Gresham keeps to old-school esotericism by casting a woman as the oracle and the man is her wand. In America’s southern states, Zeena skips horoscopes and cards, and peddles John the Conqueror root. In her hands, a crystal ball is erotic, especially when replaced by a whiskey bottle. Zeena is a victim of her former charm. In the 1947 film, Pete’s death is a predestined accident, foretold in the cards. Stan stashes real moonshine in Zeena’s stage trunk, but hands over an identical bottle of wood alcohol to the inventor of the secret code. It could be interpreted as a sacrificial rite of passage because the poison passed through Zeena’s trunk. It gives birth to the Great Stanton.
“He always reminded me that he named me after the mentalist Zeena, in a similar reverent way to what I suppose Catholics are told of their saint-name namesakes,” Zeena says. “Years later when my son was born, my father insisted that the boy be named Stanton. I’d thought it was only as a tie-in to the same story that my name came from, because I never knew my father’s birth name until well after I’d left the Church of Satan. He’d kept his birth name a well-hidden secret until Lawrence Wright, in his 1991 exposé on my father, ‘Sympathy for the Devil,’ for Rolling Stone, ordered his birth certificate and revealed that detail in the article.”
The 1947 film was a box office failure, even though it gave Darryl F. Zanuck’s studio 20th Century-Fox a masterful American response to the Italian neo-realism movement. The movie afforded Power, who fought to get it done, a chance to play something more than swashbucklers and bullfighters. It had a screenplay by Jules Furthman, an ex-newspaperman who wrote the scripts for hard-hitting classics like The Docks of New York (1928), Mutiny on the Bounty (1935), To Have and Have Not (1944), and The Big Sleep (1946). Using naturalistic settings, black and white photography, mundane carny sets, and soft-focus edits as visual metaphor, Nightmare Alley influenced films from Roger Corman’s The Man With the X-Ray Eyes (1963) to David Lynch’s The Elephant Man (1980).
The film ultimately found its audience, and a cult formed, which was just as rabid as the Rev. Carlisle’s in the book. In the LaVey household, the movie was a perennial.
“He also kept a huge cinema poster for the film in our kitchen and at least a couple of times a year we’d watch the film in celluloid on our home projector,” Zeena tells us. “The story line served as a sort of Dark-Triad template for him, it fueled a misanthropic passion to ‘build a better mousetrap,’ erroneously believing he could succeed at ‘bilking the rubes’ in ways that the fictional Stanton had failed.”
In the novel, Carlisle admits to Dr. Ritter that “I’m a hustler, God damn it. Nothing matters in this damned lunatic asylum of a world but dough.” The notebook teaches he “can control anybody by finding out what he’s afraid of,” and he puts it to use rigging a house for séances. “I can gimmick it up from cellar to attic,” Stanton says in the book. “I can give ’em the second coming of Christ if I want to.” Then he does, establishing his radio pulpit, and attracting the worst kinds of wealthy sinners willing to bet cold cash on a shot at redemption.