By NATE YAPP

Welcome to a world where the improbable happens... Val Lewton and Ed Wood work together. Well, not directly, and Lewton isn't happy about it. Watch as both alter the face of cult film forever...

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Perhaps the most bizarre stories in B-movie history is the one behind Val Lewton's Plan 9 From Outer Space and Ed Wood's I Walked With A Zombie. These two films are inexorably linked, one frighteningly good despite a silly premise, and one hilariously stupid, despite a high-class original script.

It all began in 1943, during Lewton's time at RKO. He was producing low-budget horror flicks to help the studio out of the financial hole that Orson Welles and his masterpiece Citizen Kane had dug. Lewton had just finished up The Cat People with Jacques Tourneur when RKO hit him with the title for his next movie: Graver-Robbers From Outer Space. Also, the furnisher of this title, a recently discharged W.W.II soldier named Edward D. Wood, Jr., also had a plot ready, one that RKO was enthusiastic about. Here was a science fiction epic that they felt, with Lewton's help, could be produced relatively cheaply.

The plot that Wood provided was sprawling, set in Los Angeles, Washington D.C., and the depths of space. It involved aliens resurrecting 3 corpses in a bid to destroy humans before we build a bomb that would end life in the universe. Standing in the way of these extraterrestrial are a discharged Air Force pilot, a colonel with a desk job, and a detective.

Lewton was reportedly 'extremely unhappy' to be saddled with that plot, and requested permission to 'tweak it' for 'budgetary concerns.' Over the course of a weekend, he and DeWitt Bodeen wrote a fresh script, keeping only the most basic bones of the plot. They moved the action to New York, eliminated the colonel and the pilot, and made the cop a psychiatrist.

The new script involved a young woman who swears she saw here dead father rise from his grave, surrounded by a mysterious light. Convinced that something's wrong., her fiancé sends her to a psychiatrist, who at first thinks the woman is crazy. However, reports of mysterious phenomena and murders committed by culprits fitting the descriptions of three recently deceased persons slowly convince the doctor that he may have been wrong.

After being attacked by her own father, the woman becomes hysterical and rushes blindly to the graveyard. On her trail, the fiancé and the psychiatrist arrive just in time to see the girl and the three reanimated dead vanish into a beam of light. Finally, a voice comes from the skies: "Our ninth plan has been completed. Humans have provided us with a diplomat to help us understand. The death of certain members of your species was regrettably necessary. We will return for your judgment." Fade out. The End.

Lewton, while not entirely satisfied with the final script, was glad to have made a coherent plot out of Wood's inane ideas. He called upon Jacques Tourneur to direct, and began the arduous task of casting.

Naturally, the part of the psychiatrist went to Tom Conway, but beyond that, Lewton was stumped. Wood had requested that Bela Lugosi play a major role, and Lewton, lacking a better idea, cast him as the dead father. Slowly, the rest of the ensemble fell into place. Frances Dee would play Sally, the main character, and James Ellison would be Bill, her fiancé. Darby Jones and Christine Gordon were tapped to play the other two zombies.

Lewton insisted that the title be changed to the less offensive Plan 9 From Outer Space, a request which RKO reluctantly agreed to. However, they insisted on showing aliens early in the movie, which Lewton dealt with by having difficult-to-see humanoids cause Sally to faint when she first sees her father.

Production was completed with relative ease in a 3 week period, and Lewton and Company moved on to The Seventh Victim, and Bela Lugosi on to a string of Monogram programmers. Finally, on March 16th, 1943, Plan 9 premiered.

Unfortunately, with a country in the midst of a war, and the Communist paranoia-driven science fiction craze not yet upon us, Plan 9 proved to be a flop at the box office, barely making back production costs. In retaliation, RKO refused to produce Lewton's next planned project: the Curt Siodmak/Ardel Wray penned I Walked With A Zombie.

They filed the script away in their vaults, supposedly forever.

Now, flash-forward 15 years to an older Ed Wood, now with two solid Z-grade cult classics under his belt: Glen Or Glenda? and Bride Of The Monster. Fondly recalling his experience with Lewton, Wood decided to see if he can't do the great producer a favor in return. His opportunity came when RKO, in deep financial trouble, auction off the rights to a script by Curt Siodmak and Ardel Wray: I Walked With A Zombie.

Wood was enthusiastic about his new property, but wanted to film a version with his own unique spin. So, working with a fervent speed, he completely rewrote the original.

The Siodmak/Wray screenplay was, in its most basic sense, "Jane Eyre" with voodoo. A nurse comes to Haiti to care for the bizarrely sick wife of a rich plantation owner. In order to find a cure for the wife's near-comatose condition, the nurse delves into matters she probably shouldn't and discovers a voodoo culture deep in the jungle.

Wood's version was slightly more science fiction oriented. It involved a team of rescuers, including Kelton, a mainland cop, who are looking for a famous research scientist. This scientist holds in his head the plans to a destructive weapon known as the Solaranite. Unfortunately, the doctor is in a zombie-trance, wandering around in a black cape and tux, unable to speak or think. The only female on the team, along with Kelton, discover a voodoo lord with a hulking bald manservant. This witch doctor has transformed the scientist into a zombie, and will keep him that way forever to prevent the Solaranite from ever being built. When the female and Kelton return to tell the rest of the group, she is attacked by the scientist. After a massive struggle, the hulking manservant comes in and kills the zombified doctor. He is then accidentally gunned down. One of the bullets strikes a barrel of gasoline and sets fire to the jungle haven of the voodoo lord.

Casting for this latest cult masterpiece was simple. To play the scientist, Wood used a small reel of Bela Lugosi footage he shot before the actor's death, and has wife's chiropractor fill in as a body double (with his cape covering the lower half of his head). The search team was made up of Lyle Talbot, Gregory Walcott, Mona McKinnon, and Paul Marco as Kelton the Cop. Dudley Manlove was hired on as Eros, the Witch Doctor, and Tor Johnson happily joined the cast to play Lobo, the hulking bald manservant. Criswell provided opening narration about life during death.

After filming and editing were completed, Wood invited Jacques Tourneur to the very first screening of I Walked With A Zombie. Tourneur was said to have been horrified and offered Wood a large sum of money to burn all of the prints of the film. Confused by the proposition, Wood turned Tourneur down.

The rest is well known to horror fans. In 1972, Plan 9 From Outer Space was rediscovered in the vaults of UCLA, after it had been presumed lost forever. It's now considered to be among the best science fiction films ever made, with only the plot cited as a weakness. Though no longer available on video, it pops up occasionally on AMC.

I Walked With A Zombie, on the other hand, is usually listed on the worst-ever lists, though it rarely qualifies as the most horrendous (an honor that falls to Manos: The Hands of Fate most of the time). Bad movie fans enjoy the dialogue on this one just as much as any other Wood production, as most of it is atrociously funny. An oft-mentioned example from Eros, the Witch Doctor: "Your stupid souls! Stupid! Stupid!"

To this day, cult cinema fans theorize what Zombie would have been like under Lewton, or the heights of absurdity that Plan 9 could have reached with Wood at the helm. I suppose we'll never know, but we do have the joy of remembering the time when horror's best producer and its worst director crossed paths.

(Nate Yapp is webmaster and head reviewer at Classic Horror, the monthly horror film webzine.   Pay him a visit and tell him Renfield sent you.)

Thanks, Nate, and we hope that the fans of the late and great Val Lewton have their senses of humor intact.   Hey...what's that smell?  Something die?  Look--it's...it's...Val Lewton...just kidding, Val...gasp...choke...

Article copyright © Nate Yapp

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