When it comes to zombie movies of the 1950s, there is one that rises above all others. Not for good reason, of course, but hey, you can’t win them all. Let’s talk about Plan 9 from Outer Space!
Ed Wood’s 1957 iconic turkey Plan 9 from Outer Space is the crown jewel in a career studded with terrible movies; Wood’s career has become almost synonymous with dreadful B-movie flicks of the 50s and 60s, but none is more representative of that than Plan 09.
It was a movie that probably never should have made it to release. It had a legendarily messy production – financed by a Baptist group, who agreed to help produce the film on the promise that the cast and crew would be baptised, it was shot in less than two weeks, and the cast proved a problem in more ways than one. Malia Nurmi (billed as Vampira, a camp horror icon of the 1950s) insisted on playing her character in silence due to her disdain for the dialogue Wood had created for her, while Lyle Talbot, who Wood noted as one of his favourite actors, was paid in handfuls of five and one-dollar bills at the end of each shooting day. Bela Lugosi was top-billed in his last role (though his second appearance in this series – see also, White Zombie), even though he died before the film could begin shooting, leading Wood to recycle random footage he had cobbled together for abandoned Lugosi projects. The short production schedule left more complex details, like prosthetic and make-up for the alien creatures, to be dropped, and the UFOs were constructed from a commercial model kit. And they look like it, too.
Plan 9 from Outer Space has a place in film history, alright. Just not necessarily as a zombie movie. No, Plan 9 is a legendary entry into the Worst Films of All Time canon, a truly, masterfully, hilariously dreadful science-fiction drama that feels like Ed Wood overheard the concept of a movie from three rooms away and thought “yeah, I can do that”. It’s a symphony of terribleness that comes together in an almost charmingly-entertaining mess that you can’t look away from – the terribly-blended stock footage, the tinfoil UFOs dangling on visible string, the bizarre voice over, the dreadful continuity, the stilted acting, the awful writing, the wrinkled curtains in the background of both an earthly aircraft and the UFOs.
And that’s not even touching on Bela Lugosi’s ignominious departure from the movie due to his real-life passing, as his off-screen death is limited to an unfortunately hilarious screeching tire sound effect before we cut to his grave which is clearly made from cardboard and Styrofoam. But at least Lugosi’s replacement is spot-on, if you happen to have been looking in the other direction at the time, a six-foot-something Tom Mason (a chiropractor who had worked with Wood’s wife) holding a cape in front of his face. If you haven’t seen this movie and you have an hour or so to kill, it’s truly a good time, a movie with all the pieces in place but none of the artistry required to bring them together into a full feature.
But with that said, what of it as a zombie movie? Well, Plan 9 is actually quite well-couched in the other zombie movies of the 1950s, which had broadly broken away from the Vodou origins of White Zombie et al and moved towards a science-fiction backdrop. Post-war nuclear anxiety had given rise to a stream of atomic zombie movies – Creature with the Atom Brain and Invisible Invaders – and, in broad terms, zombies had gone from an invention of the mystical to an invention of science. Of course, Plan 9 from Outer Space lands squarely in the middle of these, with the “solaronite” bomb standing in as a thinly-veiled metaphor for nuclear annihilation, and aliens using their futuristic technology to raise the dead in order to distract us foolish humans from building the damn bomb in the first place.
And, of the zombies themselves, we’re moving closer and closer to the recognisable modern zombie with every movie. Plan 9 hits a view iconic zombie beats, even amidst the borderline-incoherent plot – the grave buckling and breaking as the dead claw their way out from underneath it, the grey, deathly pallor of the recently-risen, the jerky movement. Tor Johnson as the revived police inspector Clay is a close match for the modern conception of the zombie monster – scarred visage, white eyes, mouth agape. You might not need to shoot these zombies in the head – no, it turns out that they just vanish into dust when their alien overloads get a good seeing-to from our respectable heroes – but the threat of the horde descending on an innocent California suburb is one that feels like a bit of stage-setting for the zombie movies of the next decade or so.
The narration closes out with an ominous warning about what’s to come: “we once laughed at the horseless carriage, the aeroplane, the telephone, the electric light, vitamins, radio, and even television….God help us in the future.” And the future, at least in terms of zombie movies, is perhaps the most influential zombie movie of the 20th century, George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead. But that’s for next time – so until then, keep watching the skees. I mean, skies.
If you enjoyed this article and want to see more stuff like it, check out the rest of the Season of the Dead series here, and please consider supporting us on Ko-Fi. You can check out more of my work on my personal blog, The Cutprice Guignol!
By Lou MacGregor
(header image via Classic Monsters)
