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“What did he think of
Judas?”
I asked eagerly.

“Said he could see everything there he ever learned from Castle—plus a couple things more. All the … ‘tricks' he calls them. They're a little cruder in
Judas,
but all there.”

“Like what?”

“We didn't go into it that far.
I
didn't go into it that far. Not my interest. Anyway, Zip's not the one to give away very much. But I set you up with him.”

“How do you mean?”

“He wants to see the
Judas
again. I said okay, but only if he'll let you see the rest of Castle's stuff. He agreed. Not enthusiastically, but he'll go along. Be sure to give him lots of strokes.”

“Just me?” I asked. “Don't you want to be in on it?”

She paused thoughtfully before answering. “Let's let this be your little project, all right? It was hard enough to get him to agree to that much.”

“Should I try to get the other films for The Classic?”

“Fat chance of that! He won't let the films out of his own possession.”

“I could try.”

“So try. See how far you'll get.” She added with a teasing smile, “Mrs. L. might be of some help to you.”

Knowing just what she meant, I nonetheless asked, “What do you mean?”

“Oh come on, Jonny! You can see the old girl's got the hots for you.”

I tried to play innocent-dumb, not very convincingly.

“Cut it out, Jonny,” Sharkey joined in. “You're in like Flynn there. Just play your cards right.”

“Do you really think I should try using her influence … in that way?”

“All for the sake of art,” Sharkey said.

Later that night I tried again to draw Clare out about the films we'd seen. She sidestepped every time. It was only after we'd gone to bed that I got a clear response, and a troubling one.

I'd been prattling on about
House of Blood,
assuming Clare would want to hear all about it. “It really is a shocker,” I reported. “I can see why Zip is so proud of it. It's as cheap a piece of work as anything that ever came out of Universal in the old days, but the way they used the camera and the lighting … I was frankly scared out of my wits. I can't say why, but I was. There are some scenes that I'd swear are absolutely pornographic. Not actual sex, in fact, sort of… the opposite, if you know what I mean. You should see it. There's this one shot from over the bed, where the camera seems to just float and float like … well, a bat. Makes you almost nauseated. And then … ”

In the darkness, Clare reached across to cover my mouth with her hand. Then, after a long silence, she whispered, “He's here. Can you tell?”

The words produced a distinct shiver, though I had no idea what she meant. “Who … ?” I asked.

“Castle. He's here—in the bed with us.”

I shivered again. This wasn't like Clare. I had no idea how to reply. Then she ran her hand down my body, across my stomach, into the groin, caressing. “Here, Jonny. How did the movies make you feel
here?”

Taken off guard, I had no answer to give. I lay there stupidly while Clare toyed with my strangely unresponsive member. To my amazement, I didn't want her hand where it was, doing what it did. Her touch brought with it what I might have called a sense of defilement, if I'd had the nerve to put the sensation in words. Even though I didn't, Clare could tell.

“Want me to stop, Jonny?” she asked.
“Why?
Because
he's
here. Somehow Castle's found a way to get between us. How does he do that?” There was a small, urgent tremor in her voice, almost as if she believed I might be able to answer the question for her. Clare didn't often reveal her vulnerabilities, but she was coming close to it that night. Of course, I had no answers to give her. I could only ask, “What about you? Does it have the same effect?”

“Me too! Goddamit! I feel the same way. Cold. Frozen solid. Like a puddle of dirty ice. I feel … ashamed. Of
what?
I don't know. And I don't like it. Movies are supposed to be the perfect pornographic medium, right? The ideal erotic turn-on. But not these movies. This is worse than porn. This is … I don't know what this is. It's what makes porn possible. It's the concentrated shame.” Then, after a long pause, while her hand still stroked me, “How does he do it? That's what to find out, Jonny. What's the secret? Find it. And after you find it,
bury it.”

