Outside the Blue Box: Terror (1978)

The leaves are turning brown, there’s a chill in the air, and jack-o-lanterns are being lit – it’s that time of year once again. Being an enthusiast of the macabre, I’m delighted to have been given the opportunity to write the Outside the Blue Box article closest to Halloween, and for the main site no less, which allows me to embrace my inner horror host a little and make a bit of a “Halloween special” out of it.

Long-time readers of The Geek Show will already know that I specialise in reviewing horror pictures, so covering something season-appropriate will hardly seem out of the norm for me – in fact, all-but-one of my Outside the Blue Box articles have been based around a work in the horror genre. I’d considered finding a way of tying this article into the new big-screen feature-length anniversary release of The Impossible Planet and The Satan Pit, which in itself is one of my favourite Who stories of all time and has been since I was a young scaredy-cat who could barely handle when the Doctor encountered something a little spooky, let alone anything actively dealing with ghouls and ghosts; at least Whovians have something which is a fun kind of scary to look forward to this late October, which is a bit of a change from the gruelling, nebulous existential horror of the show’s current hiatus and uncertain future.

Today’s article is a continuation of a trend I began a couple of months back on the Geek Show Patreon, where I’m doing a bit of a slash-a-thon for my Outside the Blue Box articles as part of preparation for my dissertation on the British slasher film (head on over there to read my previous two articles on Roy Skelton in Night After Night After Night and Michael Jayston in Craze). However, the film I’m covering for this article is extra special and seasonally appropriate, because it doesn’t just contain hacking and slashing – it’s also got ghosts, witches, family curses, and a fake softcore porno called “Bathtime With Brenda”. Yep, it’s time for Terror (1978).

Terror was the 5^th feature film directed by the cult favourite British horror and exploitation filmmaker Norman J. Warren, who you might know from UK genre shockers such as Satan’s Slave (1976), Inseminoid (1981) and Bloody New Year (1987). Alongside his contemporary Pete Walker, Warren was one of those rare sleaze-and-splatter filmmakers who was active in mid-to-late ‘70s Britain who I can’t help but admire and feel inspired by as a little-to-no-budget English schlock-peddler myself; Warren’s films are a brief glimpse into what a Britsploitation boom of the ‘80s could have looked like if not for Thatcherism, moral panic, and the general collapse of UK cinema towards the beginning of the decade, and regardless of how much I enjoy each individual title from his filmography compared to one another, the very existence of his films gives me hope as a young queer blood-and-guts filmmaker in a similarly tumultuous time for British film production, not least genre film.

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I’ve been meaning to cover one of Warren’s flicks for Outside the Blue Box for a while now, as a fair few of them feature appearances from Doctor Who cast members, but I was finally compelled to do a write-up on Terror out of pure frustration and disappointment at Nicolas Winding Refn’s failure to thank the late NJW in the credits to his new film Her Private Hell (2026), which borrows (or, more accurately, steals) its title from Warren’s 1968 feature debut. Refn may not have displayed any appreciation for his dearly departed sleaze-cinema ancestor, but that doesn’t mean that I won’t pick up the torch where he dropped it. By writing an article about how one of his films connects to Doctor Who, of course.

Terror opens in 1600s England, where the witch Mad Dolly (Patti Love) is captured and sent to be burned at the stake, much to the sadistic glee of the local noblewoman Lady Garrick (Mary Maude). As the flame is lit below her, Mad Dolly lays a curse on the Garrick bloodline, vowing to bring death and destruction upon their descendants until there is nobody left – a promise which she makes good on pretty quickly, returning from her fiery grave to choke Lord Garrick to death and decapitate Lady Garrick with a sword. It is during these opening scenes that we see the first of two major Who players to make an appearance throughout Terror, as Lord Garrick is played by none other than William Russell, a.k.a. Ian Chesterton – one of the first faces seen on Doctor Who, and a member of the original TARDIS team who travelled with William Hartnell’s First Doctor between An Unearthly Child and The Chase. Though Russell also appeared in beloved all-time classics such as Richard Donner’s Superman (1978), The Great Escape (1963), and of course The Gay Dog (1954), he is most fondly remembered for his enduring turn as the naturally charming yet perpetually-suffering Ian, a Who companion whose main purpose was seemingly to get trapped in situations every other week (whilst Hartnell’s Doctor was having a nap in a field during The Dalek Invasion of Earth, Ian was getting sealed into a bomb and sent into the Earth’s core – just so you know what the vibe is). Unfortunately, Russell’s appearance in Terror is very brief and fairly unmemorable, save for the fact that he makes a silly face when he gets strangled by a grotty witch arm through the wall – it’s real blink-and-you’ll-miss it stuff, and not something that most viewers would pay that much attention to if they weren’t hardcore Who enjoyers.

