There is a cemetery in Sylmar where most of the dead have no names above ground, and this Saturday its caretakers are throwing a movie night to change that, LAist reports.
The cemetery
The San Fernando Pioneer Memorial Cemetery, below Foothill Boulevard in Sylmar, dates to the 1870s and is the second-oldest cemetery in the San Fernando Valley, now a Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument. Using ground-penetrating radar and death certificates, researchers have identified at least 500 people buried there.
The striking detail is who they were, and how they were forgotten. About 70 percent are Hispanic. "The majority of the people that are buried here are actually Hispanic. About 70 percent," said Stefanie Garcia, the cemetery's chairperson. Most graves have no markers, not because the dead were unknown but because they were poor; a marker was a cost their families could not bear. The result is a historic cemetery full of people whose names exist on a death certificate in a file but not on the ground where they lie.
The event, and the movie
The fundraiser is called "Graveyard Cinema," and the film is a fitting one: "Plan 9 From Outer Space," Ed Wood's famously terrible 1957 science-fiction picture, parts of which were shot at this very cemetery. The movie is also notable as the last on-screen appearance of Bela Lugosi. The screening runs Saturday from 6:30 to 10 p.m. at 14451 Bledsoe St., with admission of $20 for adults and $10 for children, free for kids 5 and under. It is co-hosted by actors Ben Jacob and Monique Ramirez through their podcast, "Who's Dead From Your Favorite Movie?"
Ticket proceeds go toward the actual purpose underneath the fun: identifying the unmarked graves and placing commemorative markers on them.
Why it works
There is something exactly right about the pairing, and it is worth naming. A cheerfully bad B-movie about the dead rising, screened in a real graveyard to raise money to give the real dead their names back, could be tasteless in the wrong hands. Here it is the opposite: it uses the cemetery's one brush with pop-culture fame, its cameo in a cult-classic disaster, to draw people to a place they would otherwise never visit, and turns their ticket into a headstone for someone who never got one.
Preservation work at the cemetery is not new; the San Fernando chapter of the Native Daughters of the Golden West began restoring it in the late 1950s. What is new is the model: history as a night out, the unmarked poor of 1870s Sylmar remembered by way of Ed Wood. The Herald flags it as both a genuinely good time and a small act of restitution, and notes that a marker on a forgotten grave outlasts any movie, good or bad.
