Fans of cult favorite Ed Wood (aka Edward D. Wood Jr), unjustly labeled The Worst Filmmaker of All Time, now have one more Wood classic to check out: the 1971 release Necromania: A Tale of Weird Love!, a sexually explicit film about the erotic awakening of a young couple (photo: Rene Bond, Ric Lutze) through the assistance of a necromancer (Maria Arnold).
Necromania, Wood's last film project as a director, was made in about three days on a budget totaling US$7,000 (approx. $33,000 today). According to reports, the only prints went missing shortly afterwards, though several copies of the film have surfaced in varying degrees of completeness in the last couple of decades. Lying in a Los Angeles warehouse, this particular print was found by Wood biographer Rudolph Grey and a fellow Wood enthusiast, film distributor Alexander Kogan.
Ed Wood became posthumously famous for his series of grade-Z movies such as the cross-dressing drama Glen or Glenda (1953), the campy horror flick Bride of the Monster (1955), and the sci-fi cult classic Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959). During his lifetime, however, he had to resort to shooting his films with the microscopic-est of budgets, as he could find no backers. From the mid-1960s on, devoted his energies to directing and writing erotic stories.
Ed Wood died in 1978. Johnny Depp impersonated the quirky auteur in Tim Burton's 1994 biopic Ed Wood, a critical success but a major box-office flop.