Operation Terror

The Terror is a 1963 American horror film produced and directed by Roger Corman. It stars Boris Karloff, Jack Nicholson, and Sandra Knight. It is about a Napoleonic French officer (Nicholson) who stumbles upon a castle occupied by a reclusive baron (Karloff) and is seduced by a woman who is also a shapeshifting demon. 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 but relies on the Poe theme of a deceased wife who continues to haunt the husband, such as in "Ligeia" and "Morella", which were part of the Cycle. The Terror has become infamous because of the circumstances under which it was made, including its chaotic production and disjointed narrative, 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." The Terror was produced by Corman's independent production company The Filmgroup and distributed by American International Pictures on June 17, 1963. It is in the public domain, since there is no copyright notice in the credits.