Roger Corman was so pleased with the castle sets built for The Raven (1963) that he hoped to use them in another film...a wish that was granted when he realized Boris Karloff still owed him two days.

Vincent Price was Corman's first choice to star in The Terror, but Price was committed to a lecture tour.

The shooting script for The Terror was begun by actor/writer Leo Gordon, who supplied Corman with a handful of "mysterioso" scenes he had cannibalized from his own unproduced screenplays.

Roger Corman began shooting The Terror by charging production fees to the budget for The Raven, until producer Sam Arkoff paid a surprise visit to the set.

Although Boris Karloff's scenes were captured in two days, the remainder of The Terror was shot over the course of nine months, making it not the shortest Corman production but one of his longest.

Boris Karloff's salary for two days of work on The Terror was $30,000.

Francis Ford Coppola took eleven days to shoot his second unit footage, only ten minutes of which wound up in the finished film.

Jack Nicholson claims to have nearly drowned while filming in the surf of Big Sur.

Physically uncomfortable in Marlon Brando's Desirée (1954) costume, Nicholson would demand costume approval on his later films.

Nicholson angered Francis Ford Coppola by intentionally ruining a one-time-only take involving the release of a thousand butterflies.

Between the start of filming in 1962 and the resumption of shooting in 1963, Sandra Knight became pregnant and had to be doubled for full body shots by an American International Pictures secretary during the flood scene.

A shot involving quicksand was directed by Jack Hill in his own backyard. The quicksand was originally planned for the death of Jonathan Haze's character, until it was decided to have him attacked by a falcon.

Corman protégé Dennis Jakob doubled for Boris Karloff during the climactic castle flood.

Jakob had spent three days at Hoover Dam shooting close-ups of cascading water to cut into the climactic flood scene.

The Terror's plot twist of having Karloff's Baron Von Leppe turn out to be Ilsa's allegedly dead lover Eric was added by Corman during post production.

While The Terror's graveyard set was left over from The Premature Burial (1962) and the castle interiors from The Raven, the tree seen in the film's last scene was constructed for use in The Haunted Palace (1963).

Corman balked at the $500 price tag for a proposed stop motion effect involving the rapid decomposition of Sandra Knight's undead character and resorted to caramel syrup instead.

Scenes from The Terror were later put to use in Peter Bogdanovich's Targets (1968), which starred Boris Karloff as an elderly horror movie star who confronts a spree killer (modeled on Texas sniper Charles Whitman) at a drive-in theater.

In 1991, Roger Corman sought to gain back copyright on The Terror by shooting a new prologue, starring original cast member Dick Miller, and retitling the production Return of the Terror.

Compiled by Richard Harland Smith

Sources:

Flying Through Hollywood by the Seat of My Pants by Sam Arkoff

Roger Corman: An Unauthorized Life by Beverly Gray

The Films of Roger Corman by Alan Frank

Roger Corman: Metaphysics on a Shoestring by Alain Silver and James Ursini

Monte Hellman: His Life and Films by Brad Stevens

Dick Miller interview by Dennis Fischer

Boris Karloff and His Films by Paul M. Jensen

The Films of Roger Corman: Brilliance on a Budget by Ed Naha

Jack Hill interview, Psychotronic Video No. 13, by Sean Axmaker, 1992