There is a large, very old and impossibly beautiful cemetery in the city closest to where I live. Long before we wed, my wife and I spent a great amount of time there. It is a surprisingly romantic location, as evidenced by the many weddings held there.
There is a similar cemetery in 1958’s I Bury the Living, where a cemetery groundskeeper played by Theodore Bikel informs Richard Boone his domain is “a fine place to slip away from the cares of the world.” Boone has just assumed supervision of the place albeit reluctantly . For reasons that were never entirely clear to me, he and some other successful businessmen are in a group where that responsibility is assumed by a different person each year on a rotational basis.
Bikel has been there for as long as anybody can remember. He’s the one who shows Boone how to use the large map on a wall in the office. This shows the lots, with a white pin in those which has been purchased but in which nobody is interred yet. Black pins are used for those which are occupied.
The film opens with a newlywed couple who will not receive any funds from the groom’s father until they complete a transaction for the burial plots he has gifted them. There are welcome wedding gifts, there are awkward ones and then there are ones which were given with the right intentions in mind, but which are perhaps a bit too forward-thinking. Few people would want to be reminded of their eventual demise while at their nuptials.
Boone, on the first day of his turn as supervisor, accidentally places black pins in the map instead of white when marking the newly acquired plots. He soon learns the couple has died. And so sparks his increasingly horrifying experience where his accidental placement of black pins in the map seems to cause the untimely demise of those for whom a particular lot is allocated.
Side note: writing the phrase “untimely demise” makes me realize with some measure of sadness how far I have passed the point in life where those words might appear in my inevitable obituary. Also, I’m intrigued by how I have never seen the phrase “timely demise” in any capacity.
This low-budget thriller is very effective. It does require a fair amount of intentional suspension of disbelief, but I found myself capable of doing so for material this solid.
The map becomes a character on its own, largely because the weird continuous line that is the car path, as it looks like an abstract face. That map will also increasingly become larger over the course of the runtime without any characters appearing to notice. By the end, it will occupy the entire wall. By that point, it is also glowing, reminded me of the line from Poe’s “The Raven” where that bird’s eyes glow like “a demon’s that is dreaming”. I know that is a bizarre association to make, but I likely did because the plot of this feels like a hitherto undiscovered tale from the author.
The director is Albert Band, whose son Charles is one of the kings of a later era of cheap horror flicks. Although I like some of the films the younger Band would make, I like to think dad wouldn’t have stooped to helming such features as Gingerdead Man vs. Evil Bong. Even without having seen that film, I suspect the characters and dialog in that is not of the quality of his father’s 1958 work.
Nor would I assume the camera work would be as effective. For what had to be a low budget, this has an interesting number and variety of shots to make the map and its pins as intimidating as possible. There are slow pans through forests of things as shot in profile. At one point, the overhead light in the office starts swinging side to side, and the circling shadows of the pins are like a hundred clock faces with the hands spinning out of control.
Not unlike Carnival of Souls, I Bury the Living is a great example of what one can accomplish on a tight budget. It takes an interesting idea and does much with it, though there is a far greater emphasis on atmosphere than traditional horror. That said, there is the interesting possibility of what happens should a white pin be substituted for a black and, oh yes, the film will go there.
Dir: Albert Band
Starring Richard Boone, Theodore Bikel, Peggy Maurer
Watched on Shout Factory blu-ray