William Lindsay Gresham’s 1946 noir novel Nightmare Alley is considered one of the genre’s darkest works and has been adapted twice to film—a 1947 movie starring Tyrone Power and a 2021 movie starring Bradley Cooper. The novel and 1947 film have some surprising fans, none more so than Anton LaVey, founder of the Church of Satan. His authorized biography, The Secret Life of a Satanist by Blanche Barton, reported that he met Gresham in the 1950s while working as a circus cage boy. In 1963, he named his second daughter, Zeena, after the novel’s fortuneteller Madame Zeena.
Zeena has had an interesting career since 1990, when she renounced Satanism and any connection to her father’s organization. She and her husband, Nikolas Schreck, relocated to Vienna, Austria, the same year and focused on their music collective, Radio Werewolf. Since their 2015 divorce, Zeena has continued performing as Zeena Schreck and lives in Berlin. She is also a Tibetan Buddhist yogini, sound and graphic artist, photographer, and writer.
I contacted Zeena as part of a larger research project on Gresham’s life, including exploring his reported friendships and associates. She was kind enough to answer a few questions from Berlin. The following is an edited transcript of our discussion.
When do you first remember your father mentioning the movie Nightmare Alley?
That goes back as far as I can remember. I was always aware that’s what I was named after. All families have their family stories, and that was always something both of my parents made reference to, that I’m named after Madame Zeena. As if there was some metaphysical weight to that, somehow.
I think the key thing is people look to certain role models. Whether they know them in person or not, they regard the person as kind of a mentor. He would honor people that he looked up to by naming his pets after them—or his children. Or certain passages in books became important. For example, because he was such a big fan of Weird Tales, the long-standing pulp magazine series, a lot of his rituals that he wrote were based on ideas from Weird Tales stories. They were creations, not based on anything historical, creations of his own imagination from scraps of these stories, but he never told anyone this. Instead, he created origin myths to misdirect away from the sources. Since I was raised with these stories, he would read them to me, it was recognizable, if you compared his rituals to the Weird Tales stories.
You’ve mentioned that your family watched the 1947 movie several times a year. What was your first reaction when you watched the movie?
I honestly don’t remember. I would have been so young. I think I was very affected by the fact my parents thought this was very important to watch.
I never knew until after I had left my father and his organization that my father’s middle name was the same name as the main character, Stanton. I didn’t watch the film with a critical notion that Stan was anything like my father. I didn’t see it that way and didn’t realize that he had such a personal feeling of affinity because of the name. I only figured that out because of the Lawrence Wright article in Rolling Stone after I had left. My jaw dropped, and I thought, “I never knew that!”
I hadn’t known what his original first name was either until a distant relative he hadn’t seen in maybe 15 years was traveling to San Francisco and left a message on our answering machine. I laughed and said to my mother, “Who’s that? ‘Howard,’ what is he talking about ‘Howard.’ Who’s that?”
My mother rolled her eyes, looked at my father, gave him an exasperated look, and said, “That’s your father’s real name.”
Was he familiar with the novel Nightmare Alley as well?
He was aware of both the novel and the film. I read the novel in my teenage years because he had a copy. Then, in my early adult life, there was a reissue of the novel which I bought—I think it was in 86—and I still have that. Then someone gave me a gift of a vintage copy.
What was your reaction when you read the novel yourself?
When I read the novel in my teens, that was a hard time. My father was at the deepest, darkest depths of his depression. He was agoraphobic, he didn’t leave the house. I was splitting time between my parents’ house and my grandparents’ house and coming home was hard. The depression and the dark, toxic feeling in the house, you could cut it with a knife. So, when I read it as a teenager, I was in a very existentialist and depressed state. I can’t really remember what my impression was in exact detail—just feeling cynical. I thought, “Well, at least Madame Zeena made it through all alright.” There are no good guys and no bad guys, but at least Zeena tried to be a “good guy.” She tried to protect her husband, Peter, and to help Stan.
When I got the reissue of the book, I was living in Los Angeles. That was a weird, difficult time—well, when wasn’t it? Not until after I left. But when I read it again, I was reading it in an analytical way—trying to see what my father would have seen in it as a young guy. He would have been 18 or 19 when he read the novel. I was trying to see how I fit into it. All I could come up with was, “Well, at least Madame Zeena’s not the worst of them.”
The authorized biography claims he met Gresham when he was working in the circus. Do you recall him mentioning that he knew Gresham?
He mentioned him, but I suspect he didn’t know him personally. When he would share anecdotally about people he knew, it was peppered with details. But when he would talk about Gresham, it was never anything specific. It was only what he could have known secondhand. He would do that with other people too—who he wanted people to believe he knew, like Marilyn Monroe, for example. But when you actually asked him details, he would be vague or evasive.
It’s important to remember that my father did have talent in music—he was a child prodigy and did have training in music, that was his profession. That’s how he often met interesting people. In those days, if you were an organist, it was very much like being a DJ today: you get hired for events. That’s how he made a lot of these connections with people in the carney world and the circus world. But there’s no record that he actually worked in the circus himself. He was a freelance musician and he could have worked with a circus for a night in that capacity, that’s possible, but he wasn’t on the payroll.
