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| Ed Wood turned his script for Orgy of the Dead into a novel. |
"Merchandising! Merchandising! Where the real money from the movie is made!"-Mel Brooks, Spaceballs (1987)
It used to be that, once a movie left theaters, it was basically gone. Unless it played on television or was screened at a revival house, you just couldn't see it. All that survived were people's faulty memories. VCRs changed that, obviously, but these marvelous machines didn't become common in American homes until the 1980s. Before that, people who wanted to revisit a movie had to rely on soundtrack albums and tie-in books.
Movie soundtracks started gaining popularity in the 1950s, thanks to the invention of the long-playing record in 1948, but novelizations have existed nearly as long as there have been feature films. Such books were even produced for silent films of the 1910s and 1920s! By the 1960s, novelizations were a regular part of a movie's marketing campaign and remained so for decades. The tie-in books and the movies they were based on had a symbiotic relationship; each raised interest in the other. Novelizations were so popular, in fact, that at least two of Ed Wood's novels, Raped in the Grass (1968) and Bye Bye Broadie (1968), falsely claimed to be based on motion pictures. To be clear, neither movie exists.
Ed Wood's first genuine movie novelization came out in 1966. It was an adaptation of his own screenplay for Steve Apostolof's Orgy of the Dead (1965). This was perhaps the only full-length book to arise from Eddie's brief and largely unsuccessful association with Forrest J. Ackerman, founder of Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine. It was Ackerman who sold the book to Earl Kemp, editorial director at a San Diego publisher called Greenleaf Classics. The paperback has since become quite a collector's item, partially thanks to the painted cover art by artist Robert Bonfils (1922-2018). Unfortunately, to further illustrate the book, Ed Wood pilfered some photographs from Steve Apostolof's personal collection of stills. This contributed to the rift between Ed and Steve that persisted until the two reunited in 1972 for a new series of films.
The opening credits of Orgy of the Dead indicate, by the way, that the screenplay is based on Ed Wood's novel. This is not the case. By all accounts, Orgy started as a screenplay by Wood that was then purchased by Steve Apostolof and turned into a film. The novelization was only written after the release of the movie. In other words, the movie birthed the book, not the other way around. Perhaps Steve and Ed had already planned to release a book based on Orgy and they were trying to drum up interest in the novelization before it was published.
Now, if you've seen the movie Orgy of the Dead, you might be wondering how Eddie managed to get an entire novel out of it. After all, the plot is a bit sparse, and that's being charitable. A horror writer named Bob (William Bates) and his grumbling girlfriend Shirley (Pat Barrington) survive a car crash and stagger into an old, abandoned cemetery where they witness a strange trial presided over by a cloaked figure called the Emperor (Criswell) and his assistant, the Princess of Darkness (Fawn Silver). The Emperor and Princess sit in judgment over a procession of the recently deceased and decide what happens to their souls in the afterlife.
The film is essentially a burlesque show and consists mainly of striptease dancers rounded up from the L.A. club scene. Besides the characters already mentioned, the film also features a mummy (Lou Ojena) and a werewolf (John Andrews), both of whom serve as lackeys of the Emperor. After witnessing a few of the dances, Bob and Shirley are taken prisoner by the wolfman and mummy. The Emperor threatens them with everlasting damnation, but they manage to escape (barely). The villains turn into skeletons when the sun rises, and the whole story is ultimately revealed to have been a dream or hallucination. Bruised from the crash but not seriously injured, Bob and Shirley dazedly rejoin the world of the living.
As a movie, Orgy of the Dead largely consists of long, wordless sequences in which topless women dance to instrumental music. So how does that translate to the page? Well, quite frankly, it doesn't. And Ed Wood doesn't even try to make that work. The novel dispatches with all of the topless dancers as well as the werewolf, but it retains Bob, Shirley, the Emperor, the Princess, and the mummy. The basic structure of the film's plot has been retained, and much of the dialogue is identical to the movie as well. The Emperor still rules over the souls of the recently deceased, but this time, they're characters imported from Ed Wood's other books and stories.
To that end, Ed Wood essentially cuts and pastes several of his short stories into the Orgy of the Dead novel, including "Into My Grave," "The Night the Banshee Cried," "Final Curtain," and "The Day the Mummy Returned." By the time this novelization came out in 1966, Ed had already made short films based on "Final Curtain" and "Banshee," but I don't think "Into My Grave" or "Mummy" had ever appeared anywhere else. So, in a sense, Orgy of the Dead marks their first appearance anywhere. Ed Wood must have had a file folder of stories he was holding onto, sort of like a literary junk drawer. Ed was never a careful or fastidious writer, and his reuse of old material in Orgy of the Dead gets a bit sloppy at times. In particular, one memorable speech turns up twice in the novel! In Chapter Three, Shirley flashes back to an excerpt from one of Bob's stories:
A sudden wind howls. The night things are all about me. Every shadow is a beckoning invitation to disaster. I know I should think of other things, of pleasant things, but I can’t. How can I think of other things, of pleasant things, when I am in a place surrounded by shadows and objects which can take any shape here in the darkness? Any shape my mind can conceive.
