I Bury the Living (1958)

 

 I Bury the Living (1958)

 

“Out of a time-rotted tomb crawls an unspeakable horror!”

"When the moon rises--he fills the graves with screaming women . . . and terror-struck men!"

"A creature to freeze your blood”

 

n Three wildly inaccurate Tag-lines for this film but, whatever.

 

This film is surprisingly unknown to most Horror fans and though it may fall short of being a true Classic, but still a superior piece of low-budget filmmaking. It’s a rare B-movie that doesn’t just toy with the Themes of Psychological Horror but ultimately proves to be a Parody of it (like the same-year’s “The Haunted Strangler,” “Macabre,” and “The Screaming Skull”) but it is the real deal.

 

It was Produced and Directed by the prolific Albert Brand and when I stumbled across this one I was especially surprised because the only other Brand-Directed films I was familiar with were “Dracula's Dog” (1978) and “Ghoulies II” (1987), both of which were not merely bad, but utterly inept in execution. Also, he and his son were more active as Producers, they founded Full Moon Productions in the ‘80s and though they were responsible for a few good films Directed by others, most of the Studio’s product was pretty dire.

 

Like so many other thrillers of the late-50s and early-60s, “I Bury the Living” was inspired by “Diabolique” (1955), but unlike most, it didn’t slavishly ape it. Producer/Director William Castle was responsible for several silly but entertaining ones (like the above-mentioned “Macabre”) but Brand pulled this one off with a craftmanship and class that is missing in the rest of his resume, or at least the part of that resume I’m familiar with.

 

“I Bury the Living” was Authored by Brand’s Co-Producer Louis A. Garfinkle, a future Oscar-nominee for the script for “The Deerhunter (1978) and concerns a Character named Robert Kraft, played by Actor Richard Boone. Just that year, Boone secured the role he’s most famous for, the TV Western “Have Gun - Will Travel.” Boone’s famously craggy and lumpy features, rare in a leading man, always expressed a seriousness and sophistication even when playing a Comedic or Thuggish role. He’s career began in Greek Tragedy and was dominated by Westerns, and there were few greater faces for either.

 

Robert has just been appointed to replace the retiring Caretaker of a large Cemetery, Andy MacKee, played by Theodore Bikel. Bikel and Boone are the film’s best performances, and Bikel effective despite poor make-up (they tried to make him elderly despite being ten-years younger than Boone) and an unconvincing accent. That very year, Bikel was nominated for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for work on and unrelated film “The Defiant Ones.”

 

Arriving at Andy’s office, Robert is impressed with a large map of the property Andy had created.  It’s marked by black pins for occupied graves and white pins for unoccupied but sold ones.

 

In error Robert puts two black pins in the wrong place, on unoccupied graves. Later he’s shocked to learn that soon after the young couple who’d bought that lot died in a car crash.

 

A rational man, he refuses to believing this was more than a coincidence, but his rationality is only skin-deep, and anxiously tries to test the absurdity replacing a random white pin with a black one.

 

Those grave’s owners are dead within a week.

 

Robert is terrified and, seeing his distress, his friends and co-workers, dismissive of the Supernatural, insist he experiment more.

 

And more people die.

 

Robert becomes increasingly convinced that either he or the map wield some kind of Dark Power. He slips into deep guilt and depression; he believes he’s Cursed and is near suicide.

 

Stylistically, it feeling like the best of the UK’s brooding Film Noirs and there are Surrealistic touches in the Montages and Expressionist sets and props (Cinematography by Frederick Gately and Production Design by Edward Vorkapich). The map keeps growing larger and more Abstract scene-by-scene.

 

It is also blessed by haunting, harpsicord-heavy, score by another future Osar nominee, Gerald Fried. It the decades to come, Fried would be associated with everyone and everything from Director Stanely Kubrick (several films) to the TV series “Gilligan's Island” and “Star Trek” (first aired 1964 & 1966, respectively).

The film seems most blessed by being able to grab the best talent available exactly at the moment before they became too expensive for a low-budget house like Maxim Productions to afford. Its brevity is also one of its strengths, coming in at only 76-minutes. It’s often, retrospectively, compared to a really good episode of TV’s “The Twilight Zone” (first aired 1959 and its episodes lengths varied between 25- and 51-minutes).

 

 

It was a rushed shoot, only eight days, restrained mostly to a few sets, and triumphs within those limitations because of its strongly claustrophobic atmosphere. The small amount of location footage is also effective, as in the scene where Robert walks through the graveyard with Reporter Jess Jessup (Herbert Anderson) who is also Robert’s close friend. Robert says, “I’ve been through all this before. The grass, …the quiet, …and that sound. I never knew what it was. It’s the sound of a name being cut into a headstone”

 

Police involvement adds yet another layer to Robert’s distress, he’s pressured into one more experiment, this time a person who is out of the country. He doesn’t fully appreciate the significance of that detail.

 

Robert becomes irrational. Now he starts replacing black pins with white in an attempt to Raise the Dead. He visits those graves that very night and is shocked to find they are now open, the bodies gone.

 

And then comes a surprise ending which is universally disliked. Apparently, there were two solutions to this Mystery were filmed, a Supernatural and a non-Fantastical one, but I believe only the non-Fantastic is in distribution; it is wildly absurd and inappropriate for a film that evoked some solid Suspense before that point. I’m guessing the seemingly-missing Supernatural ending was probably a bit more logical.

 

Though undeservingly obscure, it had a Cultural Impact. It inspired both Stephen King’s short story “Obits” (2015) and Morrisey’s song “I Bury the Living” (2017).

 

Trailer:

I Bury The Living (1958) - Official Trailer (HD) - YouTube