Another case of falling down a Wikipedia rabbit hole and finding something new and interesting. In this case, it was LOTR meme > Christopher Lee > Boris Karloff > The Terror, a 1963 horror film starring the British actor alongside Jack Nicholson. Besides the fact that it was one of Karloff’s last films and he starred with Jack Nicholson (which seems like an odd pairing on paper), it’s the part where Nicholson played a French Napoleonic officer. In an American accent. But who am I to split hairs, it’s a horror movie about a lost soldier who gets seduced by a shapeshifting devil.
Roger Corman (A Bucket of Blood, The Little Shop of Horrors, X: The Man with X-Ray Eyes) directed the movie but there were also uncredited scenes filmed by Francis Ford Coppola amongst others. While the film wasn’t well received (if you take Rotten Tomatoes seriously for that kind of thing), it is in the public domain which is nice. And Nicholson didn’t hate it:
I had a great time. Paid the rent. They don’t make movies like The Terror anymore.
via wikipedia
Even if The Los Angeles Times called it “spooky” with a “slow, lazy plot”. Sounds about right for a 60s horror, no?
Stream it below.
Horror related: The Morning News’s “Secret Horror” movie list, Mental Floss’s top 25 horror comedies of all time, and Stalker: the fatal movie of Andrei Tarkovsky