The Exaltation of Defeat: Ed Wood's FINAL CURTAIN (1957), NIGHT OF THE GHOULS (1959)

(Night #1 of the Ten Days of Ed Wood Acidemic Holiday Special)

"Patience is the only rewarding virtue." - Dr. Acula

It's Kenne "the Meanest Man in Movies" Duncan's big phony swami moment, and he's nailing it. His laconic gravel-pit voice resounds with John Wayne authority as he grooves a pair of rich, elderly suckers like blobs of vinyl into the believer LPs. He's got them in the 'drape room' - a black curtain shrouded space in a surreal nowhere zone that looks like the janitorial void beneath an unadorned poverty row soundstage. It's like being buried alive, in a good way, not under 12 feet of dirt but in the air-conditioned darkness of an empty midnight cinema. "I have consulted with the prince of darkness who rules my destiny," says Duncan, I mean Dr. Acula (get it?). He's flanked by skeletons and some assistants, confederates, and two elderly grief-stricken suitors. Meanwhile his cute younger girlfriend (Valda Hansen) does the wandering spirit bit, clad in a big old white gown and waving her long fingernails, wandering through the bushes outside to scare off any interlopers.and then wafting through the seance, posing as the lost Lucille, the beloved of the grieving old man (Nightmare Alley-style), posing as the old man's dead love (she is supposedly inside the a candle-flanked coffin in Dr. Acula's 'resurrection chamber' slowly coming back to life ("each rising poses its own challenges). And if that doesn't work, there's Lobo (Tor Johnson). He didn't die in that fire back in Bride of the Monster. But half his face is gone - replaced by a mushy omelette of messed-up flesh. 

 One doesn't have to read Nightmare of Ecstasy  (the indispensable oral history of Ed Wood) to get the giddy, weird sensation this film was shot at 3AM, relying on darkness and the free-standing second floor dressing rooms (replete with the twisting metal stairs) and storage areas for sets. This late-late night seance, attending at feeling of cool isolation  works perfectly for the idea of a seance, as this is when the veil between dimensions is thinnest, the real witching hour. Suddenly the tricks of the bunco seance trade begins with a tumbling sprawl of sounds: a goofy slide whistle, a blaring, squawking trumpet ad its disembodied mute bouncing around on visible wires like some goofball mobile against the jet black background;  booming feedback squall, a clash of drums and a cymbal; the smack of thunder; a guy covered in a white sheet hopping across the screen while slide whistle notes flutter. And then the coup de grace, a close-up on the face of a black man in a Devo helmet, furiously licking his teeth, staring merrily into the camera as we hear a pitch-shifted voice that doesn't match his mouth say "Mongo Mongo Mongo." Since this is the first and only appearance of a black man in all of the Ed Wood cannon, it's a sudden fascinating WTF moment inside a sequence full of them, inside a movie that's all them. Who was this guy? Where did Ed get him? Was he just at the bar where the cast and crew would gather to drink up half the budget before heading off to their after-hours soundstage rendezvous? 

The result is a film that exists entirely in the 'true' dream state zones, in s darkened space that makes wLynch's Black Lodge seem like Denny's. It's the rickety house on Willow's Lake from Ed's earlier film Bride of the Monster, abandoned from a fire / lightning strike that left Lobo (Tor Johnson) facially disfigured, and likely eager for a new master, which turns out to be Dr. Acula, who has a habit of setting up shop in reputed haunted houses, of which the house on Willow's Lake assuredly is (so reputed), to keep the cops away and add to his bunco artist cred. 

At the seance are an incredulous police lieutenant Bradford (Duke Moore), clad in a tux (to match scenes inserted from an unaired TV pilot), a co-grifter gigolo pal of Acula's, a pair of elderly suckers, and a gathering of skeletons, all seated; a beautiful girl in flowing blonde locks (Valda Hansen) and a shoulder cut white dress walks along like a sleepwalking zombie, doubling the old man's name --in a flashback to Nightmare Alley. Outside in the dark, the Black Ghoul (Jeanne Stevens), a real ghost, wears a party store crown and a black veil, wandering around killing lovers from lover's lane and whomever else. She too is from that pilot, and in some scenes for the film is so covered in a burka-like face-to-toe black shroud, with the birthday party crown on, we know instantly it's probably Ed. That Stevens shot only a few things, a scene from the pilot, and a few shots of her in the crown and veil close-up, staring into the camera and waving her fingers. 

