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PREMATURE BURIAL
Rating:  ½
USA. 1962.
Director/Producer – Roger Corman, Screenplay – Charles Beaumont & Ray Russell, Suggested by the Short Story by Edgar Allan Poe, Photography – Floyd Crosby, Music – Ronald Stein, Makeup – Louis La Cava, Art Direction – Daniel Haller. Production Company – Santa Clara.
Cast:
Ray Milland (Guy Carrell), Hazel Court (Emily Gault), Richard Ney (Miles Archer), Heather Angel (Kate Carrell), Alan Napier (Dr Gideon Gault)
Plot: Emily Gault goes to Guy Carrell, demanding to know why he has sent her a letter canceling their engagement. He explains how he has become terrified after his father’s grave was dug up to discover that his father had been buried while still alive. He has become obsessed with the fear that he might suffer catalepsy and be buried alive too. She persuades him to overcome his fears and marry her. But soon after the marriage, Guy’s obsessions with premature burial start to affect his sanity. To counter this he builds an elaborate tomb to cover every possibility that might occur should he be buried alive. But then he suffers an extreme fright and collapses. Appearing to all intents and purposes to have died, he is buried – but, exactly as he has feared, he is still alive.
Premature Burial was the third of Roger Corman’s Edgar Allan Poe films. (See below for the other titles). There’s much of a muchness that the Corman Poe films fade into – the same sonorous atmosphere of doom, gloom and morbid obsession with death, the creepy old mansions and brooding production design, the thundering ominous scores, the craven tormented figures usually played by Vincent Price. The production design here, for instance, is somewhat overdone – there seems so much fog in the exterior sets that you think Ray Milland might be better off starting up a natural steam bore.
The film is reasonably accurate to the essence of Edgar Allan Poe’s original 1850 short story, which is mostly really an essay about historical occurrences of the title subject before segueing into a study in obsession from the unnamed narrator who is deathly afraid of being buried alive and builds a tomb that he can escape from should he be buried alive. The film adds to the story an improbably contrived psycho-thriller plot involving a scheme to drive somebody mad a la Les Diaboliques (1955). Not much is explained about this plot – like why the culprit is concocting this scheme, or about Alan Napier’s traffic in stolen cadavers. And none of the tortured psychology invoked in Ray Milland’s obsession with premature burial rings authentic at all.
That said, Premature Burial is nicely written in places – I especially liked the scene where Hazel Court tells Ray Milland that he is already dead, that his attempts to avoid premature burial have already symbolically buried him. Roger Corman does a fine job directing – notably a sequence modeled on the burial alive in Vampyr (1932) with Ray Milland trapped immobile in a coffin, looking up and hoping the mourners will see his open eyes. Hazel Court plays with a nicely tight-lipped firmness of character. Although Ray Milland, replacing Vincent Price who would normally be filling this type of role, gives an anxious, thoroughly overwrought performance.
With Premature Burial, Roger Corman changed his formula slightly in that it is the only of the Edgar Allan Poe films not to star Vincent Price. Corman’s usual screenwriter Richard Matheson is also replaced by horror writers Charles Beaumont, the author best known for Seven Faces of Dr Lao (1964) and Ray Russell, the writer of Mr Sardonicus (1961) and Corman’s X – The Man with X-Ray Eyes (1963).
Roger Corman’s other Edgar Allan Poe films are The House of Usher/The Fall of the House of Usher (1960), Pit and the Pendulum (1961), Tales of Terror (1962), The Raven (1963), the Poe-titled but H.P. Lovecraft adapted The Haunted Palace (1963), The Masque of the Red Death (1964) and The Tomb of Ligeia (1964).
Copyright Richard Scheib 1990
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