Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 252: Additional thoughts on Bela Lugosi's appearance in Plan 9

We know Bela Lugosi appears in Plan 9. But how did that footage get there?

As Americans prepare to travel and reunite with loved ones for the Thanksgiving holiday, I thought I'd share some feedback I received about last week's article. If you'll recall, I prepared an alternate cut of Ed Wood's notorious sci-fi/horror hybrid Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957) that only includes the silent footage of actor Bela Lugosi (1882-1956). The legendary Hungarian actor famously died before the movie was ever completed, and Plan 9 was somewhat deceptively marketed as his farewell performance. I challenged my readers to consider what they might have done with this footage if they'd been in Ed Wood's high-heeled shoes.

In presenting my cut of Plan 9 from Outer Space, I shared whatever scant information I had about that mysterious, flickering footage (roughly three minutes in length) and where it came from. Were these scenes specifically shot for Plan 9 or for some other project entirely? Were these fleeting fragments not part of any larger project but simply some test footage that Ed Wood happened to be shooting in the mid-1950s? I sourced my information from two books, Rudolph Grey's Nightmare of Ecstasy (1992) and Richard Bojarski's The Films of Bela Lugosi (1980), but found no definitive answer.

A news story from 1958.

Naturally, my readers had opinions of their own. W. Paul Apel suggested that the lengthy Ed Wood quote that appears in Nightmare of Ecstasy concerning the Lugosi footage might have come from an interview with Bob Cremer, author of Bela Lugosi: The Man Behind the Cape (1976). Wood stated that the footage was shot for a specific project, namely a script he'd already written. Paul thought this might have been Eddie's way of rewriting history "because [Ed] knew in retrospect where it ended up." Michael Martin agreed with this, recalling an interview in which Eddie falsely stated that the flying saucers in Plan 9 were hubcaps. (This is an urban legend; the ships were actually models purchased from a hobby shop.)

Sean McLachlan, meanwhile, was intrigued by Ed Wood's claim that the cemetery scenes were filmed in a Sacramento graveyard that was due to be torn down to make room for a high-rise apartment complex. It was Wood's contention that this location was found through Tor Johnson's son, Karl, who was at that time chief of police in Sacramento. (Karl cameos as kindly Farmer Calder in Plan 9.) Wood and a few of his buddies, including Carl Anthony, rearranged the abandoned graveyard for filming, unaware that the corpses of "long deceased persons" had not yet been removed. 

Wood said that this unfortunate incident outraged the local populace and led to a newspaper article headlined "GHOULS INVADE CEMETERY." ("We had the biggest laugh over that one," Wood claimed.) I searched but could find no such article or any similar real-life incident. The closest thing I could find was a wire service story from April 1958 about the vandalizing of an old cemetery in Skidoo, CA, an abandoned mining town in the Panamint mountains near Death Valley. This incident did cause some local outrage, but it seems to have occurred well after the filming of Plan 9. Nevertheless, it's an interesting story that I'd never have heard without a project like this. I've included it with this article, and it's got some great little details, e.g. the murder of a man named James Arnold by an ornery outlaw known as "Hooch" Simpson.

In the article last week, I theorized that Ed Wood may have had additional footage of Bela Lugosi he did not use in Plan 9 because he planned to use it in the follow-up film, Revenge of the Dead aka Night of the Ghouls (1959). Wood suggested as much in a letter to Tony Cardoza included in Nightmare of Ecstasy. Bob Blackburn, who befriended Ed's widow Kathy in her later years, had this to say:

I am not sure, but I have a feeling that if Eddie still had the footage in 1978 why wouldn't he have shown it to [Richard Bojarski] or Bob Cremer for that matter? Kathy said that there [were] a couple of canisters of film in a file cabinet that they weren't able to take when they were evicted, but knowing how much Eddie loved Bela I would think that would have been among the first items thrown in that old suitcase... or as in the case of his paperbacks, given to [actor and Wood associate] David Ward for safekeeping.

Bob Cremer had this to say in response:

When I interviewed Ed, I asked him specifically if he had shot the scenes with Bela specifically for Plan 9. He answered in the affirmative, stating that he had received confirmation from Bela that, although he was in poor health, he wanted to do the film, and he repeated his approach to filmmaking -- get some footage in the can and use it to get additional backers. The scenes were shot when Ed had received the confirmation from Bela and was planning on expanding his role in the film. That is what he told me. The discussion is covered in the revised [2026] version of the biography Bela Lugosi: The Man Behind the Cape.

Fascinating stuff, right? That's why I'm glad I do articles like the one from last week. There is an entire community of Wood fans and scholars, and they have lots of information and insight to provide into topics like this.

But there is one more mystery I'd like to delve into. My likely introduction to Plan 9 from Outer Space was an essay about the film in Danny Peary's book Cult Movies (1981). That book contains a publicity still of Bela Lugosi in the outfit he wears during the "lost roses of her cheeks" scene: black suit, black homburg hat, waist-length black cape. When I first saw the book, I mistook Lugosi's homburg for a cowboy hat and thought Plan 9 was some kind of Western. Nevertheless, if you go searching, you can find a few publicity images of Lugosi in this exact outfit.

Bela Lugosi in his iconic Plan 9 outfit.

Why do these pictures exist? Who took them and when? I noticed that one of them had the notation "G-29" written in the lower right corner. Plan 9 was shot (and originally premiered) under the title Graverobbers from Outer Space. Could the G stand for Graverobbers? Or does it refer to The Ghoul Goes West, a Lugosi vehicle Ed Wood tried without success to get made around this same time? If so, that may explain why Lugosi is wearing an ensemble more suited to a Western villain than a 1950s suburban homeowner. (Michael Pate wears a very similar outfit in the 1959 vampire Western Curse of the Undead.) It also lends credence to the theory that Ed Wood shot the Lugosi footage as a fundraising ploy. These stills may have been part of that same ploy.

I may have just opened a whole coffin of worms here.