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Master of visual legerdemain that he was, Castle had even developed a bright-light version of negative etching. This is what accounted for the peculiarly odious atmospherics Clare and I had experienced upon our initial viewing of
The Ripper Strikes.
There, instead of deep shadows, he uses fog to hide his secret imagery, permeating the faintly glowing haze of the London streets with a ghost dance of imperceptible atrocities. The crimes the historical Ripper is said to have committed—brutal rape, mutilation, disembowelings—have never been more than hinted at in the movies. Castle showed them, but below the level of conscious perception. Apparently he filmed these horrors separately, working his actors after hours or off the set. The shooting was slapdash, far from the professional standard; but the aesthetic quality of this material didn't matter, only its shock value. When it is cleverly etched in behind the surface action, it allows the fog that saturates the movie to take on a life of its own, like some evil, disembodied mind hallucinating the Ripper's guilty secrets. Fog, cloud, smoke, dingy mirrors, shimmering water—Castle used them all to ambush his audience with forbidden messages.

Techniques like these, and others I would later find in Castle's films, were inventions of singular importance. Their discovery was exhilarating but at the same time perplexing. Because invariably, on the subconscious level, Castle's movies were psychopathic through and through. Everywhere, blatant sexuality was mixed with a morbidity that deliberately killed any pleasurable effect. Castle's eroticism was a nightmare straight out of the witch's kitchen: bodies tormented by their lust, made loathsome by desire. Once again, as in the case of the
Judas
, I was left with an almost palpable sense of something unclean clinging to my very flesh. Could Castle's techniques be used for any better purpose? What if I revealed his secrets only to see them exploited by other filmmakers for the same sensational and psychotic effects—just that and nothing more?

The question led me to an important decision. In my brochure for the retrospective, I would say nothing about Castle's cinematic innovations.
They would remain personally classified information until I understood how they worked and what harm they might do. By then I might be able to surround what I had to say with safeguards, or at least fair warning. That was what Clare would have wanted; her concern for film ethics was still that deeply lodged in my conscience. I might not have been so cautious if I'd discovered Castle's perceptual devices in some more benign context—even if the objective were simply to shock or titillate as all the best or worst horror movies have always sought to do. Castle's films, I was convinced, were linked to something more darkly intended.

I would have been embarrassed to suggest that intention to anyone in connection with the films I was featuring in the retrospective. I wouldn't, at that point, have known how to give such work the weight it needed to be regarded as anything more than at best extraordinarily well-produced little thrillers. That was the pathos of Castle's career. Nobody was prepared to think of him as an artist. The studios handled his work accordingly. Where they found his films jarring, they chopped or slashed them freely. Often it was the endings that proved most troubling and therefore wound up the most butchered. The studios wanted a quick, conventional finish—a joke, a kiss, a platitude accompanied by a final flourish of upbeat music. As I'd learned from Zip, Castle was again and again forced to tack such final scenes on his movies—or had, in fact, anticipated the demand by shooting an alternative climax in advance. Where this happened, the sudden shift in style was so jarring, it became a signal for the sensitive viewer. “Not my work!” it cried out.

Thanks to the Lipsky collection, I'd been able to restore the original endings to almost all of Castle's films, and these were now at last reaching audiences. The effect was universally experienced as startling, perhaps the one repair that was doing the most to refurbish Castle's reputation. Those who could remember seeing Castle's movies in their studio-approved versions recalled pictures that ended with one tired cliché or another, perhaps something insipid enough to erase the entire film from memory.

For example, the finish to the studio version of
Shadows over Sing Sing
is utterly banal. The escaping convict shoots the sadistic prison guard, then is gunned down on the walls. He dies asking his mother to forgive him. There follows a brief scene at his funeral—lots of syrupy violins in the background—where the tear-stained mother
assures the understanding warden that “he was a good boy, but he went wrong.” The generic ending for prison pictures of the thirties.

