Les yeux de la terreur had little going for it except Rachel Ward. Les yeux de la terreur, aka, Terror Eyes is an unremarkable little thriller about a serial decapitator on a college campus. It isn’t very scary, and it isn’t very entertaining, despite its deliberate resemblance to classic Italian giallo. But opinions vary, and as you can see by looking at the above poster, it won the Jury Prize at the 1981 Avoriaz Film Festival, which goes to show that horror fans are so desperate for anything that resembles art they’ll hear Edith Piaf in a victim’s screams and see Jackson Pollack in his blood splatters. But one thing you don’t have to look very hard for here is British bombshell Rachel Ward in her first film appearance. She would later star in the quirky but satisfying neo noir Sharky’s Machine, the somewhat less satisfying noir rehash Against All Odds, the noir send-up Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid, and the excellent modern Aussie noir After Dark My Sweet. That’s a lot of noir, which is why she’s a favorite actress around here. As a side note, she gave an interview a while back in which she confessed that as a result of aging a bit and losing some of her extraordinary physical beauty, she wished she’d done more nude scenes. Funny, we were thinking the same thing. Les yeux de la terreur—which would later become known in the U.S. not as Terror Eyes, but as Night School—premiered at Avoriaz in January, and in Paris today in 1981.
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The headlines that mattered yesteryear.
1967—First Space Program Casualty Occurs
Soviet cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov dies in Soyuz 1 when, during re-entry into Earth's atmosphere after more than ten successful orbits, the capsule's main parachute fails to deploy properly, and the backup chute becomes entangled in the first. The capsule's descent is slowed, but it still hits the ground at about 90 mph, at which point it bursts into flames. Komarov is the first human to die during a space mission. 1986—Otto Preminger Dies
Austro–Hungarian film director Otto Preminger, who directed such eternal classics as Laura, Anatomy of a Murder, Carmen Jones, The Man with the Golden Arm, and Stalag 17, and for his efforts earned a star on Hollywood's Walk of Fame, dies in New York City, aged 80, from cancer and Alzheimer's disease. 1998—James Earl Ray Dies
The convicted assassin of American civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., petty criminal James Earl Ray, dies in prison of hepatitis aged 70, protesting his innocence as he had for decades. Members of the King family who supported Ray's fight to clear his name believed the U.S. Government had been involved in Dr. King's killing, but with Ray's death such questions became moot. 1912—Pravda Is Founded
The newspaper Pravda, or Truth, known as the voice of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, begins publication in Saint Petersburg. It is one of the country's leading newspapers until 1991, when it is closed down by decree of then-President Boris Yeltsin. A number of other Pravdas appear afterward, including an internet site and a tabloid. 1983—Hitler's Diaries Found
The German magazine Der Stern claims that Adolf Hitler's diaries had been found in wreckage in East Germany. The magazine had paid 10 million German marks for the sixty small books, plus a volume about Rudolf Hess's flight to the United Kingdom, covering the period from 1932 to 1945. But the diaries are subsequently revealed to be fakes written by Konrad Kujau, a notorious Stuttgart forger. Both he and Stern journalist Gerd Heidemann go to trial in 1985 and are each sentenced to 42 months in prison.
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