The Lost Film Stigmata
by Jeffrey Greene
| Table of Contents parts 1, 2, 3 |
part 1
It is a tragic but unambiguous fact that, on June 12th of last year, Howard Hensig was struck and killed by a hit-and-run driver while bicycling home from work. At his funeral, a mutual friend made the comment that the accident had in one stroke spared Howard the tedium of his own senescence — he was just forty — and the imminent horror of running out of rare films on which to spend his time and money making Grail-like searches.
My silence was probably misinterpreted. I knew the deceased would have appreciated it and, if it hadn’t been for a long conversation I’d had with him three weeks after his return from Mexico, I would have said something in the same vein.
It was because of that conversation that I was unable to make the same assumption our friend had: that his death was an accident. My reasons for reporting it here have less to do with any concern for “truth” — an overrated virtue, Howard would have said, infinitely subordinate to good taste — than to relieve myself of any “crippling ambiguity,” to borrow one of his phrases.
I could say I’m daring the forces that may or may not have killed my friend to come forward and prove their existence by silencing me, but that would imply both a courage and a capacity for melodrama I don’t possess. Suffice it to say that when Howard finally found Stigmata, the lost film he’d been seeking for years, it also found him.
To his small circle of friends, Howard Hensig represented a kind of limit case of the hyper-aesthetic temperament: an amateur film critic whose Usher-like sensibilities were tortured by lapses in taste too subtle to be detected by almost everyone else. No one we’d ever known was more devoted to movies or more often disappointed by them. One in ten films might earn a left-handed endorsement: “It’s worth seeing, if only to chart the beginning of so-and-so’s decline.”
Of the nine others that were unmitigated failures, he would suffer inward pangs until someone asked his opinion, then: “Loathsome!” or “A pig’s breakfast,” usually prefaced a scathing denunciation. Howard seemed to believe that bad films emitted a harmful radiation that no one could absorb indefinitely without permanent damage to the organs of taste.
It was impossible to predict what films would earn his unreserved praise. Ingmar Bergman’s color work elicited a sad shake of the head, as well as everything by Kubrick since 2001. On the other hand, he revered every frame of Dreyer’s Vampyr, Joseph Losey’s The Servant, The Maltese Falcon and Kiss Me Deadly.
That last one he had on laser disc and would show it on rare occasions to small groups of friends, although he probably enjoyed it best in solitude when, unburdened by the necessity of staying in character, that is, being the One with Arms Folded in a roomful of gushing simperers, who alone kept his critical wits about him, he could let his guard down and float in aesthetic free-fall.
Hensig lived for as long as I knew him in a musty, hundred-year old apartment house with rotting front steps, shrouded by a massive live oak tree, its branch tips nuzzling the front windows. He didn’t drive, unusual enough for Florida, and the bicycle he used was a clunky, big-tire model straight out of the 1950s. Except for bicycling — which kept him in pretty good shape — he was defiantly non-athletic and, in the hottest months of the year, maintained a business casual style of dress that set him apart from the rest of us jean and t-shirt types.
He had little use for shop talk, and it would never occur to him to ask what you did for a living or to volunteer the information that he worked in medical records in the basement of the VA Hospital. Films were his passion, and hopefully, yours, too, so he assumed it was in no one’s interest to bring up the dreary subject of what one did during the daytime hours. “I’m the last black-and-white man, and I’m packing hardware,” he once told me. “Anyone who tries to colorize me dies like a dog.” It’s true he was a snob, but a likeable one, and unfailingly polite, even to people who “heeded every coin-operated critic’s urging to ‘stand up and cheer’ over the latest swill from Hollywood.”
He’d been to Paris and the Cannes Film Festival but, most often, he took his vacations in New York, where he could see movies that would only come to Florida much later, if at all. Last April, he surprised everyone by taking a trip to Mexico with a more adventurous and outdoorsy friend from college named Terry Estep. As a mutual friend told me, there was a critical bargain involved: Howard would let himself be dragged to the Mayan ruins around Merída, Valladolid and Palenque in exchange for four days in Mexico City, where an Emilio Fernandez film festival was taking place.
I didn’t see him for a while after his return, but heard through friends that Mexico had not agreed with him. He’d come down with a dose of Montezuma’s Revenge and had acquired an uncharacteristic ruddiness from climbing bareheaded up and down pyramids; he had flatly refused to wear a Panama hat.
* * *
When, three weeks later, I ran into him during a Werner Herzog retrospective at the Hippodrome, he had recovered his health, and the blotchy sunburn had peeled away, revealing the movie house pallor of the old Howard.
After the film, he invited me over to his apartment for a beer. He directed me to a monstrous green couch that appeared to be collapsing into itself, and then he disappeared into his tiny kitchen. On the wall opposite the couch was a poster of Visconti’s The Damned and, next to it, Peter Lorre looking fearfully over his shoulder in Fritz Lang’s M.
“You’re the only one who hasn’t asked me about Mexico,” he said, handing me a beer and then seating himself in the one good chair in the room.
“I was waiting for you to tell me something I hadn’t already heard.”
“Well...” He picked up a dusty magazine from the cluttered table beside his chair, turned to an article and handed it to me. It was the Fall 1983 issue of Black and White Quarterly, and the piece was a review titled “Mondo Nazis,” by Kenneth Curry.
“I’ve always hated Kenneth Curry,” he said, leaning back in his chair, the lamplight gleaming on his broad, pale forehead. “He’s like John Simon’s parasitic twin: surgically separated at birth and with the same critical gifts, but a hundred times more venomous. You know, eleven inches tall, with sharp little teeth and a miniature typewriter. He pans everything. But this review intrigued me. Just read the first paragraph.”
