The Terror. Ghosts on the loose

Monogram studios were one of the leading B-Grade film studios in Hollywood, putting out a collection of gangster, thriller and horror films that were commercially successful and ignored by American critics. It wasn’t till after World War II, when European critics started writing of their love for B-grade Hollywood cinema that many of the films gained the attention they deserved. Roger Corman has himself built a singular reputation as one of the B-grade cinema’s luminaries, having developed an oeuvre of cheap exploitation work that also allows talented young directors to get their first breaks in the motion picture industry. “Ghosts on the loose” is a cheap Monogram horror spoof that takes great delight in lampooning Bela Lugosi and Ava Gardners’ screen images. The East End Kids star as a group of youths daring each other to enter a ghost house. Roger Corman’s “The Terror” has a young Jack Nicholson playing a weary soldier of the Napoleonic Wars who enters a strange land of witchcraft and menace, ruled over by a mad Baron played by Boris Karloff. Francis Ford Coppola assisted in the direction of “The Terror” as did Nicholson and an uncredited Monte Hellman.