Initially I followed the Django documentation and the mod_wsgi documentation to run Django on my local Apache server, but after installing mod_php5 the 2 modules began conflicting with each other when I wanted both to run peacefully in parallel.

PHP was to keep the default port 80 and Django was to run on port 9000. Here's how I triumphed over the slew of Error 500:

1. <VirtualHost *:9000> for WSGI

2. Add the following statement before the <VirtualHost *:9000> line (that's the bit not mentioned in the documentation I was following, and that I want to document here for $future_self...)

Listen 127.0.0.1:9000

3. Update the MEDIA_URL in settings.py to reference port 9000 as well.

And they all lived on their respective port happily ever after.