She raised herself and leaned over me, breathing hard against my cheek, still working at me, beginning at last to get the reaction she wanted. “Now this is all I'll tell you about Max Castle's movies. I don't know what they're all about. I don't
want
to know. Just you be careful, lover, that the man doesn't get to you. If he begins to, remember
this.
Remember us together like
this.
Like
this.”
She was astride me now, her thighs spread generously across my hips. For a time, her words faded into the rhythm of her laboring breath as she took her pleasure aggressively. We'd never made love that way, like rebellious subjects rising up against oppressive authority. Clare's use of my body that night could only be called belligerent, an act of war. Yet neither of us could say what it was that had brought such desperation into our bed.

When she'd finished with me, falling damp and exhausted across my chest, the words came back, close at my ear. “It could be he's the greatest there ever was. Quote me on that and I'll call you a liar. Because if I had my way, I'd see every one of his movies burned to fumes. Remember, Jonny, anything that makes
this
wrong is evil. Do you hear that, Herr Kastell? You're
evil, evil, evil.”

I didn't realize it at the time, but that night Clarissa Swann delivered the only review of Max Castle's films she'd ever produce. And it came down to one sentence, one word.

Max Castle might have been
persona non grata
in the well-defended domain of Clare's cinematic taste, but for all her hostility, she couldn't exile him wholly from her thoughts. She was too helplessly addicted to film to deny herself work of that caliber. As deeply as his movies troubled her, they also fascinated. So a pattern arose, one which I'd dimly perceived forming when Clare first set me to work organizing the Max Castle Festival. She would deal with Castle through me. I would be her emissary dispatched to an enemy with
whom she refused to have diplomatic relations. In a sense, I'd been granted a position of trust. Clare would learn about Castle primarily by way of my reports and evaluations. But there were times when I felt uncomfortably like a pair of tongs she was using to handle contaminated material.

For the next four months, I was a regular guest at the Lipsky house, sometimes coming as often as three times a week to sit in Zip's projection room studying the lost films of Max Castle. Though she never asked to be told, I knew that Clare expected a full account of my every visit. While I gave it, she would affect distraction, even unconcern. But I could feel the insistent pressure of her curiosity. She was taking in every word greedily, at times revealing more of her distaste than she'd have cared to know I saw.

My relationship with Zip, who sat through every screening with me, began in a distinctly unpromising way. He was at first determined to treat me as a nuisance and an interloper, tolerated only because I brought the
Judas
with me, a film he wanted to see again and again. Sometimes, in our early sessions, he would communicate with me only by way of impatient grunts and wheezes. If I dared to ask a question, he'd gasp out a contemptuous little smirk—as if to say, “Shows how much you know.” But I was determined to overcome his petulance and learn what he had to tell me about Castle. I played deferential to the core, a role that came naturally to me. I was careful to compliment every film I saw lavishly, trying to massage my appreciation through his tough hide. Even so, it wasn't until the middle of the second month that I began receiving what were for Zip reasonably friendly responses. If I hadn't believed the glowing tributes I heaped upon his work—and Castle's—I would have burned with shame. But I came to see that this bitter old man was parched to the bone for the well-deserved recognition I was offering him. My words were a small rainfall of belated praise in the wasteland of his last years.

The breakthrough came unexpectedly in our second month together. We were watching one of Castle's more obscure products of the early thirties,
Zombie Doctor.
It was one of several films on which his name didn't appear. As late as 1938, Castle wasn't reconciled to permanent residence in the B-movie ghetto; he still hoped to move on to better things. He took the work but frequently directed under other names, among them Maurice Roche.

“Roche. You get it?” Zip asked with a wry squint. I didn't. “That's
from chess.” I still didn't get it, but Zip offered nothing more than a haughty little sniff. “Max was a damn good chess player too. Beat the pants off everybody on the set. Brainy, that's what he was.”

Chess, I gathered, was a pretty classy item in Zip's eyes, but it was clear he knew nothing about the game himself, so I asked no further. Later I worked it out on my own.
Roche
was the German for rook, castle. Zip knew of four other films Castle had directed under that
nom de film
before he finally agreed to put his own name on such humiliatingly substandard work.

