Candle in the Attic Window(2)
Prince wasn’t Price, though, any more than Zenda was Corman or Castle, the men he seemed intent on imitating. But, together, they made some serviceable B-movies that found decent play, and a few fans on lazy-afternoon cable programs and late-night horror features. Most were low-rent Gothic horrors or supernatural thrillers. The Enterprise of Death is probably the best-known, a sort of locked-house murder mystery with ghostly tinges à la Castle’s House on Haunted Hill, but the best of the bunch is almost certainly The Crimson Masque, a direct knock-off of the Corman/Price Masque of the Red Death. The Red Death costume in it may be straight out of Chaney’s Phantom of the Opera, but the decadent tone of it works a lot better than you might expect, given some of the other films in Zenda’s oeuvre.
That makes it extra unfortunate that what would have been his seventh film, an immediate follow-up to The Crimson Masque, never happened. Or, rather, was never finished.
The camera passes through the house. Everything is dim and dusty and festooned with cobwebs. The only illumination comes from flashlights and hand-held lanterns.
As the crew walks around, different people exclaim about different rooms that have appeared in different movies. Mostly, Danielle points them out, or Zach does, but once Alexia says, “I spent the night in this room once. During shooting.” They’re standing in one of the upstairs bedrooms. It looks almost indistinguishable from most of the other bedrooms, the pattern of the faded wallpaper maybe a little different, the furniture in different places. “My mom was here with me. I slept in that bed. Or tried to.”
“Why wasn’t more of this stuff sold?” Caleb asks.
It’s Zach who answers: “The house still belongs to Zenda’s estate. Some kind of distant relative. Zenda wanted it left alone, so, for the most part, it has been.”
They pass through room after room, hallway after hallway, seemingly intent on getting footage, however murky, of them all. Finally, they come to the back of the house, where huge, billowing sheets of plastic bulge and whip in the wind from the growing clouds that threaten a storm at any moment. Everyone stops, staring, and the camera follows their gazes up and out. The light changes, because now, the camera’s outside, or near enough, looking through the blackened ruin of the mansion’s back rooms. The ceiling here is completely missing and what’s left of the walls stand up like charred, black bones.
Caleb York, Documentary Crew
Zach knew about Zenda before we got into filmmaking. We both did. We’d seen his movies on Saturday afternoons when we were kids, though neither of us really remembered them all that well. I remembered the monster at the end of Isle of Blood, but couldn’t remember the title of the movie, and I remembered being irrationally scared of the crawling hand in The Phantom Hand, in this one scene where it crawls up onto some guy’s windowsill.
Zenda wasn’t exactly an influence on either of us, though. It certainly wasn’t his movies that got Zach interested in doing this documentary. It was the movie he didn’t make. The mystery of it, y’know?
Nobody knew anything about it, except the working title. The King in Yellow. It came from a collection of short stories by this guy named ‘Chambers’. It was also the name of a play that showed up in those stories, that was supposed to drive the people who watched it crazy. Good material for a movie, right? And right up Zenda’s alley. But then there was the fire, and Zenda and Prince both died in it, along with another person, an actress named ‘Agatha Wray’, who was never in anything else that we know of. Along with them, the fire burned up the only known print of the film. Or, as much of the film as had been shot by then.
Nobody even knows what the movie was going to be about. Was it an adaptation of a story from Chambers’ book, or was it supposed to be the play itself? Or did Zenda just pilfer the name?
The surviving actors who’d done any work on the film all claimed that they were given their scripts a page at a time and that the pages were collected again at the end of each day’s shooting. All that any of them ever remembered was that there were character names that matched fragments of the fictional play. ‘Cassilda’ was one, and ‘The Stranger’. But that could mean anything, or it could mean nothing.
Anyway, that’s what grabbed Zach, like I said. Not Zenda, but the mystery of The King in Yellow. Of what it could have been.
The camera is stationary now, steady, obviously resting on its tripod. It points toward the table in the entryway, and toward the crew who’re gathered around it, but it doesn’t focus on them. Do they even know it’s running? They talk amongst themselves, mostly too quietly to be heard clearly. If they were being filmed on purpose, you’d think they would speak up.
There are cans of beer sitting on the table. Someone says something about coasters, and there’s laughter. Thom traces his finger across the dust on the surface of the table and holds it up.
The conversation rises and falls, allowing bits and pieces to be distinguished. They’re talking about Zenda, about how each of them heard of him and what brought each of them to this house. Danielle is trying to explain her blog to Alexia, who has never seen it. “Old movies just seem to capture weirdness better than new ones,” Danielle says loudly, warming to her subject. “Back when there were smaller crews, when things were made by hand. Weirdness slipped in that way, infiltrated, got in through the cracks and the crappy special effects. When you watch an old, weird movie, you feel like you’re watching something real, but also something not real, too. Like something from a dream, or an alternate universe. A universe where the sky’s a painted backdrop and fake trees grow up out of the fake ground.”