Trivia / Plan 9 from Outer Space

• Absurdly Short Production Time: Filming took three days.
• Beam Me Up, Scotty!: Eros never said "A particle of sunlight contains many atoms!"; the actual quote is "A ray of sunlight is made up of many atoms!"
• Colbert Bump: 1980's The Golden Turkey Awards listing Plan 9 as the worst movie ever ensured a surge of attention that made it a cult favorite.
• Completely Different Title:
  • Argentina and Spain: Space Vampires
  • Finland: Tomb Robbers from Outer Space
  • Mexico: Spectres from Space
  • Portugal: Vampire Zombie Plan 9
• Corpsing:
  • The actress playing Eros' assistant can be seen laughing in the background during one of Eros' tantrums.
  • Tor Johnson can be seen struggling to keep a straight face while he is attacking the furiously over-acting Dudley Manlove.
• Died During Production: A famous example. Bela Lugosi died after filming only a few minutes of footage completely independent of the plot, and was rather obviously replaced by Wood's wife's chiropractor Tom Mason, who covered everything below the eyes.
• God Never Said That: Many people believe that before plan 9 takes effect "plans 1 to 8 failed" or similar, citing the movie or Ed Wood himself. Turns out that nowhere in the movie, nor in any statements of Ed Wood, any mentions are made about what the other plans (if they even existed) would have been, or even if they deal with earth invasion at all.
• No Budget: Wood was so far over his head in producing the film on $25,000 that it's hard to really put into words how badly it turned out.
  • Cheaply built sets like the graveyard and plane cockpit either suffered from technical inaccuracies or (in the case of the former) were prone to falling over when the actors got too close to them. Props and set pieces were also reused between scenes, which explains why the interiors of the flying saucers have wooden desks and radar equipment, or how their exteriors reuse the interior's walls but inverted.
  • Speaking of the flying saucers, they were store bought miniatures that Wood had repainted and suspended with incredibly visible fishing lines. They would frequently wobble around and occasionally casted shadows on the backdrops whenever they moved.
  • Wood would use whatever stock material he had at his disposal and shot most of Plan 9 without a second take, causing many of the above mentioned goofs to make it in the final cut. He was also limited with the amount of zombies he could afford to hire (hence why there's only three in the movie) and often reused shots involving Bela Lugosi or the saucers to further pad out the film.
• Referenced by...:
  • Probe's "Plan 10 from Outer Space": The title is a reference to this movie.
  • The X-Files: Mulder has seen the movie 42 times. He claims the sheer badness of it numbs his brain and helps him think about cases he's working on. Scully thinks it's just sad.
  • The second installment in Andrew Kepple's Colin Mochrie vs. Jesus H. Christ trilogy is titled "Plan 9 From Underpants".
• Science Marches On: What appears to be another of the film's science blunders is Eros stating that after the H-bomb, the only explosion left to be discovered is the Solaranite, which has a pretty major omission in that no one in this universe seems to have conceived of an antimatter bomb. It's hard to entirely fault Wood for not adding this in, however, as almost nobody outside of the scientific community had heard of antimatter in the mid-50s.
• The Shelf of Movie Languishment: While it was completed in 1956 and had a private preview screening on March 15, 1957, it didn't get released until July 22, 1959. Distributors Corporation of America picked up the film and planned for a Spring 1958 release, but the company folded and the film languished another year until DCA's receiver, Valiant Pictures, got around to releasing it. ^note (However, if IMDB's trivia page is to be believed, the film was already in limited distribution by June 1958 through DCA.)
• Stunt Casting: Bela Lugosi, after he died, no less.
• What Could Have Been: The film was originally titled Grave Robbers From Outer Space, hence the final words of Criswell's opening monologue, which would've been a Title Drop. It was changed very late into production following a test screening — some sources report that it was due to pressure from the Southern Baptist ministers who produced the film and felt the title was blasphemous, while others claim that it was done preemptively at the behest of Wood himself as to not upset those same producers.

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