The film was originally planned by Cruze, under the title The Melancholy Spirit, as a vehicle for the comic actor Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle, who contributed ideas to the project. However, during the initial planning stages, Arbuckle gave a party in San Francisco at which a young starlet died, and one of her friends told the authorities that Arbuckle had raped the woman. The police theorized that Arbuckle's extreme weight had ruptured the woman's bladder during the alleged assault. The subsequent scandal and Arbuckle's three trials for manslaughter forced him to drop out of the film, which was then re-titled and recast with Rogers in the Arbuckle role. (Arbuckle was later acquitted but his film career never recovered[8][9]).
Plot
A disembodied spirit entity with a strange appearance and bulging eyes named "Ek" takes over the body of a meek psychical researcher, Professor Ezra Botts (Rogers), during an out-of-body experiment and proceeds to live it up while the researcher watches from limbo and tries to get back into his physical body and resume his life.[10] Botts waits until the spirit collapses from exhaustion, then takes the opportunity to reinhabit his own body.
^Workman, Christopher; Howarth, Troy (2016). "Tome of Terror: Horror Films of the Silent Era". Midnight Marquee Press. p. 256.ISBN978-1936168-68-2.
^Workman, Christopher; Howarth, Troy (2016). "Tome of Terror: Horror Films of the Silent Era". Midnight Marquee Press. p. 256.ISBN978-1936168-68-2.
^Workman, Christopher; Howarth, Troy (2016). "Tome of Terror: Horror Films of the Silent Era". Midnight Marquee Press. p. 257.ISBN978-1936168-68-2.
^Merritt, Greg (2013). Room 1219: The Life of Fatty Arbuckle, the Mysterious Death of Virginia Rappe, and the Scandal That Changed Hollywood. Chicago, IL: Chicago Review Press. p. 44. ISBN978-1-61374-792-6.