The Terror (1963, United States) Roger Corman.

Roger Corman’s The Terror Joins the Auteur Cinema Archive

The Auteur Cinema Archive is thrilled to include The Terror (1963, United States), Roger Corman’s fever dream of gothic horror starring Boris Karloff and a young Jack Nicholson. Though often remembered for its chaotic production and narrative eccentricities, the film endures as a strange and compelling artifact of improvisational filmmaking—and a testament to Corman’s renegade auteurism.

Set in 1806, The Terror follows André Duvalier, a lost French officer lured to a haunted castle by a mysterious woman who resembles the long-dead wife of Baron von Leppe. As the layers of illusion peel back, the film unfolds into a macabre tale of possession, guilt, mistaken identity, and supernatural vengeance—complete with a shapeshifting devil, ghostly manipulation, and a crumbling crypt flooded by madness. What began as a cost-saving experiment using leftover sets from The Raven became, in Corman’s words, “the longest production of my career—an ordeal that required five directors and nine months to complete.”

Curator Kris De Meester on the film’s inclusion
"The Terror is cinema on the edge of collapse—and that’s exactly what makes it fascinating. It’s held together not by structure but by mood, intuition, and invention. Corman may have set out to make a quick gothic throwaway, but what emerged is a surreal, disjointed ghost story with flashes of real poetry. It’s messy, yes—but unmistakably the work of an auteur pushing the limits of what could be done with no time and no money."

Beyond its gothic trappings and narrative twists, The Terror also occupies a unique place in film history: it directly enabled the production of Peter Bogdanovich’s Targets, featuring Karloff and helping launch a new wave of American independent cinema. The film’s cast and crew read like a prelude to greatness—Jack Nicholson, Francis Ford Coppola, Monte Hellman, and Bogdanovich himself all passed through its shadowy corridors.

In including The Terror in the Archive, we honor not just a film, but a spirit: the determined, sometimes delirious drive to make something unforgettable out of almost nothing.