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| Science-Fiction |
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| Horror |
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| Fantasy |
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I BURY THE LIVING
Rating: 
USA. 1958.
Director – Albert Band, Screenplay – Louis Garfinkle, Producers – Albert Band & Louis Garfinkle, Photography (b&w) – Frederick Gately, Music – Gerald Fried, Visual Design – E. Vorkapich. Production Company – Maxim Productions.
Cast:
Richard Boone (Robert Kraft), Theodore Bikel (Andrew McKee), Howard Smith (George Kraft), Robert Osterloh (Lieutenant Clayborne), Herbert Anderson (Jessup), Peggy Maurer (Ann Craig)
Plot: As a member of the board of governors, Robert Kraft is appointed custodianship of the Immortal Hills cemetery. On a map on the wall in the cemetery office the plots that are already occupied are marked by black pins and those that have been purchased by customers who have not yet died with a white pin. But then Kraft finds that when he accidentally places a black pin in an as-yet unoccupied plot on the map he has the power to cause that person to die.
I Bury the Living is a fascinating find. These days its novelty rests on the fact that it was a horror film starring Richard Boone, best known as the star of the tv series Have Gun, Will Travel. Among genre names it is also interesting for being directed by Albert Band, the father of Charles Band, together of whom during the 1980s and 90s would form Empire Productions and Full Moon Productions, making almost exclusively low-budget sf, horror and fantasy films, including the likes of Trancers (1985), Re-Animator (1985), Puppetmaster (1989) and numerous sequels to such.
Once one gets past the lurid poster title I Bury the Living has been sold with, Band develops a fascinatingly stark atmosphere. There’s a unique one idea premise – the film could easily have served as an episode of The Twilight Zone (1959-63). Stylistically Band has modeled the film on 1940s film noir. The film develops to where it becomes almost a one-set play that takes place in the graveyard office which is dominated by the giant map of the cemetery plots and eventually becomes backlit as the atmosphere develops. Band develops such an intensively shadowy and haunted tension that when a mundane, non-supernatural resolution is eventually reached it seems an uneasy jolt that is not believable and where the supernatural seems to sit much easier under the circumstances. The film’s intensity and atmosphere however is really quite memorable.
Copyright Richard Scheib 1999-2011
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