A title card at the end of this sequence reads “The End” – because Terror isn’t actually a film about 17th-century witch hunters. In fact, all that we just saw was the final scene of an in-universe B-horror picture, the latest from director James Garrick (John Nolan), who based the plot on an old family legend which he strongly suspects is based in fact. Garrick has just screened the film to a party of producers, friends, and relatives, including his cousin Ann (Carolyn Courage), who he has never previously met; neither James nor Ann have children, making them both the last of the Garrick family line, something which the former has frequently dwelt upon during the production of his latest film and his inheritance of the family’s ancestral home (complete with bewitched sword). One of the friends attending this party is a man named Gary, who may well be the funniest and most entertaining of the film’s characters – and funnily enough, he’s played by another Hartnell-era Who companion, Michael Craze, who played Ben Jackson in ‘60s Doctor Who and had a brief stint as a horror star in the ‘70s beginning with Neither the Sea Nor the Sand (1972), which I covered for Outside the Blue Box on the Geek Show Patreon at the beginning of this year. UK horror enthusiasts will know that Craze was a returning cast member from Warren’s prior satanic shocker Satan’s Slave, which I intend to cover sometime in the new year for Outside the Blue Box but don’t want to oversaturate the series with Michael Craze articles, regardless of how appealing his horror filmography is.

Gary plays an instrumental role in the plot of Terror, with his attempts at mesmerism (as a party trick) potentially allowing Ann to be possessed by the vengeful spirit of Mad Dolly, kickstarting a series of supernatural killings which inevitably lead to the untimely deaths of James and Ann during the film’s climax; weirdly, though, Craze is nowhere to be seen throughout the rest of the film beyond this early party sequence – he’s the one who discovers the body of the first victim, his glamorous assistant Carol (Glynis Barber), but after that he disappears and doesn’t even get a gory grand-guignol death scene of his own, only being referenced once more during a phone call towards the end. The plot of Terror is full of strange dead ends like this, likely because it was primarily envisioned as a series of supernatural slasher sequences with any interconnecting plot being a secondary priority, and it’s an oddly stitched-together creature overall. When I first watched Terror back in 2022, I remember being deeply frustrated by its messy plotting and bizarre tonal approach, and I think part of me found the whole thing so overstimulating that I hated it, but upon revisiting the film I’ve grown to appreciate the gems of weird Brit-horror atmosphere, the farcical satire of UK filmmaking, and the surprisingly impressive Argento-inspired death scenes and FX set-pieces. I still don’t think it’s a great film, especially when compared to other works from the creative forces who worked on it, but I do find myself compelled and charmed by it for the work of low-budget Brit-horror schlock that it is, and that I find to be so close in sensibility with my own work and creative pursuits.

I’m also surprised by the fact that, upon first viewing, I didn’t appreciate how funny a lot of the dialogue is – not just in the sequences where we see behind the scenes of the aforementioned “Bathtime With Brenda”, but also just in little interactions and exchanges which contain some very naturally funny lines and beats. This should be no surprise, given that the script for Terror was penned by David McGillivray, an icon of the UK film and theatre scenes who wrote the darkly witty screenplay for one of my favourite British horrors of all time, Pete Walker’s Frightmare (1974), as well as the profoundly grim and decidedly less funny evil-priest Walker production House of Mortal Sin (1976), which I might add is also very good. Back in 2023 when I was a younger, more inexperienced filmmaker, I had the pleasure of getting McGillivray to quickly lend his voice to a softly-spoken demonic presence in my ultra-personal transgender folk horror short The Estrogen Gospel (2024); being young and inexperienced, the recording session took about 20 minutes and I had only a quarter of a clue what I was doing, but I’ll forever be grateful that he lent his tones to the supernatural antagonist of my no-budget debut short, and the fact that he was willing to help out a queer filmmaker such as myself so early in my career is a clear testament to his character, and part of me dreams of being able to get him involved in a future project now that I’ve gained a lot more confidence, technical skill, and experience working with actors from a director’s standpoint. But that’s just my personal rambling, and has nothing to do with Doctor Who or, really, Terror – but it’s just a small part of the reason why I think David McGillivray should be widely celebrated for his contributions to UK genre film, both on screen and on the page.

There is one other Who cast member who makes an appearance in Terror, that being Elaine Ives-Cameron, here seen playing the ageing actress and landlady Dolores Hamilton. Dolores regularly asks visitors if they recognise her, which is a funny bit in itself, and whilst most might not know Ives-Cameron for much beyond this movie, some ‘70s Who fans will know her as the cultist Martha from the 1978 Tom Baker “Key to Time” saga serial The Stones of Blood, which is an appropriately spooky and occult-themed story for the time this article is being published. If you’re a Who fan who is planning on checking out Terror this Halloween after reading my article, and want some episodes that might pair well with it, then I’ve got a handful which might do the job. Both the Pertwee-era story The Dæmons and the Davison-era serial The Awakening feature some form of witchcraft-adjacent phenomena and an attempted burning at the stake, whilst the Series 3 NuWho episode The Shakespeare Code features some nicely grotty Elizabethan witchery (and, admittedly, some not-so-nice baggage thanks to one poorly-aged line and a writer who I shan’t name for fear of summoning him). If you want a Who adventure which directly involves witch-hunting, the living dead, and familial murder, though, my best recommendation would be the Jodie Whittaker-era episode The Witchfinders, which is one of her strongest outings as the Doctor, takes place during a drastically under-explored dark period of British history (the Pendle witch trials), and is properly nice-looking too. Or you could rewatch The Reality War, I guess that was pretty frightening in its own way.

Happy Halloween!

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