Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 218: What motivates Bela Lugosi's character in Plan 9?

Never is a long time, as Bela Lugosi proves in Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957).

When I think about the movies I've seen the most times, a few titles come immediately to mind, including The Wizard of Oz (1939), Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975), The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975), This is Spinal Tap (1984), and The Big Lebowski (1998). Among Ed Wood's movies, however, the clear winner is Plan 9 from Outer Space aka Graverobbers from Outer Space (1957). I first sat through this notorious sci-fi horror chiller in October 1992 as part of a four-film Ed Wood marathon in Flint, Michigan. Since then, I've probably seen Plan 9 theatrically about a half-dozen more times. At home—through VHS, DVD, Blu-ray, and streaming—I've screened it dozens of times in whole or in part, often while doing research for this series.

In short, I've spent many hours of my life with this odd little film. And yet, all these decades later, it may still have things to teach me. I'll give you an example.

Critic Harry Medved, who helped give both Ed Wood and Plan 9 from Outer Space some measure of immortality with his book The Golden Turkey Awards (1980), recently devoted an episode of his PBS documentary series Locationland to the making of Plan 9. Among the filming sites Medved visited was 15129 Lakewood St. in the Sylmar neighborhood of Los Angeles. Back in the 1950s, this charming domicile was the residence of actor-wrestler Tor Johnson, who played Inspector Daniel Clay in the film. Johnson allowed Ed Wood to use the site as the home of Bela Lugosi's unnamed character, generally referred to as Old Man or Ghoul Man. In Plan 9, we see a grief-stricken Lugosi—still reeling from the death of his young wife (Vampira)—smelling the roses outside the house before wandering into traffic and getting run over.

"Confused by his great loss," intones narrator Criswell, "the old man left that home, never to return again."

Except Lugosi totally returns again just 23 minutes later, as proven by that aforementioned episode of Locationland. When Harry Medved visited the house in Sylmar, the owner graciously let him film the outside. But Medved and his guest, comedian and writer Dana Gould, wanted to film the back porch of the house as well, because this is where Ed Wood shot the scene in which Bela's character, having been resurrected from the grave as a zombie, enters his former home, now owned by pilot Jeff Trent (Gregory Walcott) and his wife Paula (Mona McKinnon). Jeff's away when Bela arrives, so Paula is all by herself and quite vulnerable when this strange figure suddenly appears in her bedroom.

Even though I've been watching Plan 9 for decades, it took Locationland to make me realize that the Trents are living in Lugosi's character's former home and must have moved into the place shortly after he died. Jeff's coworker, sassy stewardess Edie (Norma McCarty), comments that the house is too close to the local cemetery, "I tried to get you kids to not buy too near one of those things," she opines. "We get there soon enough as it is." She also says Jeff's house is "quiet alright, like a tomb." Jeff is rightfully concerned that the police keep showing up at the cemetery for unknown reasons. What exactly is going on there?

We soon find out what's happening at that cemetery, and it's more bizarre than we could have possibly guessed. Aliens from a faraway planet, represented by the arrogant Eros (Dudley Manlove) and the more pragmatic Tanna (Joanna Lee), are using their "electrode guns" to resurrect some recently deceased earthlings, including both Lugosi and Lugosi's wife. This is all part of a larger campaign to strike fear in the hearts of the human race and thus deter us from creating a weapon called "Solaronite" that will destroy the entire universe. Got all that? 

The aliens' plan is quite convoluted and doesn't come close to working. But they do manage to bring Lugosi back to "simulated life" for a short while. Once resurrected, he is more like a traditional obedient "voodoo zombie" rather than the cannibalistic, aggressive zombies we know from the George Romero films, starting with Night of the Living Dead (1968). Eros and Tanna can control the zombies to some extent, but Lugosi is apparently allowed to explore the world on his own for a while when he's revived. And where does he choose to go first? Right back to his old house.

