Bela Lugosi's Dead has two parallel storylines going on. One is set in the 1980s in Los Angeles with this character named Mike, who is a hopeful young screenwriter obsessed with Bela Lugosi. And so in the first scene he's at Lugosi's grave in Culver City. A few headstones away is Sharon Tate's grave. And so there's a young woman, a hopeful actress who's there because she's going to play Sharon Tate in a movie. And they're both kind of like communing with their gods. And that's how they meet each other.
Hawkins:
That's a really weird storyline. And I think it could only happen in L.A.
Guffey:
Oddly enough, there's a scene in the first chapter that actually happened to me. Every Halloween my wife and I go visit Lugosi's grave. It started out as just something we did as a lark in 2007 when my wife was pregnant. And then we subsequently kept doing it every year as kind of weird ritual. So on Halloween we'll go to Lugosi's grave and my wife will take photographs. It's always fascinating to see what people have left behind. Letters, cigars, rubber bats. And this first time that we went, someone left behind a Halloween donut with orange frosting and chocolate sprinkles on it. They left it on a napkin on top of the tombstone.
We took photographs and stuff. And then as we were leaving, we see there's a priest standing at Lugosi's grave looking down at it. Now, it was Halloween, so maybe it was a guy dressed like a priest and not really a priest. I don't know. But he reaches down, grabs the doughnut, and takes a bite of it. He walks away with it. And I thought: 'Did I just see that?' My wife was like, 'You saw that, right?' Later, someone suggested to me that it's like spiritual food. Like he's a psychic vampire, and he was eating the energy of this donut. I don't know. Either he was a very hungry priest or he was a crazy guy dressed like a priest on Halloween. I'm not entirely certain.
[So, in the novel] there's a parallel storyline going on, set in the distant past, taking place in the weird, shared universe of the Universal horror films of the '30s and '40s. The initial inspiration for Bela Lugosi's Dead came about from me reading about this guy named Jean Boullet, a French film critic in the 1960s who was really obsessed with Bela Lugosi. He would make stuff up: that Lugosi dressed like a vampire, even when he wasn't on stage, and lived in a castle off the 405 freeway. And this guy [Boullet] eventually started dressing all in black and lived in a room painted all black. He slept in a coffin. And eventually he killed himself, perhaps to join Lugosi on the other side or something.
Hawkins:
Hmph. Bela Lugosi's Dead reminds me of the Moody Blues number, "Timothy Leary's Dead." Outside looking in. Some kind of cosmic dream.
Guffey:
Right. And, by the way, Timothy Leary's Dead is also the title of the documentary that was made by Paul Davids, who also did the film about Roswell with Kyle MacLachlan and Martin Sheen. So it's the overlap between the UFO conspiracy reality and the psychedelic reality of Timothy Leary's work. That documentary mixed fiction and fact, because Leary always said he wanted to freeze his head after he died. The documentary leads you to believe that Leary did this, even though that never happened in reality.
Hawkins:
Mmm. The only other frozen head that I could think of is Ted Williams. What if they woke up together in some future space-time continuum. Would Teddy Ballgame still be able to hit the fastball?
Guffey:
Right. They both end up in the psychedelic realms where Terence McKenna went when he took ayahuasca and saw the self-replicating machine elves, some strange astral realm. Did you know Aldous Huxley and Lee Harvey Oswald died almost on the same day?
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