The seance scene. When the camera focuses on Dr. Acula (Kenne Duncan) – a granite-face middle-aged guy wearing a suit and a “swami” turban – sitting at a table, and the camera moves back so that we can see three people sitting on one side, and three rinky-dink skeletons sitting on the other, I was truly delighted. I could go on about the seance sequence, but that would ruin some of the abstract imagery and the surprise of what pops up, and how everybody has such a lack of reaction to what transpires. Truly something Lynchian, at the crossroads of where the director is cartoony and abstract. But, no, it’s pure Ed Wood.
While the canon of Edward D. Wood Jnr revolves around three titles – Plan 9 from Outer Space, Glen or Glenda, and Bride of the Monster – I never really was aware of Night of the Ghouls (1959). It definitely needs to be in the conversation as this was wonderful in that distinctive Ed Wood way. A low-budget horror flick that mainly involves cops investigating a house on a dark night, and ghosts wandering the misty woods outside. From the sonorous voice of the psychic Criswell once again turning up in a funeral casket to narrate the movie (and looking like he’s had a rough night), to the use of stock footage to document “Juvenile delinquency” to the mystifying use of location and space in editing, such as Lt Dan Bradford (Duke Moore) incongruously dressed in a tuxedo during his investigation (the Lt was called in the middle of a fancy occasion, just like Kurt Russell in Executive Decision) being led by Dr. Acula through a pitch-black room, which is undoubtedly atmospheric and eerie in a shoestring B-movie type of way, only to cut to another shot of a flatly lit hallway that looks like anybody’s suburban tract house.
Characters return from previous movies including Lobo (Tor Johnson) from Bride of the Monster to Paul Marco as the hapless, histrionic Patrolman Kelton – painfully the comedy relief of the picture. We have a ghost (Jeannie Stevens) dressed in all black wandering wordlessly through the woods, hand outreached and using their dress like a cloak to engulf poor unfortunate souls. And then the “ghost” (Valda Hansen) dressed in white and wandering through the woods, hand outreached to spooky unsuspecting visitors.
Filmed and completed in 1958, but not widely released due to unpaid debts to the lab developing the film. Only rescued and released by an Ed Wood fan many decades later. Streamed a copy on YouTube. 69 minutes in length. Just a really fun time. Recommended.
“Monsters! Space people! Mad doctors! They didn’t teach me about such things in the police academy!”
VHS Tracking 