Movie Nite: Plan 9 From Outer Space

We were going to watch one horror movie every night in October, but I think we're averaging every other. 

Plan 9 From Outer Space

The UFOs were as bad as promised.

And Vampira!!!

I kinda fell asleep a little. 

And this is pretty bad... because only detectives can makes very basic inferences:

LT. HARPER Well don't forget Mrs. Trent claims to have seen them too. She didn't have anything on her breath. 
LARRY She was hysterical. 
LT. HARPER Well true, she was frightened, and in a state of shock. But, don't forget that torn nightgown and the scratched feet.
LARRY Yeah I hadn't thought of that. I guess that's why you're a detective lieutenant and I'm still a uniformed cop.

But there are a few interesting things! -- besides the legendary badness of the film. The aliens want to destroy earth people because we made terrible weapons - probably the big bomb scare theme - and they want to destroy us before we destroy them. Compared to the slasher films, I appreciate the noble goal here. In fiction writing, they always say to show, don't just tell, so possibly the guy could've taken a few classes before launching this, but I like the idea.

In another part, the alien mentions God and the human is shocked. In a way, it's a comment on how people from other cultures assume they're different, but they have more in common than they think. I like that theme generally, like several in the old Twilight Zone series.

The major funder was a Baptist preacher and converted a lot of the cast, as I learned in the Vampira book I read recently. Tor Johnson, while being baptized with most of the crew, pretended to drown. Maybe they didn't take the conversion all that seriously? Would've been funny either way. 


The book in question:

Vampira: Dark Goddess of Horror - my notes on Goodreads:
There isn't a huge cache of info on Vampira it seems. Even so, Poole manages a good bio as well as description of where she fit in the cultural changes and how she may have influenced.

What stood out to me was that she was a strong figure who instead of doing the submissive pin up routine, looked at the audience and embodied a women's right to pleasure - and pain if she wants - just by a scream.

She seems to have had lots of bad luck where others got breaks, made a few no so great choices (the lawsuit, for one), and was a little too strong for her era. Like the James Dean stunts. I feel like that would have been fine for today, but it kind of soured people on her at the time.

She's kind of an underdog or forgotten legend. She was pretty revolutionary - or ahead of her time in some ways. There was a bit about how she wanted to choose the next Vampira. She wanted a black or Latina woman, but the network said no to avoid "controversy."

She was under contract four a role in a work by William Faulkner. She was in the Village in the 40s, though her words are forgotten rather than celebrated like her male cohorts, Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs. Ackerman, it's said, borrowed from her without attribution. It's amazing that she had so much influence and so little reward.

Quote from the beginning: "Here, the marginalized learn the importance of performance for survival. They understand themselves as different from the dominant power structure and know a direct challenge rarely ends well. So they role-play and subvert, often through the medium of anarchic humor."