Ed Wood Film Found
by Andre Soares
Fans of cult favorite Ed Wood, unjustly labeled The Worst Filmmaker of All Time, now have one more Wood "classic" to check out: the 1971 release Necromania, a sexually explicit film about the erotic awakening of a young couple through the assistance of a coven of witches.
Necromania, Wood’s last film project as a director, was made over a period of two or three days on a budget that totaled about US$7,000. Reportedly, the only copies went missing shortly afterward, though several prints of the film have apparently surfaced in varying degrees of completeness in the last couple of decades. This particular print was found by Wood biographer Rudolph Grey and fellow Ed Wood enthusiast, film distributor Alexander Kogan. Necromania was lying half-forgotten in a warehouse in Los Angeles.
Wood became posthumously famous for his series of grade-Z masterworks such as the campy horror flick Bride of the Monster, the cross-dressing Glen or Glenda, and the sci-fi Plan 9 from Outer Space. During his lifetime, however, he had to resort to shooting his films with the tiniest of budgets — since he could find no backers — and from the mid-1960s on, devoted his energies to directing and writing erotic stories. Johnny Depp impersonated the quirky auteur in Tim Burton’s 1994 biopic Ed Wood, a critical success but a dismal box-office failure.
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