For Ed Wood fans, connoisseurs of chintzy spook shows, Night is the end of the line as far as his directorial monster movies go. Just scripts for other directors, and whiskey-stained smut, shorn to stilted nothing by censorship. 

Only occasionally, as in the deliciously tedious Orgy of the Dead, would his flair for ghouls and graveyards once more find fruition.

But first, the miracle that was the belated discovery of Night of the Ghouls. Wood fans like me could hardly believe it when the film surfaced--out of nowhere-- on video for the first time ever in 1984. It had everything we love about Ed and then some. Even Criswell shows up, looking bloated and puffy-eyed (as he would in Orgy). Hard to believe Night of the Ghouls was made the same year as Plan Nine -which showed a crisp, ferociously focused Criswell at his desk ready for action. Here, in the coffin, his eyes are bleary, bobbing in their sockets as he follows cue cards just below the camera level. He lets you know that things he has told us in the past have been proven to be "more than fact." Convolutions like these would fall apart in the mouths of lesser men but his peculiar cadences match the language so perfectly it may be whole minutes before you realize everything he says has canceled itself out through ouroboros loop-de-loop of train-of-thought logic. The police, he informs us, are "willing to admit the existence of juvenile delinquency" (allowing for clips from the unfinished Hellborn, later also used The Sinister Urge) but unwilling to admit in the horrors which he will now reveal to us.

 Those horrors begin at a police precinct where Inspector Bradord is told he must cancel his date at the opera (an ingenious way to explain why he's wearing a tux in footage shot for another project--as we shall see). He's the go-to guy on the force to handle "them weirdies" and at Willow's Lake it seems a girl in a white dress waved her long fingernails at a lost old couple driving by, terrifying them to the extent they need an ambulance. We see the gaping-mouthed old couple (including Teenagers from Outer Space's Harvey B. Dunn) in the car in a hilarious flashback and already we can hardly believe our luck--this film rocks. There's no reason why seeing a woman in white walking by the side of the road constitutes such an urgent police matter, but such is the universe we're in. We're in Woodland again, and it's paradise if we but stop asking questions. 

That's the magic of Wood. You can call him a hack or incompetent but, like he has that one foot in the rattletrap her and now, and one the harrowing cold void that only drunks like Tennessee Williams, Faulkner, Hemingway, and Wood, can look down into without flinching. In a way Night of the Ghouls is the Ed Wood version of Under the Volcano or The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone.  One of two elderly grief-addled suckers at seance, Ms. Wingate Yates-Foster, seems to sum it up. As she watches, her dead husband is seen to rise from a nearby coffin--his face obviously aged with make-up, his voice shrouded in echo--we can see a mix of relief and incredulity in her face. She seems to half-know she's letting herself be so conned by so obvious a charade, but it works to free her from doubt and guilt over her choice of replacement husband---a young gigolo. 

"I'm so happy to hear you say that," Miss Yates-Foster says of her husband's sanctioning of this sleazy gigolo, "I've been so alone... since you died." There, in the resurrection chamber--as close to the grave as one can get as far as being shrouded in total darkness, her relief and conveyance of unutterable sadness seem to be choked off at the echo.  The actress nails that line in such a way that it creates a great sob seizure through the entire fabric of Ed Wood's tombstone universe, collapsing the cardboard scenery tight around her like a vacuum, then exhaling it back to where it was, somehow reset and new. The actress playing her, Marcelle Hemphill, is an unknown with no other screen credits (that imdb knows about) but her one moment, in this scene of a deep dark nest of bunco chicanery in this deep, low rent last ditch production, hits deep in the same way Chaney's "We never had much time anyway" monologue hits in Spider Baby, or Lugosi's "Hunted, despised" speech in Bride of the Monster hits, as powerful little moments of true acting, marooned deep in impoverished fly-by-nite cult craziness, that get at the very heart of what being an outsider is. The popular kids may make fun of us, but when they're all asleep like the dutiful safety-first Clydes they are, we're downstairs in front of the TV, whiskey or whatever at our sides, in full charge of the universe.  If we clean up the mess before they get up to, they'll never even know we were there. 

