almost no dialogue, and the colour is the best in the film.
- Into the sea and the hawk (around 8:25). He chases her into the waves, goes under, and a hawk dives at him. It's crude by today's standards and I still flinched.
- "There is no girl" (around 10:50). Katrina in her hut, insisting he imagined everything, while her mute servant Gustaf watches. Dorothy Neumann plays her like she's enjoying every second.
- The portrait (around 22:30). The Baron shows André the painting of Ilsa. Quiet, simple and the moment the film actually becomes a ghost story.
- The witch and the lens (around 40:00). Katrina peers through a big magnifying glass and you start to understand who is pulling the strings. The close-ups of the eye through the glass are the creepiest images in the film.
- "Take your life as you took mine" (around 66:00). Ilsa finally tells the Baron what she wants. Karloff's face in this scene is worth the whole film.
Cast
- Boris Karloff as Baron Victor Frederick Von Leppe
- Jack Nicholson as Lt. André Duvalier
- Sandra Knight as Helene
- Dick Miller as Stefan, the Baron's servant
- Dorothy Neumann as Katrina, the old woman
- Jonathan Haze as Gustaf
Five directors and nine months: how it got made
The making-of story is better known than the film. In 1962 Corman was finishing The Raven, and a rained-out tennis game gave him an idea. Karloff had already been in The Raven. The sets were still standing. Why not keep Karloff for a couple of extra days and shoot a second film on the same sets before they came down? He rang the writer Leo Gordon and asked for a script with a castle in it, by the following weekend. His only firm request was that it end with a flood, because his Poe films kept ending with fires.
Karloff's scenes were done in two days. Then the trouble started. Corman needed the rest of the film shot cheaply, so he handed it out in pieces. Francis Ford Coppola went up to Big Sur and shot exteriors for about eleven days, during which Nicholson nearly drowned in cold water. Monte Hellman shot more scenes at Palos Verdes. Jack Hill rewrote the story so the new footage would fit. A UCLA student named Dennis Jakob filmed water at Hoover Dam for the flood and doubled for Karloff in a few shots. Corman says Nicholson directed the last day, and Hill says it was Corman. Either way, it took about nine months from start to finish. Corman later called it "the longest production of my career".
The story has a second act. Karloff was owed a deferred fee that the film never earned, so Corman offered him a deal: work on another project and get paid. That project became Peter Bogdanovich's Targets (1968), which opens with Karloff watching the ending of The Terror and calling it terrible. It's one of the stranger afterlives a B-movie has ever had.
The Terror played on a double bill with Dementia 13, Coppola's first real feature, in the autumn of 1963.
Why is The Terror free to watch?
Under the US Copyright Act of 1909, which was still the law in 1963, a published film had to carry a proper copyright notice or it went straight into the public domain. The Terror came out with no notice in its credits. Fred Olen Ray points this out in The New Poverty Row (McFarland, 1991), and Wikipedia's article on the film cites him. I checked our copy too. The opening titles and the closing card ("The End / A Filmgroup Production") have no © symbol, no "Copyright" and no year in any form.
There's a nice proof that Corman knew about it. In 1990 he paid Dick Miller to shoot new framing scenes for an overseas version called The Haunting, and according to Wikipedia this was done to establish some kind of copyright, since the original had none. That 1990 version has its own copyright and new music. It isn't what's linked here. The Internet Archive copy is the original 1963 cut, and the uploader marked it with the Public Domain Mark.
One caveat: this covers the United States. Other countries have their own rules.
Watch the full movie free on the Internet Archive
Frequently asked questions
Is it legal to watch The Terror (1963) for free?
Yes, in the US. The film was published without a copyright notice, so it has been in the public domain since its release. The Internet Archive hosts it free.
Is The Terror in colour?
Yes. It was shot in colour, and the archive.org copy is the original colour version, not a colourised one.
Is The Terror based on Edgar Allan Poe?
No. People often lump it in with Corman's Poe films because it uses the same sets and a very Poe idea, a dead wife who won't stay dead, but it isn't based on any Poe story.
Did Jack Nicholson direct part of The Terror?
Possibly. Corman says Nicholson directed the final day of shooting, but Jack Hill, who also worked on it, disputes that.
How long is the film?
About 79 minutes in the archive.org copy.
Is it actually scary?
It's creepy more than scary. Don't expect jump scares. It's an old-fashioned haunted castle film, and the witch scenes are the most unnerving part.
Watch next
If you liked the mood here, try these. Some are already on our movies page.
- The Last Man on Earth (1964), Vincent Price alone in a dead city, also free
- Night of the Living Dead (1968), the other famous horror film that lost its copyright through a missing notice
- Dementia 13 (1963), the Coppola film that shared a double bill with this one
How we checked this
I watched the Internet Archive copy all the way through to set the timestamps and paused on the opening titles and the end card to confirm there's no notice. Production details, the double bill and the 1990 re-edit are from the film's Wikipedia article and the sources it cites, mainly Corman's memoir How I Made a Hundred Movies in Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime. I also searched the US Copyright Office public catalogue for the title and found no registration or renewal for the 1963 film.
Sources
- Wikipedia: The Terror (1963 film)
- Fred Olen Ray, The New Poverty Row (McFarland, 1991), p. 51
- Wikipedia: List of films in the public domain in the United States
- US Copyright Office: Copyright Act of 1909 (PDF)
- US Copyright Office public records search
- Internet Archive: The Terror (1963), 720p
The image on this page is a frame from the film. No AI-generated images are used on this page.
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