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The break was bound to come. Looking back, I could see it setting in as long ago as my first viewing of the
Judas,
when I came away knowing that I'd seen—or felt—more in the film than Clare did. Now my sojourn at MOMA's archives had given me the chance to see several more of Castle's long-lost silents, which had opened doors for me—especially the apprentice pieces from his UFA days. From that period Arlene Fleischer had recovered four movies in whole or in part, including a reasonably complete print of
The Dreaming Eyes,
his first work. These early efforts were made for quick and profitable release with minimal supervision from the studio. They went out to a still-naive audience for whom movies were little more than a novelty; there was every expectation that, after a brief run, they would promptly be scrapped like old newspapers. Castle and the
Grabräuber
were, after all, the cinematic equivalent of pulp magazines, disposable items to be enjoyed and destroyed. For that reason, Castle could afford to experiment with less caution. Techniques he would later polish to perfection showed through more crudely in these works and so gave me clues to later films.

The museum had also acquired one short reel of miscellaneous footage cut by MGM from
The Martyr.
It was in miserable condition, jumpy, blurred and cruelly scarred by cinch marks. That might have been reason enough to leave it out of the retrospective. But I had other grounds for omitting it. For one thing, the material had an unsavory character. The reel had been donated to the museum by the grandson of one of the original MGM executives. He recalled being told that it was stashed away by studio moguls for their private use. Publicly, under pressure of the lawsuit Castle had once threatened to lodge against MGM to recover his disputed film, the studio
claimed that all the edited material from
The Martyr
had been destroyed. Poor Castle! To the end of his days, he was left to believe that his one great American movie had been consigned to the flames. He might, however, have found it even more galling to learn what the studio had preserved and why.

The sequestered reel was made up entirely of outtakes from bathing and love scenes that captured more incidental nudity than would ever have survived into the finished film. There was, for example, one sequence of the undraped Louise Brooks getting in and out of a poolsized bathtub over and over again, often caught from highly revealing angles—not the sort of material any actress would have wanted preserved. Had she known at the time she was being filmed? Did she ever know the footage had become a privileged executive pleasure at MGM?

There was only one aspect of this reel that lent it importance—though probably to no one but me. At several points in this waste footage, Castle himself appeared on camera. I don't believe anyone noticed that but me; certainly nobody at the archives mentioned it, perhaps because Castle was far from a familiar face. Or because nobody looked closely enough. The film was badly fogged; watching it was like staring into a snowstorm. But there he was, caught in candid little directorial episodes: handing Louise Brooks her robe, gesturing to the camera, signaling to someone out of sight. At one point, seeking to shield his nearly nude leading lady from the peeping lens, he walked directly forward, playfully thrusting his own disapproving face into the camera.

For me, these fleeting moments touched the man with a reality my research could have achieved in no other way. They animated Max Castle, giving him a living presence, a personality. Up to that time, I'd seen only a few photographs of him; they made him out to be severe and brooding. It was remarkable how the moving pictures of Castle I now possessed shaded that image without essentially softening it. There were some small hints of humor in the man: Castle caught grinning (large, horsey teeth), making a joke, pretending anger, bawling someone out, then giving a brief laugh. But there were many more moments that revealed somber intensity: Castle staring fixedly at some detail, then frowning, gesturing a “no, no, no” correction. Or squinting into the lights, making a sour face, clamping his teeth together, muttering a curse. There was one glimpse of him in a bedroom scene, barely visible to one side, lying flat on his stomach
setting a tricky shot. And another that I studied again and again. In the foreground, a bare-breasted Louise Brooks was being powdered and preened; behind her just at the edge of a shadow sat Castle gazing intently off camera, at what I couldn't say: shoulders hunched, his gaze rock-steady, his hand fisted at his mouth, his posture utterly taut. Seventeen seconds of total concentration, then a gesture of command (one finger raised, a word spoken) and he eases back in his chair, suddenly looking deeply fatigued.

