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perpetually squinting out at an unforgiving world.
    â€œ Cadaver went on to become my highest-grossing movie ever,” the sandpaper voice continued. “It played the drive-ins for years. I still see it on late-night TV.
    â€œI should have gone on to bigger and better things, but that shyster Sol Kravitz talked me into those idiotic rock movies. Nothing but trouble. Music stinks. It’s death at the box office. These kids, these teenagers, they don’t spend money. They steal. I lost so much of my own money on Big Rock Beat , I almost went out of business.
    â€œI learned my lesson—there’s nothing like scaring people. They never get sick of it.”
    â€œThat’s the truth.”
    â€œYou know the sound of a gunshot?” the old man asked. Clint nodded. “Everybody overdubs a big boom,” Woodley pointed out. “It’s a standard sound effect, every library has dozens of ’em. What I did in Snuff Addict was, in the scene where the guy kills the chick, I let the actual sound of the gun, a crack, stay in. That evil little crack is nasty. That sound scares people more than those cannons you hear in all the movies now. Listen to a real gun, it sounds like ‘pop!’ and it’s ominous. Sometimes, when you want to scare someone, less is more. The real fear is up here,”—he tapped his head—“inside your brain.”
    Clint nodded. “What do you think scares people the most?”
    Landis considered the question, then said, “Many people fear the dark, you know, and movie theaters are dark. I don’t know. They’re afraid of dying, of being alone, but isn’t that what happens to you when you pay your way in and sit there staring at the wall? Your own life is suspended, forgotten temporarily. You huddle in the dark, alone, waiting to be seduced by what’s up there on the screen.”
    He tried to light his cigar, but it was too wet and short to function. He gave up and put it down with a sigh, as if his whole life was like that now, a used-up cheap cigar. “People are scared of what they don’t understand,” he continued. “I scare people because no one has ever understood me.”
    Snuff Addict was a very disturbing film. Clint had seen it, of course. Woodley made it during the 1961–65 era, a very dark time for him. He’d been reduced to making skin flicks, peep-show loops, and worse. Landis had, once again, preyed on people’s worst perversions, and his sick movies went for the jugular even then. He sought out the strange, the bizarre, the most depraved fetishes for his subject matter. It ultimately proved too much for even the porn houses.
    Clint wondered if Snuff Addict contained a real murder. Now that he knew the truth about Woodley, nothing was out of the question.
    In the early seventies, when the sex film industry was somewhat legitimized, the world left Landis Woodley in the cold once again.
    After Cadaver , and the ill-advised Big Rock Beat , he only made one more legitimate feature, the rarely seen Cold Flesh Eaters , a waste of celluloid in every critic’s book.
    The rapidly diminishing quality of his work eventually eroded what little credibility he had, and in a few short years Landis’s name meant box office death. You could only fool people so many times, then they got wise.
    Sitting across from the old man, Clint felt himself becoming strangely detached. He felt as if he’d stepped outside the scene, watching himself doing the interview.
    He knew everything about Landis Woodley that had been made public. His infamous career, his brief success, his spectacular failures, his scandals, and his well-documented perversions.
    Tip of the iceberg, Clint thought.
    â€œThose bats are only active at night. That’s why I keep it so dark in here,” Woodley said, changing gears again. Clint nodded. The old man seemed as much a creature of the dark as the bats.
    â€œThey eat