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| It's all connected, says author Tom Shubilla. |
NOTE: This article continues my coverage of Ed Wood's Warm Angora Wishes and Rubber Octopus Dreams (Arcane Shadows Press, 2024).
The story: "The Plan 9 from Outer Space Universe" by Thom "Beefstew" Shubilla
Synopsis: This article purports to tell the true-life events that inspired many of Ed Wood's most famous movies. Most of it centers around a strange, supposedly haunted house called the Old Willows Place in San Fernando, CA. The house, a "vector for the supernatural," dates back to the 1800s, but it gained everlasting infamy after it was purchased by exiled Russian scientist Dr. Eric Vornoff in 1948. Vornoff had been expelled from his native country and separated from his family after the Soviet government took a dim view of his attempts to create a new master race by exposing human beings to high levels of atomic power.
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| Vornoff: Lynchpin of the entire saga. |
After his banishment, Vornoff traveled the world, acquired a henchman named Lobo in Tibet, and developed a keen interest in cryptozoology. He bought the Old Willows Place to be near a giant octopus who lived in a swamp near the home. Vornoff continued his experiments in America and killed several innocent people in the process. Eventually, the police tracked him down, and the scientist died in a massive lab explosion in 1955. Vornoff's research influenced NASA scientist Dr. Carl Bragan, who created a plant monster while on sabbatical in Japan in 1970. But there is no truth to the rumor that a mad scientist named Dr. Charles Conway, who attempted to prolong human life through the invention of a new gland, had any connection to Vornoff. It's coincidental that both scientists had sidekicks named Lobo.
Two years after Vornoff's death, a cemetery not far from the Old Willows Place became the site of a truly bizarre series of events involving flying saucers and the resurrection of dead bodies. It seems an alien civilization attempted to frighten the human race into pacifism by unleashing a plague of zombies on the small community of San Fernando. Unfortunately for the aliens, they only managed to create three zombies, including a woman known as the Black Ghoul, before their plans were thwarted by a small band of humans.
In 1959, an itinerant conman named Dr. Karl Acula and his wife Sheila set up shop on the site of what had been the Old Willows Place. An ex-vaudevillian from Ed Wood's hometown of Poughkeepsie, Acula drifted from city to city as an adult. He altered his appearance frequently and even paid a highly-skilled plastic surgeon named Dr. Boris Gregor to change his entire face. In San Fernando, Acula passed himself off as a medium and started holding phony seances in order to trick gullible older people out of their money. Eventually, though, Acula somehow managed to provoke the wrath of the dead, and they dragged him down to hell.
Ironically, Acula had taken inspiration from the famed TV psychic Criswell. What Acula didn't know was that Cris was actually the Emperor of the Dead. In 1965, a writer named Bob and his girlfriend Shirley reported seeing the Emperor of the Dead presiding over a strange erotic ritual in an abandoned cemetery with the Black Ghoul of San Fernando at his side.
Excerpt:
The Old Willows Place was not the only case of the supernatural for the San Fernando Police Department. In 1957 a spaceship reportedly landed in the backyard of Jeff and Paula Trent who lived next to a cemetery adjacent to the Old Willow's House. According to secret testimonies of the miserable souls who survived this terrifying ordeal, aliens planned on resurrecting the recently deceased on Earth by using long-distance electrodes shot into the pinion pituitary glands of recent dead, march the dead on the world's capitals with the goal of nations recognizing the alien's existence and stop the Earth from developing the deadly Solaronite bomb.
Reflections: We're lousy with universes these days. Somewhere along the line, we decided that we enjoy fictional stories more when they're connected to other fictional stories. Now, we're inundated with endless talk of franchises, dimensions, multiverses, alternate realities, and timelines. It's not enough that Marvel and DC have their own, incredibly complex universes; especially popular characters like Spider-Man and Batman have their own universes within those universes! Meanwhile, multimedia franchises like Star Wars and Star Trek have become so elaborate that their lore can (and does) fill up entire encyclopedias.
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| Patton Oswalt rants about Star Wars. |
"The Plan 9 from Outer Space Universe" is Thom Shubilla's attempt to create an interconnected franchise out of Ed Wood's best-known films. Eddie already laid some groundwork for this in advance, since three of his films—Bride of the Monster (1955), Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957), and Night of the Ghouls (1959)—form an extremely loose trilogy and share some characters. Ghouls has even been called a direct sequel to Bride. But Shubilla has fun with the premise by throwing seemingly unrelated films like Jail Bait (1954), Orgy of the Dead (1965), The Venus Flytrap (1970), and even Boris Petroff's The Unearthly (1957) into the mix.
I'll admit I had thoughts along these lines when I was reviewing Blood Splatters Quickly (2014), an anthology of Eddie's short stories. "Wouldn't it be fun," I mused, "if all of these strange, violent, and perverse stories were happening in one really messed-up town?" In retrospect, many of them do. The town just happens to be Los Angeles.
What Shubilla's story really reminds me of, however, is comedian Patton Oswalt's notorious filibuster from the sitcom Parks & Recreation (2009-2015). In an episode from 2013, Oswalt plays a man who desperately wants to prevent the city council from voting on a measure, so he deliberately wastes the council's time by pitching a Star Wars sequel. His proposed story not only includes characters from Marvel but also the entire pantheon of Greek gods. When I read "The Plan 9 from Outer Space Universe," I imagined it being delivered aloud with the same level of misguided passion Oswalt brings to his speech.