There is a specific kind of magic that occurs when a man’s ego and his budget have never even been in the same post code. Most directors, when faced with a total lack of funds, try to hide their poverty under the cover of darkness or clever framing. Not Edward D. Wood Jr.

Ed Wood didn’t just lean into his lack of resources; he rode them into battle with the conviction of a holy crusader.

​To talk about Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957) is to step into the realm of transcendental failure. This isn’t just a bad movie. Calling Plan 9 bad is like calling the Satan a naughty boy. It is the spiritual core of everything we love about trash cinema—a manifesto of the misunderstood creator, a film so spectacularly broken that it circles back around to being a work of unintentional, shimmering genius.​

Ed Wood didn’t just lack talent; he possessed a terrifying, almost beautiful immunity to reality. He saw a masterpiece where we see shower curtains, paper plates, and a chiropractor holding a cape over his nose. Grab your Solaronite, folks. We’re going in.​

The Criswell Prophecy

​The movie begins with Criswell, a famous 1950s psychic who looked like a ventriloquist’s dummy that had been granted a soul by a malicious warlock. He delivers an introduction that sounds like it was written by a man trying to explain the concept of time to a goldfish.​

Staring directly into the camera with a gaze that suggests he can see the exact moment of your death, he warns us:

“Future events such as these will affect you in the future.”

Wait… what??

Let’s pause there. There is part of me that weeps at the purity of that line. It is a masterpiece of circular logic. He isn’t just a narrator; he’s the gatekeeper to a dimension where the English language has been beaten into submission. He continues to drone on about the day and the hour, setting a tone of pseudo-intellectual dread that the rest of the film has absolutely no intention of fulfilling. It’s the most nonsensical runbish you will ever hear and I fucking adore it. It establishes a personal connection with the viewer by immediately letting us know that logic has been checked at the door.​

The Invisible Stand-In​

We have to address the Bela Lugosi situation, because it is the most visceral example of Ed Wood’s commitment to his craft. Bela Lugosi, the man who defined Dracula, died in 1956—long before a single page of the Plan 9 script was finalized.​

Did a minor detail like the death of his lead actor stop Ed? Absolutely not.​

Ed had roughly five minutes of random footage of Lugosi—shots of him walking out of a house, smelling a rose, and looking generally mournful in a cape. Wood decided that this was more than enough to build an entire alien invasion epic around. To bridge the gaps, he hired his wife’s chiropractor, Tom Mason, to play Lugosi’s ghoul character.

​The problem? Tom Mason was a foot taller than Lugosi, had a completely different build, and lacked the legendary actor’s hypnotic presence.

Ed’s solution was a stroke of brilliance: have the chiropractor hold a cape over his face for the entire movie. You’re watching a guy stumble through graveyard sets (which are clearly just a soundstage with some dirt thrown on the floor), hiding his face like he’s trying to avoid a bailiff. It’s an insult to the audience’s intelligence that is so bold it becomes endearing. It’s the ultimate in DIY filmmaking—if you don’t have a star, find a guy with a cape and tell everyone to shut up.​

The Grave Robbers and the Baptist Money​

The film’s original title was Grave Robbers from Outer Space. According to one of the many myths that cling to Plan 9 the production was funded by the Southern Baptist Convention, who apparently didn’t find the idea of interstellar grave robbing to be particularly Christian.

​In a move of compromising genius, Ed changed the title to Plan 9 from Outer Space, implying that Plans 1 through 8 were either successes or, more likely, even bigger disasters than what we’re seeing. To appease his donors, Ed even had the entire cast baptized in a swimming pool.​

Let that sink in for a moment: you want to make a movie about zombies and aliens? You better be prepared to get dunked in a pool and change your title for a group of ministers who think Hollywood is a den of sin. This undercurrent of religious interference only adds to the film’s distinctive, frantic energy.​

Hubcaps, Shower Curtains, and Cardboard Tombs​

Now we get to the technical triumphs. The cockpit of the airplane in Plan 9 is a legendary achievement in low-budget set design. The instruments are just photographs of dials pasted onto boards. Behind the pilots, there is a visible shower curtain acting as the cockpit door.​

When the pilots talk to control, they aren’t using sophisticated radio equipment; they’re holding a silver-painted stick that looks suspiciously like a piece of a vacuum cleaner. And the UFOs? They are famously hubcaps or toy kits dangling from visible strings. When the military “fires” on them, Wood cuts to stock footage of actual anti-aircraft fire that doesn’t match the lighting, the grain, or the reality of the scene. It’s a rhythmic, dramatic collision of footage that has no business being in the same zip code, let alone the same film.​

But the cemetery is where the real magic happens. The tombstones are made of cardboard and are frequently knocked over by the actors as they walk past. In one scene, Tor Johnson—the Swedish wrestler turned actor—stumbles through the graveyard and hits a cross, causing it to wobble like a drunk on a Saturday night. Ed Wood’s reaction? “Print it!” He didn’t care about the surface-level polish; he was seeking the spiritual core of the scene, which apparently involved wobbling cardboard.​

The Alien Master Plan: “All You of Earth Are Idiots!”

