Young Jack in the Post-Poe Po-Mo Hellman Hole: THE TERROR, THE SHOOTING

The legendarily muddled Roger Corman Poe-ish Gothic horror THE TERROR (1963) famously came together spur of the moment when, supposedly, Corman still had two days on Karloff's shooting schedule on THE RAVEN (1963). Not wanting to waste them, Corman shot some stuff of Boris walking around in what remained of the castle sets for THE RAVEN, trusting a film could be built around it with minimal effort and cost. He was right about the minimal, but that's the film's shaggy dog-eared charm. Francis Ford Coppola went up to Big Sur to shoot some exteriors, and then later, Jack Hill as writer and Monte Hellman as director came along to reshape, rework, and reconfigure, shooting in and around Playa del Rey, Leo Carillo Beach, and what was then the AFI. So there's a lot of hands in the mix here, with the final product being enigmatic as intentionally as possible while hitting all the traditional bases.  The final product is more than the sum of its parts, but whose authorial voice is it that results when the 'more' is factored? Corman's usually wry, hip but never anachronistic Gothic "voice" isn't here, and Coppola's style isn't really noticeable any more than, say, Dennis Hopper's might be on THE TRIP), and Hill's balls-out stealth feminist drive-in moxy isn't there, but Hellman's vanishing point identity and existential narrative-dissolution is. And in the context of j subsequent enigmatic masterpieces, THE TERROR fits beautifully, perhaps even situating his two later acclaimed existential works THE SHOOTING (1966) and TWO-LANE BLACKTOP (1971) within a more immediately graspable mythic context then they might have if seen solely as examples of their respectively associated genres, and vice versa.


The Hellman style wasn't yet a recognizable 'thing' in 1963, but after seeing his more well-known works you feel that innate "Hellman-ness" formed in THE TERROR's dreamy 'edge of forever' tide pools, the ambiguity of relationships and the fluidity of identity, especially where "the woman" is concerned. Hellman's female characters tend to control the action around them almost unconsciously, yet they themselves are often void of distinct personae except as surfers of the oceanic unconscious, archetypal currents billed in the credits as "the woman" or "the girl." This anima ambiguity perfectly fits the ghostly figure played by Sandra Knight in THE TERROR as she appears to lost Cavalry officer Lt. Andre Duvalier (a young Jack Nicholson) at various points along the shore or cliffs, sometimes luring him to a would-be doom, or to maybe sometimes in her other form as a falcon, or she was the falcon the whole time and asked the sky witch for human legs, or she's a ghost or a girl who thinks she's a ghost in the middle of an elaborate revenge. While you could lump that concept in with NIGHT TIDE, THE SAILOR WHO FELL FROM GRACE WITH THE SEA, THE SEA WITCH, THE ASTOUNDING SHE-MONSTER, i.e. low budget horror films that use a girl and some waves (both super cheap, especially if one is your girlfriend) as a low budget Bergman art-horror hybrid, you'd be selling the talent of Jack "SPIDER BABY" Hill and Hellman short, who were coming in for the second half of a project begun by Corman as a straight Poe-ish Gothic, with Coppola adding an old witch and the idea that the ghost might just be a hypnotized daughter (Hill and Hellman rather than twisting further toward normalcy brought it farther out, into the suggested transmigration of souls, the transitory nature of the flesh, and the relentless corrosion of time's ocean tide whiplash.



Part of the weird effect THE TERROR has on fans such as myself, is that it never seems to tell the same story twice. In order to understand how and why, you just have to dial your focus out and consider the film's post-release history, the differing hands at the helm being just one aspect. THE TERROR fell into Public Domain a long time ago, and ever since has shown constantly, first on local TV in the pre-cable era, then on $5 video tapes, then nearly every 100 movies for $10 DVD horror collection on the market. And since there's no quality control, the film often appears edited for time, with out-of-order (or missing) reels, faded color, cheap VHS tracking issues (carried over onto cheap DVD burns), scenes cut and added from different prints of different quality, etc. If you're a classic horror fan you've seen THE TERROR dozens of times, maybe never even intentionally... and seldom all the way to the end, making it perhaps the benchmark for what fantasy and horror fans call dream (or nightmare) logic. Because it's so atmospheric, and fun--especially considering Nicholson is so young and sometimes confused--it's endlessly re-watchable even if you're not really watching. You can fall asleep to it real easily, and dream your way right in.

