Ed Wood's Warm Angora Wishes: "Final Curtain Revisited"

An actor battles a vampire in "Final Curtain Revisited."

NOTE: This article continues my coverage of Ed Wood's Warm Angora Wishes and Rubber Octopus Dreams (Arcane Shadows Press, 2024).

The story: "Final Curtain Revisited" by Douglas Gibson

Synopsis: A brief prologue explains that Final Curtain (1957) was an unsold TV pilot written and directed by Ed Wood. In this short film, a character identified only as the Actor wanders around the dark, spooky Dome Theatre at night after having played a vampire onstage there earlier in the evening. He becomes increasingly paranoid and is mysteriously drawn to something on the second floor. The object beckoning him turns out to be a coffin. Resigned to his fate, the actor climbs inside.

Valda Hansen as the Banshee.

The sequel picks up several years later. The Actor still dwells in the Dome Theatre, long after the events of the first story. He lies in his coffin in a storage room on the second floor, invisible to the (living) actors and crew members who work in the building each day. Every few years, the Actor is resurrected so that he can steer someone toward a peaceful afterlife and spare them great agony. No one can see or hear him, but he can directly influence people's behavior nevertheless.

The Actor's eternal nemesis is the Vampire, an alluring female who dwells in a room down the hall. She, too, is unable to leave the Dome. One night, the Actor rises from his coffin and finds that the Vampire is tearing apart the body of a recently-deceased theater critic. Unfortunately, he cannot do anything to prevent this. The Actor strolls around the theater, even visiting his old dressing room. He also sees the Banshee, a young blonde woman who had pretended to be a ghost when she was alive. In death, she is a restless soul who is cursed to wander the earth forever.

Eventually, the Actor realizes why he has been awakened from his years-long sleep. He needs to save the soul of a stagehand who is on the threshold of death. This young man, though not evil, had yearned for fame and glory but had been denied these things during his life. Now, this doomed man seems inextricably drawn to the Vampire. Knowing he is breaking the rules, the Actor enters the room of the Vampire and protects the stagehand from her. The Vampire slashes the Actor’s throat. The stagehand dies peacefully, and the badly-injured Actor collapses on a mattress, unable to reach his own coffin.

Excerpt: 

The hall produced chaotic sounds that presumed Grand Guignol-like horrors. Snarling, choking sounds, like a wolf man descending on a young lovely. More howls of agony, followed by poundings on the wall. Perhaps a maniac driving nails into his torture victim? The Actor strained to repress these feelings, thoughts. Were they repressed memories of past awakenings, or just his still-lively imagination? How many souls existed there?

Reflections: M. Night Shyamalan's The Sixth Sense (1999) turns 25 this year, so I’ll assume that anyone who wants to see this film has already done so by now. Besides, its twist ending must be one of the worst-kept "secrets" in movie history. I've long felt that this extremely successful film (which Ed Wood would have loved, incidentally) could have been the pilot for a fascinating weekly television series. 

Willis and Osment in The Sixth Sense.

To recap, The Sixth Sense concerns Malcolm (Bruce Willis), a psychologist who slowly comes to realize that he is deceased, and Cole, a troubled young boy with a rare ability to see and talk to ghosts. Together, they are able to bring solace to tormented souls who have unfinished business on earth. They only do a little of this in the movie, coming to the aid of a female child ghost named Kyra (Mischa Barton) who has been poisoned by her mother, but I figured they could keep doing it week after week. After all, there must be plenty of unhappy ghosts out there who need Malcolm and Cole's help.

"Final Curtain Revisited" has some of the flavor of the Sixth Sense TV show I was envisioning. It takes Duke Moore's character from Final Curtain and turns him into a kind of Mr. Fix-It of the afterlife. By the rules of this fictional universe, though, the Actor has to remain at the Dome Theatre, so his services aren't needed very often. In the story, even he doesn't know why it's the stagehand's turn to die. It just is.

Maybe if the Actor branched out beyond the walls of the Dome Theatre, he could assist other souls in want. The Banshee in this short story seems to have free reign, at least to some extent, but she does not take advantage of this opportunity. She exists only to suffer. The author compares her to Jacob Marley from A Christmas Carol (1843), but at least Marley does one productive thing with his afterlife.

Frankly, it never would have occurred to me to expand on the story of Final Curtain, nor to tie it into the story of Night of the Ghouls (1959) and the unreleased The Night the Banshee Cried (1957). But author Douglas Gibson has done a nice job of recreating the spooky atmosphere of the original film. He does not replicate Ed Wood's writing style because I believe doing so would be impossible. Wood takes great leaps into the absurd and implausible, and he is not cautious in his use of language. In comparison, Gibson's writing is more restrained and even tasteful. If there's such a thing as a polite take on Ed Wood, this is it.