• Directed by Albert Band
• Written by Louis Garfinkle
• Starring
  • Richard Boone
  • Theodore Bikel
  • Peggy Maurer
  • Robert Osterloh
  • Herbert Anderson
• Produced by Albert Band and Louis Garfinkle

It probably wouldn’t be unrealistic to posit that Albert Band’s greatest contribution to current cinema was the procreation and education of his son, the exuberant genre schlockmeister Charles “Full Moon” Band. Albert’s directing and producing career spanned five decades, but if you ignore those later features which he either directed or produced for his son’s various companies, most of Band pere’s output was in disposable and forgettable European-made drive-in fare.

If any one movie in his list of credits has a shot at immortality, though, it’s this one. Unlike the spaghetti westerns and peplums (yes, that’s an acceptable plural) which were his bread-and-butter, I Bury the Living is a quiet and sombre little horror tale which both revolves around a singular gimmick, and yet opts for some surprising psychological depth.

I have a duty, though, to harp on the epigram which follows the opening credits:

Science has learned that man possesses powers which go beyond the boundaries of the natural.

This is the story of one confronted by such strange forces within himself.

By definition, what science deals with IS natural. If it can be measured, quantified, and reproduceably studied, it’s the purvue of science. Whereas if something is “beyond the boundaries of nature,” all that science can do is shrug and say, “Not my department.”

[Pedantic little complaint aside, he proceeds with the review.]

“Hmm… This ‘Masters Edition Battleship’ is harder than I thought.”

The “one” referenced in the preamble is Bob Kraft (Richard Boone), upstanding community member and department store owner who has just been reluctantly elected the chairman of the “Immortal Hills” cemetery committee. Not that he’s got anything against civic service, or any problem with the cemetery as such; he’s been a member of the committee for years. But the revolving chairmanship comes around to him at crunchtime: His business is picking up; his impending marriage to Ann (Peggy Maurer) is, well, impending; and the old caretaker, Andy McKee (Theodore Bikel), is being retired with full pay, meaning that a replacement needs to be found. (Bikel, who was thirty-four at the time of shooting, plays the role under a white wig and moustache and some fairly obvious age makeup. This is, of course, the result of the famous “Hollywood Shortage Of Aged Actors Who Could Fake An Adequate Scottish Accent” of 1958.) But Bob is the realistic sort, and he’s willing, if not eager, to put in his time for the greater good.

But Bob soon has occasion to show the less methodical, more intuitive side of his personality. McKee shows Bob the office cottage, where a huge map on one wall shows all of the plots of the cemetery, with names on all those that have already been sold. White pins mark the plots whose owners are still living; black pins mark those whose tenants have moved in, so to speak. When a just-married couple (Glen Vernon and Lynette Bernay) comes by to fulfill the terms of his trust fund and purchase their plots (“But honey, I wanted a toaster!”), Bob mistakenly plants two black pins for them in the family plot. Later that same day, he receives news that the couple was killed in a traffic accident. And when he returns to the board to change their pins and discovers the black ones already there, an unsettling notion occurs to him: That maybe, somehow, he marked them for death with the black pins.

The perils of waterproof foundation.

It’s not the sort of idea that an upstanding businessman entertains idly, so to disabuse himself of the notion, he picks a purchased plot at random — for a man named Isham — and replaces the white pin with a black one.

And that night, Mr. Isham (Cyril Delevanti), the kindly old toymaker, dies at his workbench of a cerebral hermorrhage.

But if the underused intuitive side of Bob’s personality can’t shake the irrational suspicion that the pins are causing the deaths, the pragmatic side of him insists on more concrete proof. After all, previous chairmen, including his own Uncle George (Howard Smith), have used the map for years with many a misstuck pin, and never an ill-timed death. So with George’s encouragement, Bob replaces the pin for the previous year’s chairman, Henry (Russ Bender), who they know to be in excellent health. And Bob almost persuades himself that his suspicions are mere imagination when he calls Henry’s house that evening and finds his wife in good spirits… until she goes to bring him to the phone and finds him dead in bed.

