“Return to the Sabbath” (Weird Tales, July 1938)

Bloch, Robert. “Return to the Sabbath.” Weird Tales, July 1938, pp. 95-104.
https://archive.org/details/Weird_Tales_v31n06_1938-06_sas/page/n61/mode/2up 

The story begins on a hot day in Hollywood with two movie producers looking for a cool place to rest for the afternoon. The find a theater that is showing the usual mix of live acts and films. The first movie shocked them into wakefulness. It depicted a horrifying monster emerging form a grave and crawling its way to a terrifying Satanic ritual. The producers were riveted. Not only that, but they had a horror movie to cast, and the star of this film would be perfect. it took some doing, but they finally discovered that the Austrian actor, Karl Jorla, was a complete unknown. They set him a contract, and he left for the United States immediately. Upon arrival, his strange behavior alarmed the producers and the crew. Jorla was secretive and insisted on no publicity at all for his presence I the film. He talked about the previous film, the one that got him noticed, and said it was all true that the black mass actually happened. He also said that the film’s release was accidental and that the participants in the film were being hunted by those involved in the back mass. 
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When news arrived that the director of the Austrian film had been murdered, Jorla was a wreck: “He came down to the office, and at first when he walked in I didn’t know him. The dark glasses and muffler helped, of course, but he himself had changed. He was trembling, and walked with a stoop. And when he spoke his voice was like a groan” (100). He began to use a disguise and refused police protection. He stopped going to the set. Nobody knew where he was. They continued to shoot the film hoping to work around his absence. the female lead worked on a scene where Jorla would rise form the grave. As they filmed the scene, something did emerge form the grave. It seemed to be Jorla, but his entire presence was monstrous and otherworldly. When the scene ended, they looked for Jorla, but somehow he had vanished. They developed the film, and there was no Jorla at all, just a glowing, inverted crucifix. The mic did pick up sound: the thing, whatever it was, said an address. The producers called the police, who went to the house where they found Jorla’s corpse. They medical examiner said he had been dead for three days!

Bloch was still living in Milwaukee at this point in his life, and so his impressions of California, including locations such as Topanga Canyon and Hollywood, must have been derived from books, radio, newspapers, and movies. No first-hand experience, in other words, but this story has more specifics than “The Black Kiss” did, although that previous story was also set in a somewhat abstract version of California. California would become a principal location for his fiction in the coming decades as well as his home for the second half of his life. Bloch’s love of the silent-film era—something he talked about in Once Around the Bloch and elsewhere—becomes one of his favorite subjects in years to come as well. This is the first glimpse of that subject in his fiction. There is just something so intense and joyful about the description of Jorla’s Austrian film, the surprising terror that can flash from a screen when one least expects it. It reminds me of Bloch’s own youthful experience when he saw The Phantom of the Opera in 1925:

They were eyes that had closed in death and opened in the coffin under earth. They were eyes that had seen the body rot and the soul depart to mingle in worm-ravened darkness below. They were eyes that held an alien life, a life so dreadful as to animate the cadaver’s body and force it to claw its way back to outer earth. They were hungry eyes—triumphant, now, as they gazed in graveyard moonlight on a world they had never known before. They hungered for the world as only Death can hunger for Life. And they blazed out of the corpse-pallid face in icy joy.
Then the cadaver began to walk. It lurched between the graves, lumbered before ancient tombs. It shambled through the forest night until it reached a road. Then it turned up that road slowly ... slowly.

And the hunger in those eyes flamed again as the lights of a city flared below. Death was preparing to mingle with men. (97)