Castle, I now learned, was a small man, quite a bit shorter than I'd imagined. His build was slight, his manner highly strung, birdlike. His fingers seemed always to be twitching at his side, his dark locks needing to be brushed back from his high, frowning brow. And when he walked into the camera to block out Louise Brooks in the background, his hard, steady gaze looked for all the world as if it could melt its way through stone. In these fleeting appearances on film, Castle never lost his commanding authority. No question that he had been a domineering character; I would even have said charismatic, though perhaps I was reading too much into what I saw. He was, after all, no more than twenty-six or twenty-seven when this footage was shot.

By the time I'd sat through this reel of film some two dozen times, I realized the true reason I was keeping it to myself. Each time I viewed it, I was staging a sort of private cinematic audience with Castle, probing a little further into the distant and receding mystery of the man, hoping to wring one more intimate nuance out of these dim, oblique images. I was taking a secret, obsessive pleasure in the fact that just possibly there was no one left in the world who knew Castle as well as I did, that no one deserved to.

With the full sweep of the man's work spread before me from his first film to his last, I found myself steadily drawn deeper into Castle than any conventional critical analysis could take me. I had no choice but to follow where Zip Lipsky and his mysterious sallyrand had first pointed the way: into the
Unenthüllte,
the Unrevealed, as Orson had put it, which made itself known only to the dark side of the mind. I was now certain that whatever his studio assignment might be, Castle had found ways to make a second, secret, movie beneath the surface of the first.

I can still remember my excitement when I discovered the first of these hide-and-seek techniques. It appears in one of his earliest silent pictures,
Queen of Swords,
a homicidal thriller about fortune-telling
gypsies. I named the effect the Chinese box; it was, in effect, a double subliminal image. In a key scene in the film, the hero, a deranged youth who has murdered his mother in a particularly ghastly way, bends forward to kiss his fiancée. As he does so, there is a brief image of his murdered mother's terror-stricken face superimposed upon the girl. The effect comes across just above the threshold of awareness, so that we catch it at the fringe of consciousness and quickly register the Freudian motif: girlfriend identified with mother. Seeing this for the first time, I could understand the hero's shock; but not the sense of almost unbearable disgust the shot produces. More than merely startling the viewers, the moment imprints a sickly loathing. Why? With the help of a sallyrand, I might have answered the question in short order. Lacking that magical spyglass, I made do as best I could, viewing Castle's film the way nobody has ever looked at a movie, as if it were a specimen under a microscope.

It was only after I ran the film through the museum's analyzer projector, stopping the action frame by frame, that I realized there was a second image that displaces the mother or, rather, skillfully blends with her in the eye. The effect wasn't easy to catch; it appears on just four frames positioned about a quarter-second apart, each underlit in a way that requires careful use of an enhancing filter to tease the image into visibility—and then just barely.

And what does one then see? It is a quick glimpse of a decomposing but still-living body coated with worms. The body even appears to writhe, struggling to claw at the maggots that are feeding on it. These flash frames make use of an astonishing perceptual device. Each of them in the brief sequence is several times double-exposed, the illusion of movement compressed and blurred on the film. Nevertheless, in just that split second, it
takes.
One's attention, picking up the first barely visible image of the mother, is just sufficiently distracted to miss the second completely; it eludes one's guard and gets through unnoticed, but with undiminished impact.

By all the known rules of perception, it ought not to be possible for such an image within an image to register on the eye or the mind at all; it simply comes and goes too quickly. The effect works, however, because Castle has tied all three images together—the fiancée, the mother, the corpse—by a powerful visual signature that appears in the flash frames: a crossed circle that has already appeared several times in the film, always in connection with the themes of lust and violence. Two bloodstained knives crossed on a round table, a prostitute's
crossed legs on a circular carpet, a man spreadeagled against a circular window as he is gunned down … Castle has systematically schooled the eye in the course of the movie to receive his secret message. When it comes, it penetrates like an invisible dagger.

