Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 288: 'Invisible Ghost' (1941) and 'Deanimated' (2002)

Artist Martin Arnold did some interesting things to The Invisible Ghost (1941).

It was a long way down for Bela Lugosi. We know that his Hollywood career peaked with his indelible, much-imitated portrayal of the title role in Tod Browning's Dracula (1931) for Universal. Over time, however, the Hungarian actor's fortunes were plagued by numerous factors: typecasting, shifting audience tastes, plus Lugosi's thick accent and ruinous drug addiction. By the 1950s, when he started working with Edward D. Wood, Jr., his once-sparkling career was utterly in the doldrums. Any work was welcome. Hence Glen or Glenda (1953), Bride of the Monster (1955), and the posthumously released Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957).

But Bela's career was vast and varied. By the time he made Dracula, he'd already accumulated numerous movie credits, foreign and domestic. From 1917 to 1921, he appeared in silent films made in Hungary and Germany. From 1923 onward, he appeared in American-made films, first silent then sound. And all this was in addition to maintaining an extremely active stage career. 

In the turbulent decades between Dracula and Glen or Glenda, Lugosi made dozens of films of wildly varying quality, ranging from major studio productions to low-budget B-movies and serials. In 1941, Lugosi began a productive if not exactly glamorous association with a Poverty Row studio called Monogram Pictures. Nine films in total eventuated from this. For a detailed and thoughtful analysis of this era, I'd highly recommend Gary D. Rhodes and Robert Guffey's Bela Lugosi and the Monogram Nine (2019). 

A Monogram production.

Lugosi's first assignment for Monogram was a low-ambition thriller called Invisible Ghost (1941), which wasn't even his first movie with the word "invisible" in the title. In this one, the ex-Dracula plays Charles Kessler, a wealthy but deeply delusional man who lives in the requisite secluded mansion with his grown daughter Virginia (Polly Ann Young) and several uneasy servants. Kessler is reeling from the fact that his wife (Betty Compson) left him for another man. He still insists on setting a place for her at the dinner table and has "conversations" with her empty chair. His stalwart butler Evans (Clarence Muse) humors him as best he can.

Amazingly, the bedraggled Mrs. Kessler is suffering from amnesia and is still living on the property, sometimes sneaking food from the kitchen. Every now and again, Kessler will catch a glimpse of his ex-wife wandering on the grounds at night and think he's seeing a ghost. This puts him in a hypnotic state during which he commits several murders, totally unaware of what he is doing. The not-too-bright police, led by cigar-chomping Lt. Williams (George Pembroke), are utterly baffled. They are so far off the track that an innocent man, Virginia's boyfriend Ralph (John McGuire), is executed for a murder that Kessler committed while in a trance. By the end, several more bodies have piled up until the cops finally crack the case and lead a docile Lugosi away.

Seemingly just another cheaply-made murder mystery, Invisible Ghost has an oddness that is difficult to ignore or deny. The plot hinges on outlandish, totally impossible contrivances, making it feel like a dream or nightmare. The actors do not behave or speak the way "real" human beings would under such circumstances. Their conversations are filled with non-sequiturs, stilted phrases, and unannounced left turns. It just so happens that I screened Invisible Ghost the night after watching Hal Warren's Manos: The Hands of Fate (1966) for the umpteenth time. That film, too, features characters who struggle to express themselves in a convincingly human way. It's like they don't know how to be people!

Joseph H. Lewis' direction at first seems merely workmanlike, but after a few scenes, you start to notice the movie's strange, disorienting rhythm or, more accurately, lack of rhythm. There are numerous ill-timed pauses, unmotivated closeups, and dead spots in the movie, all contributing to its dreaminess. There is very little sense of time passing normally in this movie. We're either lurching through events at incredible speed, such as the swift downfall of Ralph, or dawdling unnecessarily through flat conversations. But Lewis occasionally displays some visual flair. There's a fireplace in the study, for instance, and there are numerous shots where the fire is in the foreground, making it look like the characters are roasting in hell.

For these reasons and many more, Invisible Ghost is exactly the kind of movie that would have set Ed Wood's mind ablaze. I'm sure he saw it. His own, unfilmed script The Vampire's Tomb can be seen as his attempt to write something in this "old dark house" tradition. While I watched Invisible Ghost, I could not help but think of Eddie's 1950s films. Some direct parallels I noticed:

• The shots of the forlorn Mrs. Kessler staggering around the grounds at night are strikingly similar to the shots of Valda Hansen doing likewise in Wood's Night of the Ghouls (1959). Betty Compton's character is "haunting" the estate in the same way the banshee does in Ed's short story "The Night the Banshee Cried."

• When Lt. Williams announces, "Somebody's been doing these killings!" it's impossible not to think of Lt. Harper (Duke Moore) in Plan 9 and his infamous line, "Inspector Clay's dead, murdered, and somebody's responsible!" Williams and Harper talk, dress, and act much in the same manner.

