Book review: ‘Silver Nitrate’ by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Yet, it’s the more tangible sorcery of filmmaking and stardom that wields power over Moreno-Garcia’s protagonists, 38-year-old Montserrat Curiel and Tristán Abascal. Movie-besotted friends who grew up together in the 1970s, “theirs was the bountiful affection of children who sat close to the TV set, mouth open, and watched monsters carrying maidens away.” “Crazy-beautiful” Tristán’s career as a telenovela actor has been derailed by drugs and the tabloid-ready death of his movie-star girlfriend, Karina, in a car crash that left him disfigured. Montserrat — plain and slight, “a tiny, ferocious elf” — has for years worked as a sound editor at a B-movie studio specializing in schlock. Since childhood, she’s carried a torch for Tristán, a womanizer who sees Montserrat solely as his devoted friend and sidekick.

The pair’s long-standing, desultory routine of platonic dinners and watching movies on video (the novel is set in 1993) is disrupted when Tristán moves into a new apartment and meets his neighbor, “Abel Urueta, who had directed three magnificent films in the 1950s, 1689594463 a mere footnote in the history of entertainment.” Soon the two men are sharing coffee and dishing old movies and fallen stars, a scene that brings to mind Norma Desmond’s “waxworks” playing bridge in “Sunset Boulevard.” The director flatters Tristán, insisting that he’s far too handsome for the voice-over work that’s sustained him since the car accident. When he learns Tristán has a friend who’s a crackerjack sound editor, Abel invites them both to dinner.

Montserrat impresses the director with her knowledge of forgotten cinematic lore, especially her admiration of his own trio of gothic horror movies: “Whispers in the Mansion of Glass,” “The Opal Heart in A Bottle” and “The Curse of the Hanged Man.” The conversation turns to supposedly cursed films, including Abel’s own obscure, never completed “Beyond the Yellow Door.”

“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,” writes Moreno-Garcia, who previously contributed a book review column to The Washington Post. “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.”

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Abel shares his film’s secret history, centered on Wilhelm Ewers, a Nazi occultist and screenwriter who emigrated to Mexico and worked on the movie’s treatment. The charismatic Ewers convinced those around him that he was a sorcerer, that movies were the ideal medium for magic and that shooting on silver nitrate stock would enhance the film’s power, silver being an integral element in many magical systems. Never mind that silver nitrate is notoriously combustible and emits a gas that can destroy other film emulsions. (Kodak stopped manufacturing it in the 1950s, and silver nitrate fires have destroyed collections at the National Archives, the George Eastman House, the Museum of Modern Art and at Cinémathèque Française.) Ewers assured the film’s cast and crew that “Beyond the Yellow Door” would cast a spell on viewers and empower all those who’d contributed to making the film. But then Ewers died after a mugging and the production was shut down. Everyone associated with the movie would subsequently suffer a string of catastrophes and failed careers.

Skeptical of this tale, Montserrat and Tristán are still intrigued by the oddball Abel. But, during later visits, they grow increasingly unnerved as they learn more about the production and Ewers’s repellently racist beliefs. Why did Abel choose to work with him? Why would he agree to shoot on silver nitrate, knowing how dangerous it is?

And why has he covertly retained the original reels for all these decades? Chalk it up to silver-tongued Nazi sorcerers promising the usual — eternal youth, power, the love of beautiful Aryan men and women, etc. Oh, and good old-fashioned movie magic, as Abel gushes, “You should see nitrate film stock when it is screened! The whites look like bleached linen, the blacks are so rich you feel you could bury your hands in that velvet darkness … God, the film looked beautiful.”

Author of a string of best-selling novels, including “Mexican Gothic” and “The Daughter of Doctor Moreau,” Moreno-Garcia revels in genre tropes. Her most recent book, “Velvet Was the Night,” gave the nod to noir movies and authors. Here, she invokes Mexican filmmakers including Carlos Enrique Taboada and Guillermo del Toro, Italians Mario Bava and Dario Argento, a swathe of Hammer Horror movies, “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom,” and more recent works including “Berberian Sound Studio,” “Archive 81” and “Mal de Ojo,” as well as numerous novels about occult films, in particular Theodore Roszak’s brilliant 1991 classic, “Flicker.”

One imagines that Montserrat and Tristán are familiar with all or most of these pop culture touchstones, which should make them think twice about going along with Abel’s plan to reverse the film’s curse. Still, that wouldn’t be much fun, so Tristán agrees to provide a new voice-over that Montserrat will dub onto the film, creating a counterspell that will take effect once the film has been screened. And sure enough, a run of luck seems to follow Montserrat and Tristán as they assist Abel. Out of the blue, Tristán nabs an important audition. Montserrat’s sister has a remarkable recovery from cancer. But other people and forces also want those reels of silver nitrate, and the friends’ good fortune abruptly shifts to nightmarish encounters with Karina’s ghost, and worse.

Moreno-Garcia spends a bit too much time explaining how Ewers’s movie magic functions, but the myriad film references and odes to analog tech make this the equivalent of a lovingly nostalgic double-bill “Chiller Theater” for 21st century horror nerds. Best of all is Moreno-Garcia’s depiction of the poignant, lifelong friendship between Montserrat and Tristán, with its simmering romantic undercurrent, shared childhood language and adult resentments. Like its namesake, “Silver Nitrate” catches fire and doesn’t stop burning until the end.

Elizabeth Hand is the author of 20 award-winning novels and five collections of short fiction. Her novel “A Haunting on the Hill,” set in the American writer Shirley Jackson’s Hill House and the first book to be authorized by the Jackson estate, will be published this October.