I think his knowledge of Gresham was through his friendship with the author Robert “Bob” Barbour Johnson. Johnson is a key figure in the Weird Tales group which fascinated my father. He was very fascinated with the artists of Weird Tales, especially Virgil Finlay—he even tried painting in that style. He had his favorite Weird Tales writers too—definitely H.P. Lovecraft was top.
Bob Johnson lived in the San Francisco Bay area and knew my father personally for quite a long time and had a big influence on my father in the 1950s. Their association dovetailed with what my father later did with the Church of Satan, but they parted ways shortly after its forming. My father lost contact then with a lot of people he used to know in his twenties. So, I think Johnson was the real connection to my father knowing about Gresham’s personality.
I believe the details of Johnson’s life are what my father kind of fudged and used as a template for his own mythology. Johnson actually did work with a circus—he worked as, I think, a publicist for a small traveling circus. I don’t know if it’s the same Clyde Beatty circus that my father claimed he worked with, which there’s no record that my father did. Johnson also did other things like train cats—he got this experience in taming domesticated house cats from working with circus people. He wasn’t a lion tamer, and neither was my father, but he picked up little tips and tricks and did them with his own house cats and put on little shows. The other thing that was very Johnson-like was that he was also quite good at painting, and my father also had natural artistic ability. So, his friendship with Johnson gave him a lot of material, ideas and inspiration, along with Gresham’s books themselves.
It’s very difficult to discern between what my father believed of his own stories and what he was aware he was deceiving people with. He would reiterate some of his mythology so much and embellish upon itself each time, that I do think, to a certain extent, he began forcing himself to believe it.
(Interviewer’s Note: Following our conversation, I determined that Johnson and Gresham contributed to some of the same magazines, including Blue Book and Mike Shayne’s Mystery Magazine, during the same period. As of this writing, no scholars have established whether Johnson and Gresham knew each other)
There’s also a prominent mention of Gresham’s nonfiction book, Monster Midway. Any memories of him mentioning that?
I have a visual memory of that book in our parlor—the parlor was called the Purple Room, and that’s where we would entertain guests. It was right there, at the forefront of the bookshelf. So, it had a big influence on my father.
It gave him a lot of firsthand information about carney life. As far as I’m aware, Gresham didn’t actually work in the carnival either, but he was a researcher and made inroads into that world. I don’t think Gresham was a carney himself, but he got to know them well enough to describe their life in detail in Monster Midway and that provided a template for my father.
Do you recall your father mentioning other crime noir stories or carnival tales he enjoyed?
He would get fixated on certain true crime cases—like the Black Dahlia case and Ed Gein. He claimed that he met Ed Gein, though I’m not sure about that. That’s the kind of thing I tend to doubt. I tend to think, as was his modus operandi, that he knew people who knew Ed Gein or that he knew journalists who interviewed Ed Gein or provided him with anecdotes.
He would make connections with eccentric people—oddballs and outsiders. Through this network of Bay Area and Los Angeles eccentrics, he would get information he wanted when he got fixated on a certain case. For example, he got fixated on the Black Dahlia case, and through his connections, he met Will Fowler, who was the first journalist at the scene of the crime scene, before the police, even.
He was a weird and geeky kid, but he always wanted to be on the side of the police—he played at being junior G-men with his friends. Before the Church of Satan, he was a law and order man. He used to befriend cops—he still did when the Church was going because we had vandalism issues, letter bomb attempts, stalkers constantly loitering outside the house, break-in attempts, so we were always in contact with the police. But even before that, he was fascinated with being on the side of good—like the rumors he started that he worked for the police department. What it really was, was that he would eavesdrop on the police dispatch announcements, then drive out to crime scenes and take photos. But very often, if you actually saw the photos that he claimed were police photos, they weren’t much of anything. They might be the aftermath of something, a car being towed out of the water, but no bodies or anything like that.
That gives a great sense of the true crime he enjoyed. Anything more on the fictional side that he enjoyed?
He was always attracted to the very, very dark side of life—whether it was the dark, kind of scummy world of the carnival or gangsters. Like 1930s gangsters—Al Capone. So, he was a total film noir buff. Scarface, the early 30s version with Paul Muni, was a big influence on him. In his teens, that character is what he patterned himself on, the tough-guy, and began referring to himself as “Tony.” Once he got into his teens, he was a full-on pachuco boy.
Another big influence was Freaks. Freaks was a pre-code film directed by Tod Browning and it didn’t do well because it was a very dystopian, bleak film. That’s the kind of thing he was interested in. He was also active in 1950s Bay area artist circles’ efforts to get the movie back into circulation—he convinced a woman named Willy Werby to buy the rights to it.
I don’t know if it’s nature or nurture, but I’m also very fascinated with film noir. He and I had a lot of the same taste in music and art.
When I watch true crime things, though, it’s more for understanding what makes people do what they do. How can these things be avoided? With me, it’s always more analytical. For him it was more vicarious—a vicarious thrill. That’s the weird thing—two people can have the same interests, but for very different reasons.