• In Rob Craig's Ed Wood, Mad Genius (2009), the author identifies resurrection as one of the principal recurring motifs in Ed's movies. It's certainly a major theme throughout Invisible Ghost. Mrs. Kessler is assumed to be dead, but she is still alive and trapped in a limbo-like state. Her ghostly reappearance is too much for her beleaguered husband to process. Meanwhile, when Ralph dies, his identical twin brother Paul (also played by John McGuire) appears at the estate. It's like Ralph himself has returned from the grave. And when servant Jules (Ernie Adams) is seemingly murdered in the Kessler home, his wife (Ottola Nesmith) is shocked to find him still (barely) alive in the morgue.

• The movie's dramatic use of thunder and lightning is very Woodian. Nearly all of Eddie's most famous movies, including Glenda and Plan 9, have similar shots.

• Many scenes in Invisible Ghost occur in the kitchen and dining room, reminding us of similar domestic scenes in both Glen or Glenda and Jail Bait (1954). Late in Invisible Ghost, there's a moment when a dead body falls over from a standing position after being hidden behind a curtain. This is like the scene in Jail Bait when Dr. Boris Gregor (Herbert Rawlinson) discovers the body of his son Don (Clancy Malone) stashed in a pantry. Even the prominent water cooler in Kessler's kitchen reminded me of the one in Glenda.

Appropriately, Invisible Ghost makes prominent appearances in at least two Wood-related films. A clip of it is incorporated into the biographical short film Ed and Bela (1986), and the film's poster is seen throughout the documentary Hellborn: The Aborted Masterpiece of Edward D. Wood, Jr. (1993).

Martin Arnold.

Critically derided when it was new, Invisible Ghost may be remembered today as just another of Bela Lugosi's bargain basement movies from a low period in his career. But I'd say that this film has gradually acquired... well, not a luster exactly but at least a patina of some sort since its release. For better or worse, it stands out. 

One person who recognizes this is Austrian-born artist and filmmaker Martin Arnold (born 1959), who is best known for his use of found footage. He has taken clips from feature films and cartoons and heavily edited and modified them to create new, often surreal works. What's interesting is that he's been doing this since at least the 1980s, long before the "remix culture" of the internet truly took hold.

Martin's 2002 film Deanimated uses Invisible Ghost as its source of footage. While the original movie runs about 63 minutes and change, Martin's movie lasts exactly one hour to the second. I mentioned the many odd pauses and dead spots in Invisible Ghost.  Deanimated emphasizes and extends these moments. During the movie's many conversations, much of the dialogue is eliminated while the pauses are extended and looped. Certain shots are altered so as to remove actors from the frame, often making it look like the remaining characters are having one-sided conversations with their imaginary friends.

But the movie truly savors the moments when no actors are onscreen whatsoever. We spend many minutes looking at unoccupied sets: the kitchen, the study, various bedrooms, and the woods surrounding the Kessler estate. In creating this version of the movie, Arnold says he wanted to give us "the only true remake that is possible anymore: an exact recycling of empty spaces and encounters from yesterday's films." 

The true stars of Deanimated are the elegant items of furniture in Charles Kessler's richly-appointed home. (No jokes, please, about them giving wooden performances.) It's especially funny when Arnold gives us a shot of a camera slowly panning across an empty room, and we hear terribly dramatic music on the soundtrack even though literally nothing is happening onscreen. Toward the end of the film, Arnold toys with the audience by showing a totally darkened frame with nothing but faint static on the soundtrack for several minutes. We are left with nothing but our own thoughts. It's like the filmic equivalent of John Cage's "4'33" (1952).

I can sympathize with you if this kind of thing is not of interest to you. You may not see the point of such formal exercises as this. What makes Deanimated so appealing to me is that it reminds me of things I've done in my own informal film studies. With the advent of DVDs, obsessive viewers like me were finally able to pause movies precisely and advance through certain moments frame-by-frame. In particular, I became fixated on those moments when there were no human performers visible onscreen. These moments, often at the beginnings and ends of shots, were somewhat tricky and therefore satisfying to pinpoint. I began to imagine depopulated versions of all my favorite movies. At last I could concentrate on those wonderful background details without the pesky humans getting in the way.

Martin Arnold's Deanimated may remind you of another film I reviewed years ago in this series: Jesse Berger's Glen or the Bride of the Night of the Plan 9 from Outer Space (2014). And there are some surface similarities in the way that Arnold and Berger manipulate scenes from old movies. But Berger, I think, was trying to wring some Freudian tension out of the scenes he lifted from Ed Wood's movies. His film attempts to create a new narrative out of some preexisting ones. Arnold's media manipulation is of another kind. This is a meditation on absence and silence. It undercuts the very idea of a narrative and makes us wonder why we spend so much of our lives staring at screens, watching the lives of other people.