​Let’s talk about the actuality of Plan 9. The aliens, led by Eros and Tanna (who dress like they’re heading to a very cheap Renaissance Fair held in a basement), are worried that humans will eventually discover Solaronite.

According to the aliens, Solaronite is a substance that can explode the very particles of sunlight. If we explode sunlight, we explode the universe. It’s a thesis-driven plot that makes absolutely no scientific sense, but Eros delivers it with such vitriol that you almost believe him.​

Their brilliant plan to stop human scientific progress? Resurrect three dead people.

That’s it. That’s Plan 9. Three zombies. One is Vampira (the goth icon looking like she’d rather be literally anywhere else), one is the chiropractor-Lugosi, and the third is Tor Johnson. How three slow-moving ghouls in a small California cemetery are supposed to stop the global development of Solar-bombs is never explained. It’s a world where the stakes are cosmic, but the execution is strictly backyard.

The aliens aren’t superior beings; they’re just cosmic bureaucrats who can’t afford a proper invasion force.​

The Declaration of the Absurd​

The writing in Plan 9 is where Ed Wood’s exceptional and distinctive voice truly shines. The characters don’t speak; they recite declarations of the absurd. Take, for instance, the legendary line:

“Excerpts from his diary were found… written in his own hand!”

Whose hand did they expect him to use? A neighbor’s? A rental?

​Then there’s the alien Eros, who snaps at the humans:

“All you of Earth are idiots!”

It’s the perfect line. It’s direct, confrontational, and establishes an immediate connection with the audience—mostly because, after watching this movie, we’re inclined to agree with him.​

The dialogue is rhythmic and dramatic, filled with elevated vocabulary that is used entirely incorrectly. It’s a pulpit where the preacher has forgotten the scripture but decided to scream louder to compensate.​

Tor Johnson: The Tectonic Plate of Talent

​We cannot overlook Tor Johnson. Playing Inspector Clay, Tor is a massive, hulking presence who moves with the speed of a tectonic plate and the grace of a falling fridge. When he is resurrected as a zombie, he becomes the film’s heavy.

​Watching Tor try to climb out of a shallow grave is one of the most hilarious experiences in cinema. He doesn’t so much rise as he does displace soil. He is the personification Ed Wood’s casting theory: find the biggest, weirdest person you know and put them in front of the camera. Tor doesn’t need to act; his sheer physical mass does the talking. When he grabs a character, you don’t feel fear; you feel a strange, spiritual awe at the audacity of the production.

A Saucer-Sized Slap Fight​

The movie culminates in a fight inside the alien saucer—which is basically just a room with a wooden table and some blinking lights that look like they were salvaged from a pinball machine. The hero, a pilot named Jeff Trent, gets into a physical altercation with Eros.​

This isn’t a choreographed stunt. It’s two men awkwardly grabbing each other’s shoulders while the saucer (the set) wobbles behind them. Suddenly, the saucer catches fire and explodes. Or rather, a model of a hubcap on a string catches fire and is dragged away from the camera by a visible hand.​

The aliens are defeated, the Solaronite threat is postponed, and we are left with Criswell returning to the screen to deliver a final, haunting warning:

“Can you prove it didn’t happen?”

Well, Criswell, I can prove there was a shower curtain in the cockpit, but as for the rest? I’m stumped.​

Final Thoughts

Plan 9 from Outer Space is the ultimate trash deep dive because it represents the pure, terrifying reality of the independent spirit. Ed Wood was a delusional madman in the form of a filmmaker. He resisted the surface-level analysis of the big studios and created something that, while technically garbage, has outlived thousands of good movies.​

It’s a movie that asks us to look past the wobbling tombstones and see the genius of a man who just wanted to tell a story about aliens, his dead friend, and the impending doom of sunlight. It is uncompromising, rhythmic, and completely, gloriously insane.

​Ed Wood didn’t make a bad movie. He made a window into a beautiful, broken mind. And for that, we should all be grateful.