And in Chapter Nine, the actor from "Final Curtain" describes his fateful night in an empty theater;
A sudden wind howls outside. I become noticeably cold. The dressing gown I have wrapped about my body feels as light as if I had nothing on at all. I know I should think of other things, but I can’t. How can I think of other things, of pleasant things, when I am in a hall surrounded by shadows and objects which can take any shape here in the darkness? Any shape my mind can conceive.Eddie must have really loved that bit of writing, since it also turns up in the film versions of both Final Curtain and Orgy of the Dead.
Elsewhere in the novel, we encounter an unscrupulous mortician who cons grieving families into having closed-casket funerals for their loved ones so that he can exploit the corpses for both fun and profit. As Rudolph Grey points out in Nightmare of Ecstasy (1992), similar characters also turn up in Suburbia Confidential (1967) and Love of the Dead (1968). Someday, I will have to do an entire article about this ghoulish mortician story—which was possibly inspired by the real-life case of Burke and Hare—because of its three (!) appearances in the Wood canon. It really deserves a post of its own. Again, though, Orgy of the Dead appears to be the first-published iteration of the tale. It strikes me only now that the cunning and resourceful mortician is a stand-in for Ed Wood himself.
Even with all this blatant recycling, the Orgy of the Dead novelization contains a fair amount of material that I've encountered nowhere else. In Chapter Eleven, the Emperor and Princess sit in judgment of a young woman who says she learned voodoo from an old witch. Using this knowledge of the dark arts, the woman convinced wealthy men to fall in love with her and occasionally even marry her so she could obtain "pretty clothes, silken undies [and] furs" with their money. Then, once she'd drained their bank accounts, she'd have the witch kill the men with voodoo. Eventually, the young woman grew resentful of her dependence on the old witch (who demanded large amounts of money) and tried to kill her with an elaborate spell, only to wind up destroying herself in the process. The Emperor is not sympathetic.
I wouldn't be surprised if Ed Wood turned all of this into a short story or perhaps a chapter in one of his other books, but I haven't been able to find it... yet. Chapter Eleven bears some slight resemblance to the stories "The Witches of Amau Ra" and "Gemeni," but it's distinct from both of those. Until I'm told otherwise, I'll say this "voodoo witch" saga is exclusive to the Orgy of the Dead novelization. If you know otherwise, please tell me.
Really, though, what I love about the Orgy of the Dead novelization is that it's a prime example of Ed Wood's giddily over-the-top horror fiction. Eddie had several different modes as a writer, depending on the project. He tried his hand at everything from crime fiction to sex manuals over the course of his writing career. But I think he's at his very best when he's channeling Bram Stoker and Edgar Allan Poe in his own slightly awkward yet endearing way. Eddie grew up watching Universal horror films and, even as an adult, was obsessed with vampires, ghosts, graveyards, and things that go bump in the night. This book reflects that on nearly every page. I mean, just read this passage from the novelization in which the mummy rises from his tomb:
The tombstone, weakened at its base, toppled forward into the hole with a resounding thud. For a moment, only grave dust filtered up out of the ancient opening. A nasty smell of mold and centuries of decay followed. Then … a hand—a giant hand, as wrinkled and as dry as old leather—gripped the side of the grave.
The dirt crumbled against the gripping pressure, but the hand persisted until it got a firm grip; then it began to pull. The head, with vacant eyes, was void of all hair. It was as leathery and as creased as had been the hand. The hand and head of a giant mummy. The powerful hand continued to pull, to force it’s own massive body up out of the grave.That's such an evocative passage, and it's so quintessentially Ed Wood you could cry. It reminded me a lot of the scene in Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957) in which Tor Johnson rises effortfully from his grave. Then I remembered that Ed had Tor record a version of "The Day the Mummy Returned" for a record that never materialized.
As a movie, Orgy of the Dead is pure sexploitation, an excuse to show attractive, half-naked women gyrating for our entertainment. Nothing wrong with that. The Orgy book includes some suggestive passages, too—Shirley loses her bra at one point, for instance—but the emphasis is more on the eerie and horrific aspects of the plot. As a reader, I got the sense that Ed Wood was having a grand old time describing the cemetery and the strange beings who dwell within it. That's what makes this book special.