It seems Bob’s pragmatic side has bequeathed all of his imagination to the other half of his brain, because his next move is to call the police, a plan of action which seems particularly ill-thought out. What is Homicide Lt. Clayborne (Robert Osterloh) going to make of a tale of a sinister cemetery map, connecting two traffic fatalities, a cerebral hemorrhage, and a heart attack? At least Bob doesn’t get locked in a rubber room, but those close to him, like Ann and George, start to worry about his mental equilibrium, and even go so far as to arrange a Miami vacation which he soundly refuses. Seems to me like getting out of town would have been the best course of action: if it’s all coincidence, then a trip would clear his mind and calm his nerves; and if, as he begins to suspect, it’s some unwanted ability inherent in him rather than in the map, getting the hell away from the map which seems to trigger his Grim Reaperesque tendencies would still be prudent.

Let’s see, I already made a Battleship joke; should I follow it with a Spirograph joke?

But no, he sticks around, obsessing about the pins and refusing even to resign, until the three remaining members of the committee make him an ultimatum: he can keep his chairmanship, if he will that very evening go back out to the cemetery and plant black pins in the graves of those three men. While I admire the scientific method as much as anyone else, I do think there’s a point at which the costs of proof beyond a reasonable doubt outweigh the satisfaction of a well-supported conclusion. Perhaps I’ve just got a lower tolerance for death-tempting risks than these guys. (Or perhaps I’m not a character in a movie.)

You might think that the string of “Well, let’s be REALLY sure” deaths would get a little redundant, and it’s true that the movie is almost in danger of becoming comical as the bodies pile up and get planted. But the story doesn’t concentrate on the deaths so much as on their effect on Bob, who can’t shake the fatalistic guilt of responsibility that comes with each death, even as each new attempt to disprove the crazy idea offers less and less probability of exoneration. And eventually, the idea which has been obvious to viewers from about the fifteen-minute mark springs into his fevered lobes: If placing a black pin in the plot of a live person kills them… what will a white pin in a decedent’s plot do?

I Bury the Living was Albert Band’s second outing as both producer and director, and there’s an energetic spirit of storytelling experimentation to his direction which balances out the sometimes crude and unsuccessful techniques. Visual tricks to depict Bob’s state of mind — hazy heatlines obscuring his vision, high-contrast shots of the cemetery map that almost leave it looking like an abstract depiction of staring eyes — are surprisingly effective, given how obvious and overt such techniques look today. In some respects, the limitations imposed by the budget on the polish of the production actually add to the visual style. Scenes of Bob in his professional offices are uniformly, even banally lit; in contrast, the lighting is almost minimal in the cottage housing the cemetery office, with splashes of light aimed only at those areas of the set necessary to the scene, leaving the rest sunk in claustrophobic darkness. It’s a better movie for being a small and cheap movie.

Okay, quick: Which one’s the police detective, and which one’s the newspaper reporter?

But without being intensely spoileriffic, I must opine that the ending of the movie lets the air out of the whole feature, with as bad a case of Scooby-Dooism as I ever recall seeing. I watched this movie for review in the same week as the contemporary feature House on Haunted Hill (1959), and can’t keep from comparing their approaches to the supernatural: House on Haunted Hill maintains a well-balanced ambiguity between ghostly and naturalistic explanations for the strange goings-on, so that the climax, while not exactly an airtight conclusion to the preceding events, still seems to be of a piece with the rest of the movie. I Bury the Living, on the other hand, spends so much time “proving” the supernatural explanation, that the last-minute revelation of a naturalistic explanation elicits a hearty “oh, come on!” rather than the intended catharsis and renewal of faith in the natural order.

I know, that’s a lot of big words devoted to a cheap drive-in movie. It’s just a shame when the last five minutes overshadow and emasculate the dramatic effect which the preceding seventy minutes set up.

“I don’t see dead people! I don’t! I don’t see ‘em!”

Given how many classic B-movies have been given the remake treatment in recent years (including the aforementioned House on Haunted Hill), I can’t help but wonder if Charles Band has considered acquiring or simply asserting the remake rights to his late father’s film. It’s certainly a production which could be mounted within the confines of the current range of Full Moon’s direct-to-video budgets. On the other hand, there are no characters from which a collectible toy or action figure could be derived, and the insertion of such into a re-imagined plot would likely destroy whatever magic might have rubbed off the original into the remake. So perhaps I’d better shut up and not give anyone ideas.

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 8
• breasts: 0
• explosions: 0
• ominous thunderstorms: 0
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 1
  • Theodore Bikel (McKee) played “CPO Sergey Rozhenko” in the TNG episode “Family”