Before the movie started I remarked to Zip that I'd seen it just a few months back on late-night television; I had no idea at the time that it was one of Castle's films. Zip shook his head dismissively. “You
think
you saw it, sonny. What you saw was chopped liver. This is the real thing. This you didn't see.” There was a mischievous twinkle in his eye. “You ready?” he asked. I nodded that I was. “Okay, hold tight.” And he gave the signal to Yoshi. The lights melted away. The movie started—but not in my eyes. In my ears. A thunderous burst of jungle drumming, a good fifteen seconds of it blasting out at full volume. Poor sound from a crackly sound track, but certainly loud.

Then the first image. A face, wild with fear, fills the screen. A black face, staring straight into the camera. The face turns, the man begins to run, stumbling through the undergrowth, his half-clothed body gleaming with sweat. His panicky breathing comes up loud to counterpoint the incessant drumming. The camera, hand-held and jiggling, pursues him like a tiger after its prey. The fleeing man throws terrified glances over his shoulder, running for all he is worth, panting, whimpering. The drumming accelerates. Voices come up, a ragged chorus of deep-throated howls and hoots, chanting to the racing rhythm. Only now, at least a minute into the action, does the first title appear.
Zombie Doctor.
Jagged letters blurring in and out of focus, using that sort of shimmering, fluid script that was a popular device in thrillers of the thirties. The rest of the titles follow in rapid succession, washing across the screen while the chase continues. But the eye scarcely takes them in; it is concentrated on the running man, sharing his terror.

Now this wasn't the way
Zombie Doctor
began in the version I'd seen. There we have the titles alone against a poorly drawn jungle background, accompanied by a piece of hackneyed studio scoring, in this case Universal's off-the-shelf thrills-and-chills music: a mewling electric organ over jittery fiddles. When I first saw the picture, I
assumed this was one of the movie's forced economies, never realizing that Castle had shot a totally different beginning.

It was at least a couple of minutes into the opening before I clearly registered the fact that I was witnessing two striking innovations. This might be the earliest movie to begin the action before the titles; this was also the longest tracking shot I'd ever seen, the camera relentlessly following the running man without a break through the entire credit sequence. As of the mid-thirties, a shot like this should have been a complete impossibility on a standard studio lot. There just wouldn't have been the space. Yet here we were watching what seemed like miles of ground racing by.

The sequence ends with the frightened man falling exhausted, writhing on the ground belly up, reaching to fend off his pursuers. His mouth gapes, too dry with fear to cry out. He gasps a stifled shriek as the camera bears in close. In the last split second, the camera swings dizzily around to show what he sees. Two, three, four horrific faces, twisted, demonic. Before the screen goes black, we just barely recognize that they are masks—the masks of the voodoo priests we meet later in the film. As it does so, the voices reach a yammering crescendo and give a final piercing shout. Silence. The movie begins. The audience (at least the audience that was me) starts the picture with adrenaline overflowing—and finishes on the margins of nausea transfixed by an image of unparalleled brutality: the film's hero expiring on an antheap where a gang of victorious zombies has left him crucified. The shot, taken overhead in cruelly slow motion, then tracks up and back, up and back … until the camera must have been shooting from the rafters. (How did Zip do it?) By that time, the victim has shrunk to the size of an insect in the eye of an uncaring god. Needless to say, the end, like the beginning of the film had been cut from the release version.

Zip made me wait until the movie was over before he'd answer any questions. That gave me the chance to mark another change from the release version of the film. In the
Zombie Doctor
I knew, the generic studio scoring was used throughout. Castle's original used voodoo drumming and voices; they were there all the time, building steadily through the film from slow and quiet to fast and furious. I asked Zip at once about the music.

“Yeah, they threw out all the drummin', the sons of bitches. Nigger music, they called it. Not what the audience expects. Blah, blah, blah. And, hell, they got Max's score for practically free.”