Only we, who know the terrible sting of feeling "so alone," who know the highs and lows of addiction, the hellish pain alternating with heavenly exaltation, know the true joy those late night/early morning hours. When there's no one awake in the world, there is no loneliness anymore. We're free. We understand how the misery of being alone is often such you'll sign any satanic contract, which is why we don't scoff a Mrs. Yates-Foster's choice of paramour, or warn her away, like Mrs. Stone's friends in the Roman Spring. We know the illusion granted by him is better than any sensible daytime reality of being alone in her big empty mansion. If she's smart--and she's not--she'd get a pre-nup--but there you are! She needs her husband's ghost corpse to sanction a choice she'll make anyway, and Dr. Acula is just helping out for a cut, same as any other capitalist filling any other human need.

Depending on your tastes, Marco's Kelton, the rattled cop, is a liability. Learning he's being sent off to Willow's Lake with Bradford and told to wait by the car, Marco hears noises and sees the Black Ghoul and Woman in white wafting through the trees in the distance. Mugging and overacting shamelessly and semi-ineptly, sputtering his 'b-b-buts' and weird lines like: "Monsters! space people! mad doctors! They don't teach about such things at the police academy, yet that's all I've been assigned to!" His weird off-brand interpretation of Wood's dialogue earns a special star, but it's not a star anyone wants to see displayed. 

Scaring poor Kelton seems to be quite an easy thing. But it wouldn't be an Ed Wood film if he didn't feel the need to touch all the same bases as his beloved Monogram Lugosi chillers, and that means comic relief, ideally bungling cops or female reporters heedless of danger until it's too late to turn back. And in today's climate, the idea of police shooting at unarmed civilians just because they happen to look scary is no longer is 'funny' like it used to be. Here in Ghouls though, even Kelton can evince growth. After being throttled by Lobo, dumped in a coffin, and rescued by Clay, we next see him relaxing on a shitty backstage couch and smoking a cigarette in a way that lets you know he's a real smoker and not some kibbitzer. He seems like a different person, just for a minute, like real. Maybe the cigarette helps: "Mind if I rest a minute?" he asks Bradford, hat off, and not hamming for the first time ever in his Wood trilogy. "then I'll be ready." 

But soon he's yelling "there's my hat!" with the finesse of a bullhorn trying to sneak up on a feather.

Change doesn't change anything--we sense the abyss looming--a darkness within the darkness that no amount of hamming will allay. This is a movie wherein we know the end of a whole genre, of life, of the night, of youth, of life, is coming,  but we're not going to go all Kelton and freak out about it, emptying our gun at phantoms and maybe hitting beautiful ghost impersonators. We are going down, and nothing can change that, but we can stand firm and not flinch, but we don't live past the credits no matter who we are. Like Tennessee Williams' later plays, Ghouls is a torch that lets us see deeper into the midnight darkness. We realize the soothing sound of a friend's voice, or a shot of rum after the parents go to bed, or even an AA pamphlet, can ease us back from the lip of the abyss. 

Wingate-Fosters' beautiful heartbreaking moment eases, like Roman Spring of Mrs Stone's love affair with Warren Beatty, the feeling of death onrushing while at the same time illuminating just how false is the warmth we cling to. Deep inside the black abyss of a D-list spook film, we feel the boozy cheer of meeting up with Ed's ragtag crew at various Hollywood bars, drinking up the budget. We feel a warm fire deep inside the blackness, beating back the aching loneliness of a town where has-beens and never-rans are shunned by the successful like a contagious plague. Bribing the night watchmen to shoot after-hours on an unrented soundstage, creeping in at 2 AM, after the bars had closed, setting up and shooting against black stage walls and stage curtains, these actors knew Wood was giving them a gift of illusion, akin to Dr. Acula's resurrection chamber. The "prince of darkness" provided these tinsel-lashed losers a small oasis -- a phantasm of boozy security deep in that black death nesting doll.... a parallel to the stay of execution the movie provides us, these decades later, as we either drink in ecstasy to Ed's wild ride or convulse on the floor in agony in front of an empty screen. We're living here because these people made the effort. You can feel the weird magic in that they themselves never got to see it on the big screen in an audience, never got critical feedback, not even a derogatory mention in Variety. Their ghosts are seeing it now, for the first time, through you, grateful for the flicker of iconic immortality your appreciation grant them, at long last. 

