Programme notes CH 03 — The Haunted Screen
The Terror
A lost French lieutenant follows a woman into the sea, and then into a baron’s castle that should have no one left in it.
Corman finished The Raven with days to spare on Karloff’s contract and the castle still standing, so he shot a second picture inside the first one’s sets, then let his apprentices finish it: Coppola, Hellman, Jack Hill and Nicholson himself took turns over the following months. The seams are the pleasure. The plot changes its mind about who is dead more than once, and the cliffs of Big Sur stand in for Napoleon’s Europe. Stay for the last minutes, when the flood comes in and the heroine’s face stops holding its shape.
Credits — follow anyone
- Directed by
- Jack Nicholson · Francis Ford Coppola · Roger Corman · Jack Hill · Monte Hellman
- Photographed by
- John M. Nickolaus, Jr.
- With
- Jack Nicholson · Boris Karloff · Jonathan Haze · Dick Miller
Every name is a door — each opens onto everything else that person made in the network.
The thread · every thread
Corman’s speed as a style, three years apart. Little Shop was shot in two days on a set built for another film; The Terror was begun on The Raven’s castle before it came down. Jack Nicholson is in both, first as a dental patient who loves the drill, then as the leading man.