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Young Jack with then-wife Sandra Knight - THE TERROR; Middle Jack with Maria Schneider - THE PASSENGER

This has helped, of course in making the film 'great' in the sense that you can watch it a dozen times and never understand it or have any idea you've seen it before, and it never gets boring (or exciting - it's perfect), making it a great gateway drug to dream logic extremists like Jess Franco and Jean Rollin. And if you're a filmmaker of any caliber it's a call to arms, because it's an example of how in our mind fills vaster voids than bigger-budgeted auteurs can etch, and absence of coherence is the same as just enough, and our unconscious savors the randomness our conscious minds resist. And I don't mean that with any disrespect. From the loftiest Kubrick enigmas to the accidental Brecht of your child babbling at you about a film they saw in school while you watch TV commercials with the sound muted, that's it, that's the end of sentence. For true artists find the third route, neither right nor left, but purple; not forwards nor backwards, but red, and balloon, and Jeff. And it is thus that man can become totally lost in between, where dreams cohere and dissolve above the sordidness of conscious ass-dragging desert, a cloud of slow-mo exploding books lapping into seahorses, and against all this might a Napoleonic officer be separated from his regiment and wind his way among the staggering primordial cliffs of Big Sur, California.

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Karloff, making three movies at once just by standing there

And all that is my way of defending the loopy narrative of THE TERROR, which answers unasked questions with more questions. So it's the daughter of Isla being hypnotized into seducing her father to kill himself by posing as her own mother, whom he killed 20 years ago... did I get that right?... Or was Erick Ilsa's lover who posed as count after killing him in an effort to assuage his remorse? And she's the ghost because... he killed her too? As she and the count were having an affair? And the witch is the girl's mother who brought her spirit back to wreak revenge or is she Erick's mother? Is young Jack like one of those smitten lovers who winds up alone as his vampire lover vanishes in the waves at the end of a typical Jean Rollin vampire movie? Supposedly Sandra Knight's Helene isn't really 'Isla, the Ghost of the Baroness von Leppe' but Eirk's real daughter (or wife) whom he tried to kill and so an old witch keeps her around... hypnotizing her? But who is Karloff, then? The servant or the Baron? Substitute a dotty old handyman for the witch, and that's the plot of the similarly elegiac Monogram Lugosi film THE INVISIBLE GHOST, another Public Domain title we all saw constantly back in the 70s and which made no sense at all for kids too young for 'nightmare logic' --in other words, we didn't need our linear narrative preconceptions disrupted, we were still trying to form them!

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One patriarch's madwoman in the attic is another man's ghost on the lawn

So, yeah, there's a lot of contradictions and cross-current enigmas, but that's when semiotically inquisitive post/modernists like Monte Hellman come alive. And the final cumulative impression of THE TERROR when you finally do see the whole film, after all these centuries, on remastered Blu-ray, sober as a judge, at a beauty contest, with a cracked AA chip he's trying to bet in a poker game, is a weird bittersweet reverie on death, memory and how film disintegrates when washed in a salt water flood tide lapping up against moldy stone.

Because in the end there is no right answer to what's really going on or who these people are, and that's the film's charm, that's Monte's modernist difference. Every thread doubles back on itself, refusing to pick a side, until the strange and haunting ending, where it's just yet another beautiful girl's youth and beauty slowly peeling away in the Big Sur tide to reveal the ancient foe, eternity's ancient ally, time's twisted waxwork skull as the soul flies free as a predatory bird in the Bergman dawn. When all is revealed as melting clay returning to the sandy foam of the Pacific, then the world will be seen as it really is, not meaningless but so packed to overflowing with meanings and counter-meanings and alternative deconstructions and author intents and last minute story changes that all meanings are there at once, exposed on the forked rocks. Ironic then that it had to be pulled from the sludge, cleaned up and digitized before we could savor its analog tactility.