The original film ends very differently, a terrifying visual essay on crime and punishment. In it, the young convict, wounded and broken, hides out in the prison basement. He huddles in a dark corner behind a maze of steampipes and debris, more imprisoned than he had been in his cell. Nothing seems to happen, yet the scene quickly takes on an excruciating power. Why? The answer lies in the shadows that lend the finish of the movie a blackness few
noir
films ever achieved. Playing through the shadows we find a run of Castle's negative etching: a rapid series of double exposures in which the convict himself takes on the texture of the stone that imprisons him; he becomes the prison from which he would escape. Nothing could make his plight more hopeless.

Then, as the oily black shadows close about him, a gigantic figure appears barely sketched in an undulating gray light upon the darkness: the villainous guard who has tormented the boy all through the film, now towering vastly above him. He takes on mountainous proportions; the convict shrinks to the size of a mere insect at his feet. The boy gazes up at the punishing form; just beyond it, there is a high window where the sunlight shines through. With his last gesture, he reaches toward the light, but the window draws farther away until it becomes a dying glimmer which is swallowed up in the eye of the guard, then vanishes. The screen goes black.

For the next several seconds, the blackness holds; the eye remains fixed upon it. Why? An unseen vortex fills the unlighted screen; it begins to swirl dimly through our awareness, sucking the mind down and down. On the surface it looks like nothing more than scratches on the film, flickers of light, but the effect is hypnotic. One feels the experience of descent physically in the deep gut, falling, falling… . The audience waits for the familiar words “The End” to appear like an act of mercy. Castle withholds them. The falling is without end, the abyss without a bottom. We sit staring at a seemingly blank, unlighted screen, not knowing why the blackness grips us so forcefully. The vortex effect at last diffuses into the dark of the theater, finally freeing the restless audience.

Scholars would one day refer to this closing sequence as the famous “black hole” at the end of
Shadows over Sing Sing,
assuming its power has something to do with the nature of the story. It lasts only sixteen
seconds, but those few seconds proved too strenuous for a conventional B-movie, vintage 1936. So the end was crudely lopped off, surviving only thanks to the loyal Zip Lipsky.

Castle was a man with a bag full of tricks. Many of them remain mysteries to this day, unexplored by any filmmaker who came after him, the trade secrets of genius. But there was something I discovered in my close analysis of his work that was quite as remarkable as any of his unorthodox methods. That was the number of times he got what he wanted using no tricks at all. In several of his films I isolated scenes of extraordinary power, convinced that there must be some hidden gimmick at work. All it finally came down to was the lighting, the camera work, the cutting, basic elements of film craft that every director has available. Castle, working on a starvation budget with a hand-me-down screenplay, could do it all better—though only occasionally, by fits and starts, where the deadline might permit or where a few extra dollars might be wangled. When he reached the limit of his resources and could grind nothing more out of his stars or his script, he knew how to work around the weak spots with clever cuts or to frame them with surprising and distracting effects.

But much of this work suffered the same fate as the films that contained hidden material. Found intolerably disturbing by studio heads, they were chopped and scrapped. At the end of
House of Blood,
for example, the vampire is discovered in his coffin just as the sun is about to rise. His pursuers place the deadly wooden stake above his chest and prepare to strike. So far, it is the Hollywood cliché without modification, the predictable end of every Dracula film. But in Zip Lipsky's camera original, the Count's eyes spring open, his hand reaches up—not to defend against the stake but to caress it and position its point above his heart. Eagerly, he invites the blow that will end his detested existence. And when the stake is driven home, there is a profound and grateful sigh. No, it can't be called a “sigh”; it's the ghost given up in an ecstatic exhalation, a breath that might have been held for centuries finally achieving its freedom. Orson, sight unseen, had done himself proud. That single groan-moan-growl was one of his great performances.

