![]() A relatively bare-bones release, Shout! has included a photo gallery and original movie trailer. Nevertheless, the film looks better than it ever has outside of its original release and those defects do nothing to detract from the forgiving fan’s enjoyment of this singular one-off from United Artists circa 1958. Close-ups of Boone’s intimidating proboscis are amusingly sharp but the overall clarity is variable throughout. Shout! Factory’s blu ray looks generally fine but unfortunately it’s no revelation in picture quality. I Bury the Living retains little if any of that ambition but it has a memorably morbid atmosphere, enhanced not just by Boone’s nerve-jangled performance, but its startling montage sequences and art direction as well, including a nightmarish jaunt through the graveyard and that cemetery map which becomes, over the course of the film, both an hallucinatory dream object and antagonistic co-star to Boone’s feverish anti-hero.Įdward Vorkapich, son of the great montage creator Slavko Vorkapich, is credited as “Visual Designer” and it is surely the younger Vorkapich’s influence in those chilling cemetery sequences as well as in the design of the spooky map itself, its swirling contours suggesting a pair of accusing eyes bearing down on our brooding hero. Based on the Stephen Crane short story The Monster and shot in Sweden with several key members of Ingmar Bergman’s regular crew, this quasi-horror movie is an admirably ambitious tale about pride and prejudice in small town America. But by all rights he should be remembered not just for the spooky twists and turns of I Bury the Living but his follow-up film, 1959’s Face of Fire. ![]() When several more deaths occur under the same sinister circumstances, the jittery Boone begins to wonder, what if instead of a black pin, a white pin were placed in the slot for the dearly departed? A shock cut to the earth erupting around an empty grave gives him the answer.ĭirector Albert Band had a fascinatingly unpredictable career that featured mostly low budget fare like Ghoulies II and Dracula’s Dog. New to the burial game, Kraft mistakenly uses a black pin instead of white to reserve one of the plots, leading to unexpectedly deadly consequences. ![]() The map harbors its own macabre special feature: black pins indicate the already deceased inhabitants while white pins designate the graves awaiting their eventual occupants. To make matters worse, the perennially gloomy Kraft, already skittish about his disconcerting new position, is saddled with a decrepit, unnaturally chilly workplace watched over by an unnerving bit of decoration, an eerie map of the cemetery grounds. The film boasts an off–kilter leading man as well with the crater-faced Richard Boone as Robert Kraft, a small town business man railroaded into managing the family run cemetery. I Bury the Living implicates us in a primal childhood thought-crime… what if you stepped on a crack and really did break your mother’s back? What if simply wishing someone dead made it so? Guilt, pure and simple, gives this off–kilter 50’s chiller its lasting power.
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