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from top: TERROR, SHOOTING, TERROR, SHOOTING, TERROR, SHOOTING

If "Monte Hellman's THE TERROR" still doesn't resonate with a profound metatextual dimension, consider its ambiguous 'collapse of identity' aspect as not accidental, but as creating an ancestry, a back story, for Hellman's acclaimed existential western THE SHOOTING (1966). It was Hellman's first western, and he filmed it back-to-back for Corman (but without Corman's influence or presence), with the more recognizably 'genre-specific' RIDE THE WHIRLWIND, out in the Utah desert. With colors recently remastered for the Criterion Blu-ray, under the eye of Hellman himself, the two films look better than they probably ever have, even on drive-in screens (where they were created to be, as a cowboy double feature). They were the first films Hellman had made in the States since working on THE TERROR (he made two films, also starring Jack Nicholson, in the Philippines--where life is cheap, and so is Corman--in the interim), THE SHOOTING especially echoes THE TERROR in the way the characters seem adrift somewhere between life and death, outside the normal confines of civilization and its conforming consensual notion of cause and effect. It starts in a recognizable location, but there's never any 'town' with a sheriff, nor bar fight, nor whore house; only alien primordial terrain, characters hoping their forward movement will mask their amnesia (i.e. like Karloff's character in THE TERROR, Warren Oates here may either be a twin or actually is his own brother, and one regularly wonders if even he knows the difference).

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It's this terrain-based amnesia that makes THE TERROR and THE SHOOTING readable as parts one and two of a very strange textural existential genre meltdown Hellman trilogy (along with 1971's TWO-LANE BLACKTOP), a strange mirror to Antonioni's trilogy of BLOW-UP (1966), ZABRISKIE POINT (1970) and--also with Nicholson--THE PASSENGER (1975). In TERROR,  the plot twists are layered back on themselves, then unwound back to separate fibers as if time's moving diagonally backwards while moving up and down the shore, in and around the castle, as Young Jack continually tries to find the mysterious woman, demanding answers from Old Karloff when even the writers might not know. THE SHOOTINGs movement is out into the white blank of the desert, until its far too late to turn around (or reach civilization), all Warren Oates' common sense outvoted by a headstrong nameless "woman" and a smirky gunsel dumb enough to buy her damsel act; TWO-LANE BLACKTOP also has a nameless young girl (Laurie Bird) making trouble for some men otherwise involved in wandering the landscape, but this time in cars, no vengeance, just a race for pink slips. A marked step up in art house complexity from THE SHOOTING (which was itself a step up from TERROR), BLACKTOP manages to keep in almost constant motion along America's back roads and highways without going farther than a few inches inward or outward, or anywhere: Oates is now a GTO driver who sees each new hitchhiker as a chance to change his backstory; and the "Driver" and "Mechanic" have no backstory at all, it was slowing them down, so they tossed it overboard. When the dust finally settles on 70s cinema, it will be TWO-LANE BLACKTOP that wins the pink slip AFI road movie run, all else is vanity. (See Stillness in Motion: CALIFORNIA SPLIT / TWO-LANE BLACKTOP).

Mystery Woman thy nameless Hellman 

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Sandra Knight as ?? ("Helene / Isla The Baroness Von Leppe")  - THE TERROR (1963)

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Millie Perkins as ?? ("Woman") - THE SHOOTING (1966)

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Laurie Bird as ?? ("the Girl") - TWO-LANE BLACKTOP (1971)

The plot of SHOOTING involves Warren Oates as a tough as nails gold miner laboring at he and his brothers' claim in the middle of the Utah Nowhere. One of his brothers has rode on out of there like blazes after maybe running over a kid or something the night before Oates returns - it's never entirely clear. So when a mysterious woman (Millie Perkins) shows up offering to pay royally for his service as a guide across the desert to a nearby town (where the brother may have went), Oates agrees to handle it, but is he the one who did the thing she's going to go avenge, whatever it is? Is he really going to let them shoot his brother? The vagueness of motivations is clearly intentional, which makes us wonder if the TERROR's was too. Which came first, a love of open-ended existential landscape wanderer identity-collapse (fueled maybe by Antonioni's 1962 film L'ECLISSE), or the need to situate Corman's low budget and off-the-cuff 'shoot first make sense later' raw material in some kind of framework? Did Julian Schnabel break a dish by accident, and decide to use it in a painting, or did he break the dish on purpose? Answer: chartreuse. 