Even more exciting was my discovery of the device I called miniaturized coding, a far more potent perceptual trick, which Castle was to use again and again in his later movies. It appears in some of his earliest silents, but is introduced nowhere with more precision than in his vampire films. These were the movies that, as Leroy Pusey told me, worried executives at Universal had agonized over for weeks, searching for obscene material that could never be found. To all appearances, the movies were no more suggestive than other vampire pictures of the period. There were the usual sexual overtones, but nothing explicit: not much violence, no blood at all. Finally, the studio settled for arbitrarily cutting several minutes from each of the two films, sections that everyone, though without knowing why, agreed were the most objectionable parts of the movies. In this crudely abridged form they reached their audience, becoming the only Castle films to survive into the late forties.

Zip Lipsky's uncut version of both films preserved the offending sequences; each time I viewed them, I also came away convinced that the movies were intolerably lewd, though I was no more able than the Universal executives to pinpoint the objectionable material. Even when I searched for the sort of subperceptual maneuvers I now regarded as a standard feature of Castle's films, I could find nothing. I was baffled, until I found, among the Castle materials purchased by the museum from private collections, a brief sixteen-millimeter reel of unidentified film in which I was able to recognize some of the actors from
Feast of the Undead.
The reel had clearly been shot at the same time, using the same costumes. Here the cast appeared in a succession of violent, gory, and lurid snippets that had been spliced together in no recognizable order. This was the only film footage of this kind I'd ever come upon in Castle's work. Even by contemporary standards the material would be X-rated. Why, then, had it been made? I searched the movie closely, and it was only after I'd gone through it many times frame by frame that I spotted a clue.

It was in a scene that had been arbitrarily cut by the studio. Once it was gone, people felt less disturbed, though they had no idea why. To all appearances, this sequence is simply a dinner party; amid the feasting and drinking, the host, Count Lazarus, tempts his unwary
guests to stay the night. He raises his wineglass in a toast, and for a split second the glass flashes in the candlelight. The result is a star flare that might survive in a contemporary film but that would have been regarded as a flaw in a 1939 production. Castle, however, kept it in the film—a daring move, though at the time probably dismissed as sloppy editing. I knew I'd seen this flare before—in the sixteen-millimeter reel. It appears in a scene where one of the women guests, seminude and vulnerably supine across a bed, is attacked by a bat. (Though the actress is in deep shadows, I was certain it was Olga Tell, once again providing the erotic juice in a Castle movie.) The bat crawls up her body, from the thighs to the breast, and then fastens itself to her throat. As it does so, its eyes catch fire with the same penetrating flash of light—a momentary shock.

I isolated the frames from the dinner-party scene that carried the flare and examined them in every way I could imagine. I found nothing. Finally I printed off a series of stills from the sequence and blew them up to four times their ordinary size. And there, in the Count's upraised glass, I discovered the naked woman and the bat. They appeared miniaturized and upside down, then, in later frames, turning this way and that, as if they might be bubbles floating in the bright wine. When the Count puts down the glass, their image remains there, unobtrusively present and dominating the table.

At once I set about examining the entire scene in this way, making blowups of details from still after still. Every glass and plate on the table carried these ingeniously hidden double exposures. The dinner table fairly seethed with submerged images of lust and death that anticipate the grisly fate of the guests, all of whom will finally become the Count's victims. Yet, even when I'd located this hidden dimension of the scene, the mystery of Castle's craft was only deepened. I had no way to explain how these images were printed on the film or how they could be taken into perception. In no way that made sense could one say they were “seen”; yet this clearly was the material that lent the movie's questionable scenes their undeniable air of obscenity.

I searched further through the dinner-party sequence, probing the deep shadows at the rear of the chamber. Here I discovered still another piece of hide-and-seek filmmaking at work; negative etching, as I called it. Castle had seeded the cavernous darkness of the room with a wealth of veiled images printed in their film-negative form. Here were the eyes that Zip told me Castle loved to collect, an invisible montage of maniacally goggling eyes filled with malice and
perverse desire. There are twisting bodies, orgiastic couplings, acts of sadistic violence. Here was all the gore and sexuality that didn't appear at the surface of the film, more of it than the Hays Office would have ever licensed in its day. There was no question about it; Castle had produced the ultimate vampire movie. No one before or since has captured the sick eroticism, the vile carnality of the Undead more powerfully, or in more graphic detail.