That may sound sad, but it's a Woodsian sadness, a sweet, giddy form of surrender to the narcotic comfort of the cardboard grave. It's the final sign post on the road to ruin, a road where alcohol-fueled love of cinema trumps skill and focus. Spook show flimflam ("Mongo! Mongo"); terrified cop Paul Marco on the midnight perimeter, emptying his revolver at women and trees; Lobo with a big wad of gunk on half his face; an elder couple terrified by a young girl's long fingernails; Criswell's resonant narration; Cute Valda in her white dress doing a homage to Coleen Gray's ghost impersonation scene from Nightmare Alley; the contrast of the Black Ghost (Jeanne Stevens) wafting along, occasionally killing wandering lovers in lovers' lane,  all keep one's own slide around the perimeter of the abyss feel air-conditioned and inviting. As long as this Night of the Ghouls keeps playing, the booze keeps flowing and it's still dark out... all is well. We know this groovy movie will end, that the credits will rise, and the bottle run dry, and the sun come up, the rooster crow, our coffins bid us scurry home, back to our coffins. For now, night is on high, Duke Moore is in his tuxedo, the movie is playing, the booze is there, all is well.... the sun has been officially seen to set. If the sun will be seen to rise, well, that's tomorrow's look-out. 

THE FINAL CURTAIN IS RAISED

Night of the Ghouls is a film even the cast may have never actually seen. The legend goes it was lost for decades, deep in the bowels of a processing lab, waiting for Wood to come pay the bill. When it came video in 1984 it was as something otherworldly and brand new, Bride of the Monster's forgotten sequel. For Ed Wood fans, it also gave us a wild hope that maybe there are other, similar things--strange things-- floating out there somewhere in the ether. 

Then, in 2010, intrepid fans exhumed Wood's 1957 TV pilot, "THE FINAL CURTAIN", first in a series Ed envisioned called Portraits in Terror. When it didn't get picked up, Wood worked some footage from it into Night of the Ghouls, which finally explains why Bradford had to be wearing a tux before going up to That Old House on Willow's Lake. Duke Moore, the star of Curtain, is wearing one. Clothes got to match - even in Woodsville. 

For CURTAIN, Moore plays a haunted actor (his role onstage "The Vampire") hanging in his dressing room after the play is over and everyone is gone for the night. Why? Why has he remained in this darkened theater? Because he must find an object. as Dudley Manlove's weird, wondrous narration explains, he doesn't know which object, how big or small, only that he is afraid to find that object. But he's drawn to find.... that object. On the soundtrack there's only a few sound effects and an internal monologue read with mounting, and then mounting some more, hysteria.

Things don't add up from the beginning: the stage of the theater is dressed is a quaint one-room rustic cabin, making us wonder how a vampire in a tux could possibly fit in. We never learn, instead we watch Moore wander around the empty theater (it was probably all shot in a single night, maybe they even snuck in after hours?), his eyes bugged out in horror while Manlove oomphs up any weird vibes that Ed can riff up on from nothing more than tied up cords of roope, rafters, lights, and railings. And riff he does. The rows of darkened audience seats seem like "squatty little fat men standing row after row..." A stray wind witching hour might be "a spirit coming in for a night of pleasure" (which Manlove pronounces "play-zsher."). He hears "a creak in the galleries!" A chill passes through him. "A rattle in the pipes! Somewhere overhead!" 

There is so little movement, other than that of Bradford, eyes bugging out ever more as he beholds things like curtain rigging, electric switches, and open windows leading out to the noise-filled night; backstage he enters cavernous maze of storage and dressing rooms, the wide hallways make us realize we may no longer be in a quaint downtown theater, but a cavernous and dilapidated soundstage. Manlove is ready to lose his shit: "I cannot tell where space ends and the auditorium walls begin. But... do I really want to know?!" Thunder crashes, eerie chiming organ notes are almost subliminally low in the mix. The railing up to the dressing rooms seems to vibrate in his hand and is "like a cold, slimy, snake!"  The stairs ring "louder than I have ever heard them ring before!"