(Interviewer’s Note: Willy Werby was a founding member of San Francisco’s Camera Obscura Society and got the circulation rights to Freaks from Dwain Esper in 1956. Zeena emphasized early in our discussion that this happened a full decade before LaVey started the Church of Satan and decades before several controversies involving Werby’s husband. Jack Stevenson provides the full story of the Werby-Esper business deal in his book Land of a Thousand Balconies: Discoveries and Confessions of a B-Movie Archeologist.)
You’ve spoken in the past with Den of Geek writer Tony Sokol about your father connecting with the Nightmare Alley protagonist, con artist Stanton Carlisle. He seems to have connected with Stan’s talk about “bilking the rubes,” manipulating people. Any thoughts on why that appealed to him?
That’s hard to say. Only he could know. A lot of his life was contradictory.
On the other hand, I knew all the things that a family member knows. I knew his paranoias. I knew his mental problems. If I ever expressed compassion, it was ridiculed—love was not a word in our vocabulary.
It could have been his character—just the way he was, natural pessimism—or it could have been his personality, or it could be that he had been bullied.
To understand why he would be so attracted to these bleak, dystopian, dark sides of life, we would have to consider his early life—what made him so bitter, so very nihilistic and very misanthropic?
We do have to consider the period when he was raised—which, in his case, was the Depression and the war years. In the war years, he was a latchkey child while both of his parents worked in the shipyards of San Rafael. He probably felt feelings of abandonment—which resurfaced later in life. He definitely had great, great fears of being abandoned.
So, it’s a complex thing. It’s not any one thing or another.
In his late teens and early adult life, he did try to fit in with certain alternative religious and occult and metaphysical groups, but he never fit in there either.
What kind of groups was he involved in?
He ran the gamut—he was always on the sidelines, because he himself would never join any groups or attend any lectures, but he knew others in groups like the Bay area’s Ordo Templi Orientis, Crowley’s group. Although, he hated Crowley and said he was just a puffed-up windbag. He knew Beatniks and artists who were into Eastern philosophies like Hinduism, Zen Buddhism, and followers of Alan Watts. I don’t think he knew Alan Watts personally, though. He may have met him at a party.
He never wanted to put himself out there and meet rejection. He was never an attendee of these people’s lectures, but his circle of friends dabbled in those things more seriously. He would get the run-off, the secondhand information, then he would decide if he wanted to try something and usually not. If he tried to get involved, I got the impression he just rubbed people the wrong way.
To be fair, I think there probably was something mentally off. Something that in a kinder world or more knowledgeable time—I don’t know if we live in a kinder world, but at least we have a bit more understanding of mental illness. These days, we have ways of dealing with certain conditions, and we have words for it that didn’t exist then. Like neurodivergent for people who have neurological differences. Or psychological issues, that might otherwise go untreated. Maybe if he was a young person today, he would have experienced some therapy or help. Then again, maybe he wouldn’t have wanted it.
Because he just didn’t fit in anywhere, I think it made him very bitter. It caused him to take a dim view of humans and humanity.
Now, some people have that attitude and can grow out of it or be exposed to healthier influences and change their minds. I don’t think he wanted to, and I don’t think he felt the need to. It was partly ego and the way a certain kind of man from his generation was expected to be—if you were the kind of man who gravitated to film noir and the antihero.
He did not want to have a profession where anyone could compare him to someone else. He hated being compared to other musicians of his generation—like Liberace or Korla Pandit, other keyboardists. He hated having to feel in competition or having to live up to some standard of his artistic ability. I think that’s why he gravitated to Weird Tales and that style of art—he may have felt that would be less judgmental. He didn’t like his skill being judged. He would talk about the Church of Satan as if he intended to do that. He always wanted to do something that meant he could not be compared to anyone else. Which sounds funny because, at the time, it was true, but now it’s so commonplace. There are so many splinter groups fighting each other—so many Satanic this and Satanic that.
The Church of Satan was not a planned thing. It just snowballed out of hand. It gained momentum and got way out of his control. But he tried to put a positive spin on it, like he intended it that way. He did not want to have a profession where anyone could compare him to someone else.
I’ve changed drastically from the way I was raised. I have done the deep dive into Buddhist teachings— I’ve become a Buddhist teacher. I’m a lineage holder, so I have certain commitments and vows I have to uphold to continue those teachings. So, now, at this point in my life, in hindsight, I look at all of that in a very different way and try to apply the teachings of compassion. I try to consider factors in his early life that might have made him feel he couldn’t fit in. As if he couldn’t fit in any of the acceptable sectors of society, he may as well do something that’s so utterly beyond the pale that he’d create his own niche.
Zeena’s music and other work can be found on her official website: https://www.zeenaschreck.com/
She does not answer interview requests about Satanism, nor does she answer communication referring to her as Zeena LaVey, LaVey-Schreck, or any variants of that name.
All images in this article are used with permission by Zeena Schreck.
The interviewer would also like to thank Diego Domingo and Clark Sheldon for consulting on Robert Barbour Johnson.
G. Connor Salter is a writer and editor who has contributed over 1,300 articles to various publications, including Mythlore, Mystery*File, and The Tolkienist.
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