Director – Norman J. Warren, Screenplay – David McGillivray, Story – Les Young & Moira Young, Producers – Richard Crafter & Les Young, Photography – Les Young, Music – Ivor Slaney, Makeup – Robin Grantham, Art Direction – Hayden Pearce. Production Company – Crystal Film Productions Ltd/Bowergrange Limited.
Cast
John Nolan (James Garrick), Carolyn Courage (Ann Garrick), James Aubrey (Philip), Sarah Keller (Suzy), Tricia Walsh (Viv), Glynis Barber (Carol Tucker), Michael Craze (Gary), Peter Craze (The Director), Rosie Collins (Diane), Elaine Ives-Cameron (Dolores Hamilton), Chuck Julian (Phil the Greek), Mary Maude (Lady Garrick), William Russell (Lord Garrick)
Plot
A party is held at the house of James Garrick where he screens a film he has produced based on his ancestors who burned a witch at the stake and were subsequently killed by supernatural retribution. A hypnotist is doing parlour tricks at the party and people prompt him to place Garrick’s cousin Ann under. However, Ann goes into a trance and will not emerge as she picks up a sword that was used by James’s ancestor. Immediately after, Carol Tucker, the hypnotist’s assistant, is pursued through the woods and her body left pinned to a tree. This is followed by a series of mysterious deaths of people associated with the party and Garrick’s film studio.
Norman J. Warren (1942-2021) was a British director who made a number of exploitation films around the late 1970s and into the 1980s, mostly in the horror genre. These include the likes of Satan’s Slave (1976), Prey (1978), the softcore SF film Outer Touch/Spaced Out (1979), Inseminoid (1981) and Bloody New Year/Time Warp Terror (1987), as well as a couple of adult films.
Warren says that Terror was inspired by Suspiria (1977), although he should have been aware that there were a bunch of films about witches enacting vengeance in the modern day ever since Black Sunday (1960), including British works such as City of the Dead (1959), Cry of the Banshee (1970) and Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971). There is the opening prologue where we see the witch burned at the stake and then the ancestors killed. We then cut to the party scene and the hypnotism session during which Carolyn Courage seems to become inhabited by the witch. The disappointment of this is that the witch is largely irrelevant to anything that subsequently happens and nothing else makes any references to the witch burning we see in the prologue. Indeed, what we get is a party trick where Carolyn Courage is placed under hypnosis, followed by a series of random killings of people associated that occur with no real rhyme or reason.
If anything, the influence on Terror is that of the recent hit of The Omen (1976) where Norman J. Warren serves up a series of copycat nasty deaths for supplemental characters, In the opening scenes, Glynis Barber is found nailed to a tree. In the film studio, an arc light falls on director Peter Craze. A patron from the strip club (Chuck Julian) is followed home and then his murdered body dumped in the garbage. Tricia Walsh is stabbed in the leg as she comes down the stairs at the boarding house. James Aubrey is terrorised as objects in the studio come to life and attack him and, in the most-Omen-esque scene, is killed as a pane of glass falls and beheads him. The silliest scene is where a Rover police car comes to life and pursues a cop, before Carolyn Courage is trapped inside the car as it is levitated through the trees (clearly being swung on the end of a crane).
Glynis Barber nailed to a tree
Where Terror does resemble Suspiria and Dario Argento’s other Three Mothers films is that these are supernatural killings that come without any real rhyme or reason. Even assuming all of the deaths are related to the witch persecutions at the start, the deaths also happen to a series of supplemental characters only minimally connected to the principals – people working at the studio owned by John Nolan, the girls at the boarding house where his cousin Carolyn Courage stays and even one of the patrons at the strip club where the girls work.
Like Pete Walker, director of other films of this era such as Frightmare (1974), House of Whipcord (1974) and House of Mortal Sin/The Confessional (1976), Norman J. Warren was a director who emerged more out of the 1970s British exploitation tradition than the Anglo-Horror Cycle that was begun by Hammer Films. (Warren and Walker also share a screenwriter in David McGillivray). Rather than mythical 19th Century European countries and cities, Gothic castles and heroines in low-cut gowns that were preferred by Hammer, Warren films in the contemporary surrounds of London’s Soho district. His is a world of bars and strip clubs, heroines who work as strippers and of dodgy low-price film studios who rent out to shoot softcore porn comedies. A world that seems completely removed from the cosy conservatism of Hammer, even when they visited the present-day in Dracula A.D. 1972 (1972).
