Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 230: The Mortician's Tale (1966-1968)

Something about this particular story must have really captured Ed Wood's imagination.

Early in Tobe Hooper's The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), a psychotic hitchhiker (Ed Neal) explains to a vanload of horrified hippies how the delicacy known as "head cheese" is made:

They take the head [of the cow] and they boil it, except for the tongue, and they scrape all the flesh away from the bone. They use everything. They don't throw nothing away. They use the jowls and the muscles and the eyes and the ligaments and everything! From the nose and the gums and all the flesh, and they boil it down into a big jelly of fats!

Ed Neal as the hitchhiker.

Ed Wood could definitely relate to this. Both his films and his writings have that distinct "head cheese" quality to them. If Eddie could help it, he didn't throw anything away either. He'd shamelessly recycle dialogue, plots, character names, and whatever he had on hand. He was so frugal that he edited footage from three separate, failed projects into his film Night of the Ghouls (1959) even though most of it clearly didn't belong there. And he'd occasionally publish short stories that were thin rewrites of stories he'd published only months before! In summary, he just took all the material he had available to him, the jowls and ligaments, and boiled it down into a big jelly of fats. Waste not, want not.

There is one particular plot that turns up at least three times in Ed Wood's literary canon, and it's a perfect metaphor for how Eddie worked. It tells of a disreputable mortician who bilks grieving families out of their money and blatantly abuses the helpless corpses placed in his care, sometimes for profit, sometimes just for fun. To put it mildly, this guy is a real scumbag: a liar, a thief, a necrophile, and a desecrator of graves. Even though he is eventually found out and must face the consequences of his actions, his story still leaves us with a feeling of disgust. And Ed Wood kept returning to that story! I wouldn't be surprised if it turns up in more places that I just haven't found yet! But why? What, exactly, was the appeal of this story?

Well, let's examine it. As far as I know, we first meet this dastardly scoundrel in Chapter Twelve of Orgy of the Dead (Greenleaf, 1966), Ed Wood's patchwork novelization of his film script from the previous year. As I explained in my review of that book, the mortician is just one of the deceased individuals being judged by the Emperor, a mysterious cloaked figure who rules over the underworld and who holds court in a spooky cemetery on a moonlit night. Most of the other "defendants" in the novel are imported from Wood's short stories, but our mortician friend is a new creation.

The Orgy novel.

In Orgy, the mortician is identified as Lyle Carriage, a "cocky," well-dressed man of 45. He's so arrogant, in fact, that the Emperor has to scold him for being too familiar. Lyle says that he was considered "worse than a killer" and that his story received (in a rare Woodian acknowledgement of Vietnam) "more newspaper space than the war." He started out as a physician but was unable to make much money in that profession. Then, fatefully, he inherited a funeral parlor from his uncle. The only other employee besides himself was an elderly embalmer. Fortunately, Lyle's medical training made the job a natural fit for him.

On his first day at the funeral parlor, Lyle was overwhelmed by the sight of a deceased young woman in her late teens. This may have been the first indication of the mortician's latent perversities. Typical of an Ed Wood character, he obsessed over the woman's appearance and outfit. He became especially fixated on a handkerchief he used to wipe some makeup off the woman's face.

After a few months, Lyle began to hatch a scheme. He bought a nearby cemetery, forced the embalmer into retirement, and hired a couple of local drunks (similar to the characters from "To Kill a Saturday Night") to be his gravediggers. He also started convincing families to hold closed-casket funerals for their loved ones. That way, he was free to exploit the corpses. He sold their hair, their blood, and even their internal organs. Eventually, he started removing the flesh from the bones. That way he had two more saleable commodities: skeletons and meat. He especially enjoyed mutilating the bodies of "young girls" and then wearing their clothes. All the while, coffins full of rocks were being buried five or six deep in his cemetery.

It was quite a profitable operation, but it couldn't last. One day, while Lyle was chopping up another young woman and wearing her clothes, one of the drunken gravediggers staggered into his office. The other gravedigger had just recently died, and his sentimental coworker wanted "one last look at his buddy." Upon making the horrible discovery, the surviving drunk notified the police. After posting bail, Lyle decided to abscond with some money he had hidden away in one of the coffins he had buried. That's when a bony hand reached up from beyond the grave and dragged Lyle down to hell. The Emperor sentences the mortician to a most cruel fate: he shall forevermore be forced to wear a "frilly pink dress" that is "tattered, decaying, [and] crawling with grave mold and worms." The phony funeral director runs screaming into the woods. Interestingly, Lyle has become a "little man" by the end of the chapter. He'd been tall at the beginning of it.

The mortician's gruesome story resembles not only Night of the Ghouls, in which conman Dr. Acula (Kenne Duncan) inadvertently provokes the wrath of the dead, but also the long-unproduced I Woke Up Early the Day I Died (1997), which also revolves around some money hidden in a coffin, plus the short story "In the Stony Lonesome" (1972). Interestingly, when he's digging up the coffin, Lyle uses a lighted match to see what he's doing, just as Officer Kelton (Paul Marco) does while rooting around in Inspector Clay's grave in Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957).