The 2022 Ed-Vent Calendar, Day 22: Reality is What You Can Get Away With (1992)

Reality is What You Can Get Away With (1992)

Robert Anton Wilson (1932-2007)

This'll be a quickie, I promise. There's almost not enough to warrant an article here, but I wanted to point something out to you.

In the early '90s, around the same time I stumbled upon Danny Peary's Cult Movies (1981), I discovered another strange book that changed my mind forever: Robert Anton Wilson's Reality is What You Can Get Away With (1992). Would you believe it was at the same bookstore? That's right. Young & Welshans in Flint, Michigan. I believe that building is an Outback Steakhouse now. 

Robert Anton Wilson was... well, it's tough to describe what he was. Sci-fi author, psychologist, guru, and intergalactic wiseguy. Imagine a hybrid of Albert Einstein and Groucho Marx. He was too intellectually rambunctious to be contained by any one category or genre, so his career went in a lot of different directions simultaneously. (Kind of like Ed Wood's, now that I think of it.) 

Reality—its title inspired by a quote from another visionary fruitcake, Hunter S. Thompson—is one of Robert's many oddball projects to manifest itself over the years. It's presented as "an illustrated screenplay," but it's a script that's meant to be read, not produced. Still with me? To make things even more convoluted, Wilson has added a framing device wherein this unproduced screenplay has been discovered by academics in the distant future. They're puzzling over this artifact from a strange and primitive time, i.e. the 1990s.

But what of the script itself? Well, it's a rapid-fire montage of short (sometimes very short) scenes, all flowing into and out of each other like a dream or a particularly surreal Monty Python episode. Imagine if you got very stoned one night and started flipping through all the channels on your TV. Except that your perception of reality is skewed, so you imagine the characters in movies, TV shows, and commercials saying all kinds of unlikely things. 

If it were actually produced, Reality is What You Can Get Away With would consist of some wholly original footage, plus a generous helping of stock footage and clips from various movies. Those clips would be dubbed with new comedic dialogue, a la What's Up, Tiger Lily? (1966) or Mad Movies with the L.A. Connection (1985-86). (The future academics I mentioned have a hell of a time understanding this aspect of the script.)

Among the movies Wilson would have ransacked: The Phantom Planet (1961), The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939), Meet John Doe (1941), The Third Man (1949), The Outlaw (1943), The Thief of Baghdad (1940), The Maltese Falcon (1941), The Woman in Green (1945), Crack in the Mirror (1960), and Ed Wood's Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957). Eddie would be glad to know that two of his cinematic idols, Orson Welles and Jane Russell, play important roles in the film.

Throughout the screenplay, Wilson draws on the iconography of old, cheap science-fiction movies, so it's only natural that there should be some Ed Wood in the mix. The Plan 9 content, however, is fleeting. Early on, the film's protagonist, Ignatz Ratskiwatski, watches a film called Plan 3 from Outer Space on television. 

Much later in the script, Wilson includes a clip from Plan 9 featuring chiropractor Tom Mason filling in for the late Bela Lugosi. The book is heavily illustrated with photos, so I wanted to show you a scanned page from Reality including a picture of Dr. Tom:

A page from Reality.

Wilson's script includes the Plan 9 scene in which the Ghoul Man (Bela Lugosi/Tom Mason) enters the Trents' house and scares Paula Trent (Mona McKinnon) while she's in bed. Paula, identified in Reality merely as a "housewife," rises in terror. But the Ghoul Man, identified as a chiropractor, reassures her with this iconic line: "It's okay, I don't have an erection." (Erection jokes are a motif throughout the script.) Paula then dashes out of the house and into the cemetery, where she promptly runs into Basil Rathbone as Sherlock Holmes, who asks to borrow "some sugar... and maybe a few lines of coke." Wilson then cuts to some novelty bumper stickers (including "Campus Crusade for Cthulu").

And that's it. That's the extent of the Ed Wood content in Reality is What You Can Get Away With. It's not much, I understand, but I think it's noteworthy that a major author like Robert Anton Wilson would draw from Plan 9, however briefly, in one of his strangest and most memorable books.