The studio, however, found Castle's ending wholly unacceptable. A conventional struggle was substituted, the Count fighting off his pursuers, then, as he screams and writhes, quickly disintegrating in the light of day. There is a fakey dissolve and lots of the usual optical smoke. As the vampire's remains smolder in the background, the
hero and heroine of the film walk into the camera, embrace, and kiss. The scene is obviously a hasty afterthought, rapidly improvised and badly acted.

In the wedding scene from
Kiss of the Vampire
there is an even more striking example of Castle working without benefit of the
Unenthüllte,
yet achieving results that directors would kill for. The hero has begun to suspect that his bride may be one of the Undead. Is she or isn't she? We never know for sure, but there are hints. The first comes in this sequence, which the studio decided to excise on the grounds that it was indecent. This is one of the cruelest cuts inflicted on Castle's work. In the release version, the newlyweds—Helen Chandler and David Bruce—kiss goodnight and turn off the light. Abrupt end of scene. But in Castle's version, the scene continues for another forty-nine seconds, a now famous forty-nine seconds studied in film schools everywhere. The quality of Zip's camerawork—jagged black-and-white contrasts that almost give the film fangs—might have been enough to guarantee the sequence a classic status. But this time Castle's sound track makes a contribution that even Orson would have envied. Nothing more than heavy breathing, first the woman, then the man. And then their breathing picks up pace until she is panting nearly orgasmically. The camera snakes around them, almost fondling them. We see the couple up close, their faces and bare shoulders streaked at a bizarre angle and in high contrast by light striking into the dark room through Venetian blinds. The camera lingers over a series of moist, lingering kisses. The woman's lips catch the light, gleaming. The striped lighting, which turns slowly in a crazy spiral, lends an eerie, peekaboo effect, masking and unmasking the actors as they move from dark to light to dark. Her hand, filling the screen, the fingers spread and flexed, passes slowly over his shoulder, through the hair of his chest in a clawlike caress. We think we see scratches where her nails touch. There is a sensuous curve of flesh: her body, his hand tracing the contour, but with the camera in too close for us to know what part of her anatomy it might be. She bends to press a kiss into the hollow of his throat, her open, questing mouth sinking into a stripe of pitch-black darkness. Her lips fill the screen moving forward; there is one faint gleam of teeth. His eyes register shock, then pass into shadow. Did she bite him just then? Just before fade-out, we hear a small, suppressed giggle of delight.

Simply by restoring cuts like these to Castle's films, I managed to
give him a secure new identity as one of Hollywood's more gifted minor talents. There were some critics who were already prepared to go further; they believed comparisons with Hitchcock, Lang, or Carol Reed were in order—or would have been had Castle been given a fair chance to make the grade. Privately, I'd reached the conclusion that Castle was a greater talent than any of these, but I wasn't ready to stake that claim for him openly. Instead, I settled for touting him as a solid second-rater whose best efforts had been thwarted by the studio system. That in itself gave him a new status as one of the artistic martyrs of the movie industry. The way forward from there was clear. I needed more study of the
Unenthüllte
in Castle's work. I would then be in the position to press for a radical reevaluation of the man, one that would place him—so I hoped—among the great names of screen history.

Which would, incidentally, pay a neat dividend for me as his discoverer and chief student. As it was, by virtue of my stint at MOMA I'd become a recognized authority in my special little field, strategically positioned to begin collecting grants and fellowships. Accordingly, I applied for them in all directions. At the same time, my
Times
article and my museum brochure had drawn inquiries from interested publishers whose lists were beginning to carry more and more film studies each year, most of them sentimental exercises in nostalgia. With my research fattening to book length, I had every prospect of pinning down a reasonably lucrative contract with one or another of them. Academic promotion was already in the offing; very likely job offers would soon drift my way.

Sure enough, during the next year I received feelers from three major film departments; these in turn shook loose a nicely competitive offer from UCLA, where I decided to remain. But, by way of increasing my bargaining power, I kept that decision to myself for the time being while I accepted a generous Rockefeller Fellowship. I was working the academic marketplace for all it was worth.