Plan 9 from Outer Space is famous as the worst movie ever made, but this deep dive asks listeners to look past the punchline at how Ed Wood actually got an independent film made in 1957. The episode lays out Wood's ambitious premise, in which aliens fearful of a solar night bomb that would explode sunlight itself resurrect the dead to force humanity's surrender, and how it mashed 1950s atomic-age paranoia together with 1930s gothic horror. It then follows the money: financing from a Baptist organization that required the cast and crew to be baptized in a Beverly Hills pool, backers who appear on screen as gravediggers, and a title changed from Grave Robbers from Outer Space because the original was deemed blasphemous.

The conversation digs into the production itself: shooting in an unsoundproofed wooden shack behind a hotel, paying veteran  ...