After seeing Dario Argento’s Suspiria (1977), director Norman J. Warren was inspired by its energy, its weirdly incoherent plotting and its anything-goes spirit. He told the Senses of Cinema website in 2009 that watching Argento’s baroque masterpiece was “liberating in that you could suddenly get away with doing whatever you wanted.” His regular scriptwriter at the time, David McGillivray, also loved Suspiria and together with producers Les Young and Moira Young (who both chipped in story ideas) they created Terror, their homage to Argento.

It starts as what appears to be a Hammer Films-style Gothic, seemingly a change of pace for both Warren and McGillivray who had favoured contemporary settings for their previous work (a flashback in Satan’s Slave (1976) aside). A sudden “The End” caption nine minutes in is disconcerting and it proves to have been a false start, a horror film made by James Garrick (John Nolan, Christopher Nolan’s uncle) watched by cast and crew, a chiller in the vein of The City of the Dead (1960) and La maschera del demonio/Black Sunday (1960). “What a load of rubbish!” opines one of the assembled crew members. This “rubbish” features Mad Dolly (Patti Love), a witch being burned at the stake on the order of Lord Garrick (former Doctor Who (1963-1989) companion William Russell) and cursing his line as the attempted burning descends into chaos. Garrick, who with his cousin Ann (Carolyn Courage) are the last of the Garrick line, is using his strange family history is the basis for his latest film. Gary (Michael Craze, another Doctor Who sidekick), a mesmerist, hypnotises Ann as a party trick and she attacks James with the same sword that Mad Dolly used to do in her relative Lady Garrick (Mary Maude).

He escapes with a slight injury but it sets into motion a series of events that sees their friends and colleagues meeting various grisly deaths – Carol (Glynis Barber) is stabbed to death in the woods, a leering patron (Chuck Julian) who assaults Ann at the strip club where she works as a waitress falls to his death on a row of spiked railings, a studio lamp crushes a soft core porn director (Peter Craze, Michael’s brother) to death, actress Viv is also stabbed and James’s assistant Philip (James Aubrey) is decapitated by a sheet of glass. Eventually, Mad Dolly returns and takes her final revenge on the last of the Garrick family.

It’s best not to get too involved in the plot which makes very little sense. Just seen as a series of set-pieces peppering just enough story to hold them all together and Terror works well enough. Worry about things like why people who have little to nothing to do with the cursed family are dying and the whole thing collapses. Terror has frequently been dismissed as a simple copy of the similarly short-on-plot Suspiria though it really isn’t – it’s inspired by it certainly, but it bears little resemblance to Argento’s story. Curiously, there are least two murder scenes here foreshadow similar scenes in Argento’s later films Inferno (1980) and Tenebrae (1982).

The set pieces are the thing here and while they don’t always work, they are mostly inventive and suitably nasty. Glynis Barber – seven years before finding small screen fame as one half of detective duo Dempsey and Makepeace (1985-1986) – gets a grisly giallo-style murder scene; the scene with Sarah Keller battling through a vicious rainstorm feels like the most obvious reference to Suspiria; Carolyn Courage is menaced by a levitating Rover, not long after a policeman hade been put to death by his own possessed car; and of course the best loved of the lot, the scene in which Philip is attacked by the paraphernalia of the film studio, including several reels of film that come chillingly to life (damaged prints of Saturday Night Fever (1977) were pressed into service for the effect.) Perhaps not entirely coincidentally, Warren’s earlier film Satan’ Slave had toured the UK on a double bill with Curtis Harrington’s Ruby (1977) which had also featured a scene of someone being attacked by “living” reels of film.

Scattered around the supporting cast are small roles or cameos from interesting names and faces. Pater Mayhew, lately Chewbacca in the recently released Star Wars (1977), plays a hulking red herring mechanic, while Hammer regular Milton Reid is on hand as a bouncer. McGillivray himself turns up as a television reporter and genre writer Alan Jones can briefly be seen struggling with a possessed Ann at a party, a shindig also attended by future Kenny Everett sidekick Cleo Rocos.

There are also a number of little pop culture touches that place the film very firmly in its time and place, little things that would have seemed terribly contemporary at the time, but which now just give the film a nostalgic sheen. A poster for a double bill of Satan’s Slave and Thriller – en grym film/Thriller: A Cruel Film (1973) can be seen on the wall of Garrick’s office while the dressing room of the strip joint catches the clash between the old and new wings of rock music with a poster of the artwork from prog rock giants Yes’ Tales from Topographic Oceans album next to a mirror adorned with the name of punk newcomers Sham 9 written in lipstick. Later a pile of records can be seen with a copy of Led Zeppelin II sitting proudly at the top. There were few British horror films of the 1970s that were so unashamedly of their moment. The gaudy t-shirt worn by the strip club barman adorned with the words Moonshine Goat Herd seems to hint at another pop culture reference but no such band existed until New York heavy metal outfit appropriated the name in 2012.

Warren and McGillivray were old hands at the British (s)exploitation game so the fun behind the scenes expose has a particularly authentic feel. The whole Bathtime with Brenda business (the dreadful sex comedy being shot at Garrick’s studio, much to his dismay) is stupidly funny (“I didn’t leave my knickers in ‘ere did I?”) and could surely only have been written and directed by men who were had more than a passing familiarity with that scene.

It’s all complete nonsense of course and is frequently hampered by its low budget but it’s so chock full of gory murders and genuine “what were they thinking?” moments that it’s a hard to dislike. Satan’s Slave remains Warren’s best horror film – the science fiction film Prey (1977) his best overall – but Terror is a lot of very silly and very gory fun, made by a director who was determined to keep the independent British end up. Subsequent films – witless science fiction sex comedy Outer Touch (1979), Alien (1979)-knock off Inseminoid (1981), spy thriller Gunpowder (1986) and the indescribably odd Bloody New Year (1987) – were less impressive but his earlier films remain weirdly enjoyable, Warren overcoming his miniscule budgets to create films that perhaps look better today than they did at the time. For some years, Warren entertained the notion of a sequel to Terror to be titled Beyond Terror. Sadly, like his long-cherished remake of Fiend Without a Face (1958), it never happened.