That was a bit of a half-truth; she’d heard it from Paco Orol, and he wasn’t a good source at all. Montserrat wasn’t sure that something else hadn’t happened to halt the editing of Taboada’s fifth horror flick. The story went that one of the producers of the movie had been backing Salinas’s political rival. When Salinas seized the presidency, he retaliated by either sending soldiers to steal the reels or accused the man of piracy and then had the reels seized. Of course, people also said that Salinas had murdered a maid when he’d been playing cowboys and Indians as a child and it had been covered up. All sorts of stories swirled around at parties, and when you were drunk the stories tended to become bloated. Nevertheless, as long as they were talking infamous films, surely Jirón de Niebla had to count.
“Those are good examples. What about cursed films?”
“Wasn’t The Exorcist supposed to be cursed?” she ventured. “The set burned down. They hired a priest to perform a blessing.”
“Mmm,” Tristán said, taking a quick sip of his brandy. He turned to her. “We rented Three Men and a Baby to see if a ghost had been caught on film. Remember that?”
She did. They had frozen the frame and moved close to the TV set, but all Montserrat could distinguish was a shadow. It was something silly to do on a Friday night when the pizza from Benedetti’s was running late.
“A ghost is a ghost. But a curse is entirely different.”
“Is Beyond the Yellow Door cursed or infamous?” she asked.
It was neither, as far as she knew, but it was clear he wanted this question asked. She’d heard stories about the movie through the years; there had even been that guy who swore he’d seen a poster for it. But nothing ever materialized. It was too small a film and Abel Urueta was too obscure a director for it to garner more than a sentence in publications about Mexican cinema, if that. From what she understood it would have been another horror film, slightly different from Urueta’s previous historical entries because this one would have been a contemporary story. No-name actors in the cast, or marginal ones, which was par for the course. The plot? A cult, evil shenanigans. One theory was that Urueta never meant to release the flick, that it was commissioned by a consortium of Americans laundering money and the negatives destroyed. A second rumor was of embezzlement by one of the investors, who fled with much of the film’s budget to Brazil, as the reason for its implosion. Another one was that it didn’t get beyond the pre-production stage, and if it did Urueta only shot a third of it. But it wasn’t Jodorowsky’s Dune, or Welles’s The Other Side of the Wind. People were not muttering excitedly about it and hoping for a belated release. The only reason Montserrat had ever heard about the flick was because she had a soft spot for Abel Urueta, which in itself was a rare endeavor.
Abel sat back, laced his hands together, and smiled at them. “Yes and no. It’s too obscure for anyone to remember it. But it should be remembered if only for Wilhelm Friedrich Ewers. It’s not every day you run into a German occultist who is writing movies in Mexico City.”
The name was alien to her, and she thought she would have remembered such a name.
“It sounds like you’re about to recite a tall tale,” Montserrat said, raising a skeptical eyebrow at the old man. “German occultists?”
“There’s a healthy history of German occultism. In fact, there was a fellow called Arnoldo Krumm-Heller who moved in Parisian circles before making his way to Mexico City, where he served as a physician for none other than President Madero. In 1927, he founded the Fraternitas Rosicruciana Antiqua in Mexico City.”
“Maybe that’s true, but I happen to know the scriptwriter for Beyond the Yellow Door was Romeo Donderis, if that’s where you’re headed,” Montserrat said and she plucked Tristán’s glass from his hand and took a sip of it. She hadn’t felt like drinking, but the mood was changing. Whatever defensive measures she’d erected were swiftly brushed aside, and she felt festive, even giddy, since she knew she’d caught Abel fibbing. “He was also the scriptwriter on a Western that I quite appreciated.”
“But I didn’t say Ewers was the sole scriptwriter. Ewers worked on the treatment, so to speak. He also modified bits of dialogue and polished certain scenes.”
Montserrat considered that.
Tristán took the glass back. He looked very relaxed as he stretched out his legs and inclined his head. “An occultist and a writer. I can’t even remember my appointments for Monday,” he said with a cheeky grin. “But I do admit people can get into bizarre hobbies when they’re in show business. Is that why the film ought to be infamous? Because that German boy said abracadabra and presto?”
“Oh, no. It’s more than that. It’s the whole of it. The Nazi connections, the secretive little stories.”
“Nazis! We’re not in Argentina,” Tristán said with a hearty laugh.
“I take it you’ve never heard of Hilde Krüger, or Hilda, as she called herself in Mexico. She was a Nazi, an actress, and a spy, who cozied up to many Mexican government functionaries in the 1940s. Gabriel Soria auditioned her for a role or two, which is how I learned about her. There were Nazis floating around Mexico around that time.”
Tristán’s smile faded a little. Montserrat leaned forward, looking carefully at Abel. “You’re serious? You worked with a Nazi writer?” she asked. This no longer sounded like a fib, or an elaborate joke. They were at the edge of something special.
“That’s the thing. Ewers told different versions of the same story. In one version, he’s a young man who stumbles into the circle of Nazi occultists, in another there’re no Nazis at all but he’s studying with Erik Jan Hanussen, who teaches him hypnotism, before he must flee Germany when Hanussen is assassinated. Even Ewers’s age was in question. In 1961, when Beyond the Yellow Door was filming, he looked to have been in his thirties, and at the time of Hanussen’s death in 1933 he would have been barely fourteen, which contradicts some of his stories.
“But it didn’t matter what version you heard, what wild tangle of events Ewers spun for you; after you met him you believed that he did possess secret knowledge. It was how he spoke, how he carried himself. It made folks nervous on the set, especially since we were shooting a horror film. Then, suddenly, Ewers died. He was mugged one night. We lost our funding, we couldn’t complete the film, and misfortune seemed to follow the crew.”
“What kind of misfortune?” Montserrat asked.
“Anything and everything. If you ask theater performers, they’ll tell you Macbeth is cursed, but they probably can’t pinpoint the exact source of the trouble, and it was the same with Beyond the Yellow Door. People who worked on it had accidents, or couldn’t get new roles. Vague stories, half rumors about things that happened on set. I had a friend who joked that the film had been cursed. ‘Remember Abel’s cursed movie?’ Some people had heard about Ewers and his magic talk, and they also knew it had been a horror film. Altogether it made a spooky story. I had to admit it was fun to bring it up at parties. If you have a failed production, you might as well have one that is cursed.”