Terror (1978)

 

Director: Norman J. Warren

Screenplay: David McGillivray

Cast: John Nolan as James Garrick; Carolyn Courage as Ann Garrick; James Aubrey as Philip; Sarah Keller as Suzy; Tricia Walsh as Viv; Glynis Barber as Carol Tucker; Michael Craze as Gary; Rosie Collins as Diane; Elaine Ives-Cameron as Dolores Hamilton

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

Terror was a film I once hated. I will not deny this, as Norman J. Warren was a director back in the day, as a prolific “Britsploitation” genre filmmaker, I could not appreciate and hated most of the films of. This as back when trying to watch them in the first era of my cult tastes, i.e. the naïve one narrower minded then presumed. Now would be the time, a decade or so on, to return to Terror, Warren among the most lurid of the British exploitation filmmakers from the seventies or so, and deserving my attentions again, who in spite of British film censorship managed to get away with a lot in his heyday. Inseminoid (1981) is the most infamous of the lot for what is, with a trigger warning likely to be needed here, an Alien rip-off with a scene of a woman being impregnated by the alien. Terror, returning to it, is a gory film, rampant in blood and deaths for a British film. It is also, even in how it ends up confusing its own set-up and sub-genre, a film marking how Italian genre films were making their influence known. I would be utterly surprised, even if released censored, that the Italian giallo mystery films from this time were not an influence on this film, as it proudly follows them in its black gloved mysterious killer picking people off, even if this gets into the supernatural and confuses itself.

The plot, truthfully, is slight and honestly confusing. On paper it makes sense – a curse of a witch from the past, possessing someone to murder for her from beyond the grave – but the plot is also more of a catalyst for the set pieces of death, which Terror is not going to be ashamed about, and Warren was frank in retrospect that this was a film meant to entertain in this way first¹. The film’s set up is that in the past, a woman was burnt at the stake as a witch, a film producer making a genre movie about her death, as opens the film around the sequence, with the added incentive that his family is the lineage she cursed. The giallo follow on is how this follows the trademark of faked stabbings in murder mysteries from Italy being more exaggerated in their violence, like the unfortunate sod here who ends up impaled on top of spiked metal railings. It is however meant to be a supernatural film, and gets overtly so by way of glass pane decapitation at one point, so Terror’s structure is going to frustrate some expecting some cohesion. The most important things are that people around the film producer are dying, and his female cousin may be the one in the centre of this. Dario Argento’s Suspiria (1977), a phantasmagoric witchcraft tale, was clearly another inspiration which Norman J. Warren has been honest about, seeing the Italian masterpiece as a “breath of fresh air” and taking inspiration from it¹. This aspect, knowing his respect, adds a joy to Terror, especially as deliciously this embraces the unnatural as it also soaks the screen entirely in colored gels and lights by the ending.

Terror’s true personality, which I can only appreciate decades after, is also that this is very British. Films inherit their nationality’s personalities, and setting this in the British film industry, as a cheap sexploitation movie involving a bath gets interrupted twice, was a huge virtue even if it was Warren being practical. Posters from Warren’s own film Satan’s Slave (1976) shares a wall with Thriller: A Cruel Picture (1973), and it is both an aesthetic touch to set the film within this context, but also a compelling one, playful in how the leads are mostly working actresses living in a hostel. Even if most of the cast will be killed off as archetypes, you see an interesting world of these women working between job interviews for films, preparing their lines for a wash powder ads, softcore roles, or working in a strip club where even as bar maids they get harassed by randy men. Even when the film is being titillating for the sake of it, there is the curious touch of the erotic dancer in that club being a punk goth stripper, with white short hair and a whip, standing out for herself in her ahead-of-its-time look.

All cinema depending on its source envelops their world’s personality, unless it fully compromises itself by stripping this away, but in terms of banal ordinary Britain onscreen, it is virtuous how much of this is gleefully in this realm. With a good sense of black humour to itself, there is enough also contrasting with the gory spectacle. In its world of closed independent film sets and smoky clubs, Terror is a more interesting production for me to now visit. The plot’s lackadaisical tone needs to be accepted, or this will frustrate, but I came to this with expectations and a complete forgetfulness for most of what transpired barring its Suspiria tribute near the end.

It is sleazy yet contrasts with a wonderful colloquialism of its country of origin and time period. The accents, or how one character is an eccentric older dame running the hostel, who is lost in her past in Hollywood, one which may have never happened, add a humour to everything, whilst the film making context is a history note of interest even if exaggerated, all the small scale or how the softcore film being prevented from being shot is an apt time marker for the period when Mary Millington movies were being made in real life, let alone the Confessions of… franchise with this fictional version involving the bathtub and plastic rubber ducks. Details like this I missed entirely in my youth when I was boring, whilst returning to the film now, these are the touches that make these seventies British productions more interesting to return to.

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1) British Horror Director Norman J. Warren Returns on DVD, written by Thomas M. Sipos, published for Hollywood Investigator originally on November 13th 2004.