The Tragic Real-Life Story Of Ed Wood

April 2024 ยท 2 minute read

As chronicled in Lugosi, His Life in Films, on Stage, and in the Hearts of Horror Lovers, by Gary Don Rhodes, Bela Lugosi was well into his decline by the time Ed Wood met him in 1952. In poor health and addicted to morphine, Lugosi was a cash-strapped shadow of the man who played Dracula in 1931.

Hoping to add some star power to Glen or Glenda and work with a childhood hero, Wood tracked Lugosi down and offered him $500. In Wood's own words, the Dracula actor turned him down flat. Dire financial circumstances led Lugosi to relent. Wood and Lugosi developed a friendship, and Wood often acted as an unofficial manager for the aging horror star. Lugosi would go on to make Bride of the Monster with Wood and had planned to star in several other proposed Wood horror films before his death in 1956.

Still, others including Lugosi's son, Bela G. Lugosi, saw Wood primarily as an exploiter. "Ed Wood put him in his movies because of Dad's name," Lugosi told Biography in 1995. "The movies that he put my father in were terrible." In his 1982 book, Danse Macabre, author Stephen King weighs in on Lugosi and Wood, leveling pointed criticism at the actor's posthumous appearance in Plan 9. "There's nothing funny about watching Bela Lugosi ... wracked with pain, a morphine monkey on his back, creeping around a southern California development," King writes, referring to the film as an "abysmal, exploitative, misbegotten piece of trash."

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