Tim Burton’s 1994 film Ed Wood elevated its titular low-budget filmmaker to new heights. Before then, the angora- wearing, cross-dressing outsider had already acquired a notorious reputation following the election of his 1957 film Plan 9 from Outer Space as the “worst film ever made” in the 1978 Golden Turkey Awards. Burton’s affectionate account of Wood’s struggles, however, also exaggerated the roughness of his work. Plan 9 is a far stranger, more visionary and magical artefact than the inverse hagiography built around it since Wood’s death would suggest. Gothic icons Vampira and Bela Lugosi drift through the film’s inky blacks as humanity confronts aliens from above and zombies newly risen from below. Lugosi’s character famously morphs between location and studio sequences, the latter completed by a much taller stand-in after the original Dracula star’s untimely death. Yet these discontinuities only deepen the film’s dreamlike atmosphere. Working with the barest of means, Wood conjures a genuinely uncanny netherworld from cardboard gravestones, theatrical shadows and cosmic despair. Writer Ken Hollings has argued that geography, rather than budget, accounted for Wood’s lack of success. Had he worked in the orbit of New York’s underground scene alongside figures such as Andy Warhol or Jack Smith, his films might have been received very differently. Timing, too, was crucial: Wood’s first burst of activity arrived awkwardly in the gap between the decline of the Poverty Row studios and the rise of the midnight movie. Plan 9 from Outer Space screens from a brand new 35mm print struck from elements prepared for the film’s original UK distribution in the late 1950s and preserved in the BFI National Archive. No digital intermediates. See the film as it was meant to be seen: in all its ragged, spectral glory on the big screen. Ed Wood and his zombie monsters rise again, this time on their own terms.

William Fowler