NIGHT OF THE GHOULS (1959)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous* 
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *metaphysical, psychological*

No one would accuse Ed Wood's NIGHT OF THE GHOULS of being a "wandering minstrel" a la Gilbert and Sullivan, but the movie certainly is a "thing of shreds and patches." GHOULS, in addition to being a rough sequel to BRIDE OF THE MONSTER, borrows footage from three other Wood projects: HELLBORN, of which the director shot about fifteen minutes in 1952, and two 1957 pilots for an unsold TV horror-anthology. For decades all three were lost, but in more recent years Wood-ologists have managed to unearth both the HELLBORN footage and one of the two pilots, FINAL CURTAIN. Perhaps ironically, though, it's the other, still-lost pilot, THE NIGHT THE BANSHEE CRIED, that seems to have had the greatest influence on how Wood cobbled together his disparate materials. This site was good enough to provide a summary of the BANSHEE story as Wood presented it in prose:

A beautiful young woman is aware that she is dead but does not seem to understand why she has been summoned back to the swamp behind her father's now-decaying home. She can hear the anguished screaming of the banshee who has traditionally haunted the property. The woman scans her memory in search of clues as to why she was dragged from her peaceful grave. Suddenly, the reason becomes clear: she is to replace the banshee.

Both of the TV pilots were about characters having inevitable encounters with death, and though in 1957 Wood was only a little over thirty years old, he seems to have nurtured something of a death-fetish in some of his major works. In GHOULS what was only a mysterioso encounter between a young woman (Valda Hansen) and a banshee (Jeannie Stevens) becomes interpolated with a wider story, also about inevitable death. Hansen has new scenes in GHOULS, though I believe all of Stevens' appearances may stem either from BANSHEE or FINAL CURTAIN. (Famed cross-dresser Wood is said to have played Stevens' role-- a woman in a heavy black veil and robe-- for a few quick scenes in GHOULS.)  

 

This time out, Hansen plays Sheila, the accomplice of a phony spiritualist named Karl (Kenne Duncan), though to his customers he bills himself as "Dr Acula"-- and even had the part been essayed by Bela Lugosi, most 1950s audiences would have groaned at such a corny pun. Still, had Lugosi lived long enough to play "Dr Acula," he would have found himself on "familiar ground." At the movie's opening, fake medium Karl has moved into Willows Lake House, the location where Lugosi played the manor's original owner, mad scientist Eric Vornoff, who dies at the conclusion of BRIDE. Karl, though, has fixed up Vornoff's old house to draw in superstitious customers, and in addition he has Sheila drift around the grounds in a white dress, pretending to be "The White Ghost." Karl has a couple of other helpers, but they barely rate a mention next to his mute mountain of muscle Lobo, who survived the devastation of Vornoff's lab but has become Karl's enforcer.

Unfortunately for the mendacious mystic, some citizens catch sight of the White Ghost and ask the cops to check things out. Admittedly, the constables might have done so anyway, because the Black Ghost (and former Banshee) has also been meandering the area, and has killed at least two people. In any event, two cops are assigned to suss out Willows Lake House. One is Officer Kelton (Paul Marco), a veteran of both BRIDE and PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE. The other is new character Lt Bradford (Duke Moore), who spends the entire film clad in a tuxedo. Why? Because Wood wanted to recycle one FINAL CURTAIN scene, in which Moore's tuxedo'ed character, "The Actor," encounters Stevens' (blonde) character, "The Vampire." In my review of CURTAIN, I asserted that "The Vampire" was *probably* supposed to be a creation of The Actor's imagination. But here, the Black Ghost-- both in her black-veiled and blonde incarnations-- is a real spirit, one of several accidentally summoned to the lake house. Karl knows himself but slenderly, for it turns out his medium skills are real.

To be fair to Wood, he does set up the incursion of these spirits at the film's beginning. In a monologue that seems to be a framing-device, celebrity psychic Criswell (also of PLAN 9) talks of "The Threshold People" and describes them as "monsters to be pitied-- monsters to be despised" (a line recycled from FINAL CURTAIN). However, Criswell and a half-dozen other male ghosts show up to bring Karl to his doom, that of being suffocated in a coffin. (This mirrors both the dramatic conclusion of CURTAIN and the comical ending of the Wood-scripted NECROMANIA.) Meanwhile, the Black Ghost gets the White Ghost, Lobo dies of gunshot wounds, and the cops try to figure out what happened. 

Incidentally, the three-four minutes of HELLBORN footage appear during Criswell's opening monologue. The most interesting nugget is a scene in which some young toughs beat up and rob a man while Mona (PLAN 9) McKinnon looks on coldly. I wondered if the scenario might have involved the young woman luring the older man to a location where he could be mugged. GHOULS is definitely more fully in the "so bad it's good" category than BRIDE OF THE MONSTER, with GHOULS' ridiculous excuse for a seance and a flat performance from Kenne Duncan as Karl.  There's also an odd and unresolved subplot in which one of Karl's customers is a young swindler who's been making up to a wealthy old woman, and who has apparently directed Karl to get a "seal of approval" as to his intentions. All demerits considered though, Wood does put across some genuine fear of death that's not fully diminished by his loopy dialogue.