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"The Patients and the Doctors" (detail - c. Julian Schnabel)

By the end of Hellman's trilogy (I've dubbed it the "The End Trilogy"), we know for sure that he's finally reached the 'break with breaking' as TWO-LANE BLACKTOP runs into an abrupt and final apocalyptic projector jam celluloid burn, the ultimate fusion of experimental, narrative, pop culture, and metatextual Mecha-Medusa media formatting. But it's been a long road to that apotheosis along two fronts, the meta one being a result of the first two films enduring decades of public domain (or in SHOOTING's case, pirated) dupes, and BLACKTOP encountering legal troubles due to lapsed royalties on a Doors song heard for less than a minute on some guy's radio as the boys drive past the entrance to the drag strip.  In THE TERROR the decomposition and erosion of Helene's face (or rather, Corman's drizzling carmel syrup on her to save money on make-up effects) mirrors the billion year-old erosion of the stones the Utah desert and its scorching emptiness in THE SHOOTING, which mirrors the vacant highways of BLACKTOP, that's textually, but the metatextual mirror is the ever more blurry and washed-out duping, now recently replaced by gorgeous remastered Blu-ray. The vistas in THE SHOOTING are now staggering, dwarfing the people traveling through them while mirroring their actions or vice versa in the way the stars predict our fates (or vice versa).

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THE SHOOTING: In nice remastered form

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Average blurriness for PD dupe: THE SHOOTING (1966)

I remember seeing the shitty SHOOTING Madacy disc awhile ago and imagining how great it would look if ever seen in the proper formatting and with colors restored instead of the muddy muffled blur it was on that crappy disc (Madacy may you die a thousand deaths). But now that this has been done and I have both Blu-rays, I can't help but feel that they, too, miss something that those blurrier 4:3 crops had, the protective fog feel of the crumbling, outmoded non-digital reproduction, the protection from real life offered by the abstracting bath of video to video to video to video, that oceanic whip of disintegration, the law of the universe, until all is white as snow and wan and gone... but our imaginations fill in the fog.

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From HD to PD: THE TERROR (1963)

If I had the artsy time, I would edit a 'dissolution edition' of THE TERROR into a cohesive 'unfinalized' cus, I'd make an edit that starts for the first half hour or so with the new widescreen HD remaster, then devolve to the widescreen new DVD, then the old shitty dupe full screen DVD, and so on down the ladder of quality and formatting... until it's as impossible to see as those old dupes of dupes that Max and I made in college, while drunk, from our two connected VCRs and then never watched, and eventually threw away. I think, then, it would all make sense, kind of like Bill Morrison's DECASIA, but in reverse:

What initially appears to simply be a surface effect that is not a feature of this world rapidly begins to suggest otherwise: that the decay we see twisting faces, burning bodies, and cutting holes in the world is not just the effect of time on nitrate film stock, but rather an inherent feature of the world itself rupturing the imaginary divide between then and now. The ravages of time apparent on this film are also the decay inherent in the world it depicts, and a part of the world that produced these images." - Michael Betancourt [Dread Mechanics: The Sublime Terror of Bill Morrison’s Decasia (2002) - Bright Lights 1/14/15)

In other words, it moves into Hellman existential country, the dissolving coherence of the image mirroring in nitrate clouds Hellman's vanishing point ambiguity. I'd add that the Blu-ray of DECASIA itself might be factored into this. Very old celluloid after all decays in very trippy ways which on Blu-ray are impossibly beautiful, abstract in ways no lifetime spent on After Effects or Final Cut could match. The compromise of the media formats of lesser quality in the century between the nitrate of the '10s and the Blu-ray of the other '10s aren't as aesthetically gratifying: streaky, not aesthetically pleasing or artsy in the DECASIA sense. In fact there's just such a video! VHS GeneraTion LOss! It has its own weird poetry...this is my generation!!