“In an age when fame is the fast food of the gods,” I read, “the appearance of an anonymously directed film seems an almost medieval notion, belonging more to the century of Beowulf and the folk ballads of oral tradition. Poe may have signed his first volume of poems ‘by a Bostonian,’ but no director of this or any other era is likely to bill himself as ‘a gentleman from Hollywood.’ One suspects that the anonymous director of Stigmata has not so much displayed an unearthly modesty as he has a talent for hoaxes.
“Even the most devoted of its cult followers will admit that the film owes its notoriety to the admittedly original touch of being sans credits, and to the bizarre circumstances of its first, unscheduled appearance at a New York theater during a Truffaut film festival. How it got into the cans marked ‘Jules et Jim’ remains a mystery. These anomalies have contaminated the few attempts made to criticize Stigmata. I prefer to concentrate on its lack of merits as a movie, for to call it a film would defame the work of art it usurped for its dubious ‘premiere.’”
“Later on in the review,” Howard said, “he calls it something like ‘the stillborn offspring of Mondo Cane and The Boys from Brazil’ and works himself into a tizzy trying to categorize it. Because it’s a work of fiction in which the anonymous director is a character, the narrator, in fact, who is actually traveling around the world filming cases of stigmata and other physical manifestations of extreme religious faith.
“Poor Curry can’t quite bring himself to class it with ‘that detestable genre: the spurious documentary of abominations.’ He finally decides to group it with ‘those low-budget horror films elevated by jaded critics to semi-respectability.’ After successfully boxing it in his mind, he can then proceed on firm ground and pick it apart, like a child pulling the legs off a grasshopper. The rest of the review is a more or less routine hatchet job.
“Naturally, I wasn’t put off by anything Curry said; it only whetted my appetite. Even more so when I heard that it had been pulled from American distribution.”
“I remember reading about that,” I said. “It was up for grabs, and the company that owned the theater where it showed up auctioned it off to the highest bidder. There was some grumbling from the New York film community that they hadn’t waited long enough for the director to come forward.”
“Right. A distributor from Brazil bought it, and that was the end of the matter, as far as American moviegoers were concerned. A lost film, like London After Midnight, of which only a few stills exist. A friend of a friend of mine in New York actually saw Stigmata. What I heard was third-hand, but tantalizing: ‘How frightening it is depends on whether it’s a fictional documentary or a documentary disguised as fiction.’ This person told my friend that he’d prefer not to know. After hearing that, I was ready to sell my soul for one viewing of Stigmata.”
“Didn’t it have a kind of message-in-a-bottle aspect to it?” I asked. “Less like a hoax than an act of desperation, as if someone didn’t want it released, and Anonymous had to hide the film where he knew it would be shown.”
Howard nodded, pleased that I knew something about the story. “That was one of several theories flying about during its brief run, but since no one ever came forward, people quit caring after a while. And so the years passed. Malpertuis went to the top of my wish list, then Moju. But Stigmata never showed up on video, and I gave up all hope of seeing it.”
Howard sipped his beer. “Enter Terry and his travel plans. We were back in Merída after three weeks of hot buses and hotter hotel rooms. We’d made reservations to fly out on the 30th with a couple of days to kill. By this time we just wanted to dodge hammock salesmen and relax. We were having dinner at a seafood restaurant with an attractive archaeology student we’d met earlier in the day at the Uxmal ruins, a Ms. Lightsey.
“For that entire week I’d had the heartbreak of diarrhea and had to excuse myself — with the gravest dignity you can imagine — at least once during the meal to run to the bathroom. I wasn’t too ill, however, to notice that Terry’s charm was having its usual effect on the young lady and foresaw being an unwelcome third at some point in the evening. After dinner, when he suggested that we hunt up a club near the zocálo to hear some live music, I begged off and struck out on my own.
“Nightfall had brought no relief from the heat, and one sweated while standing still. I was looking half-heartedly for a newsstand but, as the street narrowed and the buildings got more dilapidated, it seemed an unlikely prospect. Across the street from a small park bordered by ceiba trees was a supermarket that was still open. After buying something for my condition, I was walking back across the park when I noticed a movie theater tucked in a shabby corner of the block. I decided to see what was playing.
“There was a group of young men loitering on the sidewalk in front but making no move to go inside, and a bored-looking cop with a carbine slung on his shoulder standing guard nearby, as if he’d been assigned to control a crowd that had never materialized.
“It was a depressing place from the outside: all the marquee lights were either burned out or broken; the glass of the poster display cases was cracked; a fat ticket vendor was filling her tiny booth with cigarette smoke, and a decrepit, sad-faced usher stood by in an oversized uniform.
“The left-hand display case contained a faded, rain-damaged poster depicting a knife-wielding character with a pompadour and a thin mustache threatening a girl in a bikini. This gem, titled El Guapo Asesino, was opening the following week.
“I moved to the next poster, saw a lurid painting of bleeding palms and feet, gaunt faces with eyes upraised to a looming cross, fire-walkers, dervishes, snake handlers, and an evil-looking scientist leaning over a praying girl in a hospital gown, and emblazoned across all of it, in huge letters that writhed and hemorrhaged, was the word Estigmata.
“I stood there, staring at that dreadful poster, then it seemed as if the forces that had contrived to place me in front of what may have been the one place in the world where Stigmata was playing now propelled me up to the ticket window, helped me produce the five hundred pesos admission — about forty cents — and maneuvered me in a daze to a seat in the sticky darkness.
“Having already learned that the absurdly cheap ticket prices in Mexico often buys one little or no air-conditioning, I wasn’t surprised by the stuffiness of the theater and was too excited to care anyway. There was an overlong preview of The Handsome Murderer, and then the feature presentation.
Copyright © 2026 by Jeffrey Greene
