The Terror

The Terror is a 1963 American independent horror film produced and directed by Roger Corman. The film stars Boris Karloff and Jack Nicholson, the latter of whom portrays a French officer who is seduced by a woman who is also a shapeshifting devil. The film is sometimes linked to Corman's Poe cycle, a series of movies based on the works of Edgar Allan Poe; however, The Terror is not based on any text written by Poe. The movie has become famous because of the circumstances of its production, including that all of Boris Karloff's scenes were shot in two days, the long time it took to complete, the number of people who worked on it that became famous, and the part the film played in the financing and production of Targets (1968), directed by Peter Bogdanovich and starring Karloff. Corman wrote in his memoirs that The Terror "began as a challenge: to shoot most of a gothic film in two days using left-over sets from The Raven. It turned into the longest production of my career – an ordeal that required five directors and nine months to complete. But like Little Shop [of Horrors], it's a classic story of how to make a film out of nothing." Plot In 1806, André Duvalier, a French soldier lost in the Confederation of the Rhine, is saved by Helene, a young woman who bears a resemblance to Ilsa von Leppe, the late wife of Baron von Leppe who had died 20 years earlier. André sets out to investigate Helene's true identity and learns the Baron's darkest secret: after he found Ilsa with another man, the Baron killed his wife while his servant killed her lover.