Ed Wood's When the Topic is Sex: "Necrophilia: Love of the Dead" (1973)

A lovely logo for a not-very-lovely topic.

NOTE: This article continues my coverage of Ed Wood's When the Topic is Sex (BearManor Media, 2021).

The article: "Necrophilia: Love of the Dead." Originally published in Party Time (Gallery Press), vol. 2, no. 1, February/March 1973. Credited to "Dick Trent."

Excerpt: "Necrophilia can be a gruesome study. Variations in how the necrophiliac derives pleasure does much to increase the macabre circumstances. Most necrophiliacs take a more passive attitude and are content to simply commit intercourse, cunnilingus or onanism (masturbate) with the cadaver, or at least in the presence of the cadaver. Others are not content unless they also hack the body to pieces." 

Eddie's graphic book about the topic.

Reflections: How far are you willing to go in your pursuit of Edward D. Wood, Jr.? It's a question I've asked before, but I think it bears repeating today. Some fans stick to his better-known movies from the 1950s, preferring his more mainstream sci-fi/horror efforts such as Bride of the Monster (1955) and Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957). Others are willing to go a little further and explore Ed's adult film work from the '60s and '70s, just as long as the movies aren't too explicit or raunchy. 

I'd say, however, that the ultimate loyalty test for any Ed Wood fan is his writing—the novels, magazine articles, and nonfiction books Eddie penned during his darkest, drunkest years. Not only is most of this material pornographic in nature, often explicitly so, it's also Ed's most extreme in terms of subject matter. On the page, even more than on the screen, Ed Wood explored the dark side of sex. This includes detailed descriptions of various kinks, fetishes, and even violent crimes. It's understandable that some fans will not want to expose themselves to this kind of material.

No matter what your cutoff point for Ed Wood is, however, you've definitely seen evidence of Ed's career-long obsession with necrophilia, i.e. an erotic fixation on corpses. It's at the heart of Plan 9 from Outer Space, after all. It's woven throughout Orgy of the Dead (1965) and Necromania (1971), too. But, again, it's in his writing that Ed really runs wild with this topic. Under the pseudonym "V.N. Jensen," he wrote an entire, quite graphic book about necrophilia: The Love of the Dead (1968). He also discussed this unseemly topic in his other pseudo-educational paperbacks like Suburbia Confidential (1967) and Bloodiest Sex Crimes of History (1967).

The 1973 article "Necrophilia: The Love of the Dead" is in this same, disturbing vein—story after story of those who defile corpses for sexual pleasure and gratification. You'll notice the similarity to the title of his 1968 book. Eddie also manages to work in a plug for Necromania while he's at it. (This is one of the strangest examples of cross-promotion in showbiz history.)  He does not hold back when it comes to gruesome, unpleasant details. One of the victims described in this article, for instance, is a three-year-old girl. Another dies after having a "sharp stake" thrust "into her rectum and vagina." The necrophiles in this story engage in all sorts of disgusting acts, including drinking urine and ejaculating on dead bodies. Some are also cannibals.

Bob Blackburn, who compiled When the Topic is Sex, warned me about this article in advance:

The necrophilia article is/was to me the most challenging of all 80 in the book. I think you and folks who've read it or will read it will understand. Of course it's totally in Ed's bailiwick. When I was re-reading it for the final edit/proofreading, I was kinda shocked at the graphicness of it. But, hey, it's pure Ed Wood.

When he said that, I knew I had to revisit Ed's Love of the Dead book. When I read it a few months ago, I was steamrolling my way through as many of Ed's written works as possible, one after another in a short span of time. Under those circumstances, it didn't seem all that different from many of Ed's other adult paperbacks of the era—maybe a little kinkier, but not too outrageous. 

Returning to the book now, though, I was taken aback by the way Ed truly wallows (what other word is there?) in the stomach-churning details of these violent sex crimes. Given how often he revisits the topic throughout his career, I have to wonder what was happening in Ed Wood's mind. I mean, who thinks about necrophilia that much? Bob is right that this is "Ed's bailiwick," but what a weird goddamned bailiwick it is. The saving grace of an article like this is its brevity. Sure, it's an unpleasant topic, but it's over after a few pages. If you can survive "Necrophilia: The Love of the Dead," you can handle just about anything Ed writes.

Ed tries to lend some credence to this article by quoting a few experts. One is Dr. James McCary, presumably the same one who wrote Sexual Myths and Fallacies (1971). Another is Austrian psychologist Wilhelm Stekel (1868-1940), a disciple of Sigmund Freud. (Freud himself is not mentioned in this article but is namechecked in the Love of the Dead book.) As for the "Dr. Zugmund Siegel" who relates the story of a female necrophile who claims to have been impregnated by her dead husband, I can't find any evidence that he ever existed.

Next: "Sorcery and Sex" (1970)