This offbeat portrait is from an arresting but generally neglected series of photographs Arbus described as a "Horror Show" in a letter to her friend and advocate Walker Evans. Arbus discovered the hidden world of B-grade live theater between film screenings in the back rooms of cheap Times Square movie houses or at Hubert's Museum, a flea circus located in the basement of a Forty-second Street penny arcade. The Headless Woman serves as a subtle but sophisticated observation of how an effect that in the flesh might seem to many an obvious fake—presumably the actor wears an oversized dress that simply covers her head and body—when seen by the camera becomes transformed into an inherently ambiguous scene, a surreal mystery. "These are nightmares to beguile us while we wait," Arbus wrote in 1962, suggesting with a wry sense of humor that the camera is as often an agent of illusion as a diviner of truth.