Night of the Ghouls

Ed Wood was an angora-wearing cross-dresser who sank to the very bottom of the Hollywood shitpile back in the days when you could churn out cheap rubber-monster movies and still possess a certain cachet. Corman did it (a lot). Castle did it. But poor Ed — Ed just couldn’t make a go of it, what with the alcoholism, nutbaggery, and general dissipation. He ended up directing “monster nudie films,” and then outright porno flicks. Movies like Necromania.

His story was celebrated in a pseudo-fictional biopic, Ed Wood (1994), directed by Tim Burton and starring Johnny Depp as a weird, cartoonish take on Wood that was not, strictly speaking, very much in accord with historical reality. Be that as it may, that film has a certain cult-camp following to this day. That film, however, doesn’t cover the latter third of Wood’s unstellar career. Night of the Ghouls, from 1959, belongs to that last act — the purgatorial stretch when Wood was half-alive, half-myth, making movies like a man trying to prove resurrection by sheer force of will. (He’d hang on another eighteen years or so, finally succumbing to a heart attack in 1978.)

Night, which reuses footage from an aborted TV pilot called "Curtains," is every bit the journey through the celluloid stink-tank of ineptitude one would expect from Wood, whose Plan 9 from Outer Space is still lazily crowned “The Worst Movie of All Time” (it isn’t). What it really is, is an accidental séance — Wood summoning the ghosts of his own career, trying to make the dead walk again.

There’s Paul Marco as Kelton the Cop, the old standby from Plan 9 and Bride of the Monster. There’s the hulking Tor Johnson as the scar-faced monstrosity Lobo, another leftover from Bride. Kenne Duncan, who once narrated Glen or Glenda (1953) — that notorious, autobiographical, and incoherent curiosity — turns up as a charlatan swami, a spiritualist medium bilking rich old lady out of their cat-food money. Duke Moore, also from Plan 9, plays Inspector Daniel Bradford, wandering “The Old Willows Place” dressed, unaccountably, for an opera opening. Lovely blonde ingénue Valda Hansen drifts through as “The White Ghost.” It’s all some comic-book shit, G. But that’s cool.

Kenne Duncan, when not (as Rudolph Grey recounts in Nightmare of Ecstasy) whispering such sweet nothings as “I’d like to chew on your tits” into Valda Hansen’s broiling ears, holds forth in a séance parlor decorated with anatomical skeletons borrowed from a joke shop. Dr. Tom Mason, who haunted the phony cardboard graveyard of Plan 9 with a cape over his face pretending to be Bela Lugosi, arises from a coffin — like Criswell (who, incidentally, delivers our opening narration) — and makes a convincing if fraudulent corpse. Stuff floats by on a fishing line (held aloft by the spirits, ya know), while a ghoulish extra chomps his gums on camera and a ghost in a bedsheet whoops on the hopeless soundtrack. ALL WAS.

There are scenes with Eisenhower-era brats necking in a lovers-lane spot beneath a tree in the darkness — the deep dead pit of our hopes and fears, one knows wistfully. A hulking woman in black prowls about, maybe a revenant from Bride. (Bride is generally conceded to be the first in Wood’s so-called “Kelton Trilogy”: Bride of the Monster, Plan 9 from Outer Space, and Night of the Ghouls — the last of which went unreleased for decades because Ed couldn’t pay the lab bill.)

The plot hangs on the phony-spiritualist bit — the short con for marks and rubes Duncan hustles. But here’s the cosmic joke: while Duncan’s swami fakes ghostly phenomena for profit, Wood himself is doing the same for art. Both men are frauds who believe their own hokum. That’s why it works. Every wobbly tombstone, every visible fishing line, becomes a statement of faith. The Swami and Ed Wood are one — two sides of the same doomed magician, selling the lie because the truth hurts too much.

And those ghosts? They’re not just props. They’re Ed’s past — Lobo, Kelton, Criswell — his old movies come back to haunt him. Night of the Ghouls isn’t a sequel; it’s a resurrection ritual. Criswell rising from a coffin to speak is Ed Wood raising himself. Every frame says: “I’m still here.”

The séance scenes, with their rattling bones and floating crockery, are Hollywood stripped bare. The dream factory as literal ghost show. Wood exposes the illusion while clinging to it — you see the strings, and somehow that makes it truer. For him, belief is the effect. If you can still make the dead move on film, you haven’t entirely died.

Valda Hansen’s White Ghost drifts through like some lost muse, part Hollywood ideal, part memory of every woman who ever tolerated Ed’s manic enthusiasm. She’s the pale embodiment of the dream itself — beautiful, untouchable, already gone. The Old Willows Place she haunts could be Ed’s own mind: claustrophobic, improvised, full of doors that open onto nothing. He’s walking through it, flashlight in hand, still looking for a camera angle that redeems him.

Johnson stumbles around looking like a cool fat guy with groovy scar tissue. Moore wanders as aimlessly as Hansen. Duncan murmurs mediumistic nonsense as if he’s reading off a cue card. There are classroom skeletons and coffee cups on strings. And yet — somehow — it means something. Wood’s trying to convince us, and himself, that faith in make-believe can still save a man who’s lost everything else.

It’s “Old Dark House” stuff, sure, pumped out at a sleazy, third-rung level with a juvenile mentality borrowed from a horror comic — but behind the slop is a kind of accidental gnosis. Ed Wood, broke and drunk, turns his own failure into metaphysics. He’s not just making schlock; he’s proving that the act of creation itself is a séance.

Or something.

But it does have a certain charm, one supposes. A "Night of the Ghouls" — or a "Night of the Goils"? Take your pick, and fill your hand, pardner.

Excelsior.

Night of the Ghouls (1959) Ed Wood *FULL MOVIE*

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