If not for the hysterical voiceover--prime Ed at his most gloriously neurotic (commenting on every sensation, including the clammy cold of a railing, the echo of a step, the yowling of a cat, that stacking of some newspapers on a dressing room stool, etc. After awhile, one longs for a slight movement in the dark of the theater, the sign of some swaying curtain, a shadow, or something to happen to justify Moore's irrational terror / Manlove's quivering neurosis. Shots repeat over and over - a stack of newspapers on a stool; ropes tied and hanging in the rafters; the winding empty rows of darkened seats; a sky light (showing a daytime sky - but no matter). Remember those? 

Some of the VO babble returns in Orgy of the Dead ("I know I should think of other things....pleasant things" and the line about "monsters to be pitied; monsters to be despised" which we hear/read in both Orgy and Night of the Ghouls). Criswell borrows some phrases for his narration of Inspector Clay's sensations in Night of the Ghouls, riffing on the cold, clammy railing, this time not a snake but something "cold... clammy.... like the dead!"). But who can fault a drunk for repeating himself especially as he must have presumed no one would ever see this, since it was never picked up. That we're talking about it now is a comfort to any outsider artist who labors on projects that have no ready audience. In 50 or 60 years, who knows? 

But no outsider artist can touch the delirious inclusive nocturnal madness that is prime Ed Wood: whipping up a story out of nothing more than a spooked actor walking around an empty theater, voiceover free-styling in prime and priceless examples of his nightmarish ecstasy, the delirious radiance he finds in just about anything. This is why he reminds me too of being a young child in the 70s, still the height of the classic monster craze, when we'd make haunted houses out of the rec room, and conjure vast spires gothic madness from a few plastic skulls, a scary sound effects record, a bowl full of cold noodles, and a blindfold. The spook details would fill themselves in with our titanic imaginations. With Ed, that swooning adoration for the macabre survives into adulthood, beyond all opposites-- good and bad, alive or dead, nothing and something, alone and together, drunk with boozy ecstasy, and obliterated by the cold dead sleep of the intoxicated.

So yeah, even so, nothing in The Final Curtain happens until the final 'twist' - EXCEPT a memorably surreal scene that would be folded into Orgy: Moore finds Jeanie Stevens ("The Black Ghoul") motionless in a props room, dressed in gossamer Max Reinhardt Titania white, standing still and looking blankly at him in a scene so wondrously strange and eerie it's as if it belongs in yet a different show, maybe the other unaired episode of Portraits of Terror, "The Cry of the Banshee." rumored to exist somewhere in that eternal Woodian limbo. 

Stevens is marvelous. Was she only available for an hour or so? Is that why there's so little of her? Whatever happened to her, or Hansen, or Hemphill, or any of them, these one-shot actresses who wafted through the Ed-verse? Most of them are precious and to be cherished, especially in this phase of his career, the Orgy / Night / Curtain phase.

They may be gone, but, to paraphrase Criswell, they get to rise from their coffins once a year (or more) when a powerful medium (like video) calls them back into the land of the visible. They may need to creep back to the void come the dawn, but then again so do you. The parents will be waking up soon and you don't want your dad to find you looking like this. See you soon.... in the grave!!

 

read my 2009 praise of Night of the Ghouls here

See also the Other 11 Nights of Wood, and Wood-esquery:

Gorilla, mon Amor: Ed Wood's THE BRIDE AND THE BEAST (1958) + UNTAMED MISTRESS (1956)

Eternal Rewards: ORGY OF THE DEAD (1965)

"Your Powers are lightnings!" - REVENGE OF DR. X (1962) 

Way of the Coffin Flop: GAME OF DEATH II (1981)

Hair of the Dogmatizer: THE BRAINIAC (1962)

Cozzi takes the Cake: THE BLACK CAT (1989) aka Demons 6: De Profundis

Noisemakers: NABONGA (1941), BOWANGA, BOWANGA (1951), EEGAH (1962)

Playing Card Flapping in the Wheel of Progress: THE BEAST OF YUCCA FLATS (1961)

The Far Outsider: SHAITANI DRACULA
Brokeback Barbarians vs. the Metalheads: CONQUEST (1983)

O'Keefe, the Imperturbable: ATOR: THE FIGHTING EAGLE (1982), THE BLAD MASTER (1982), THE IRON WARRIOR (1987)