I Bury the Living

Year:  1958

Director:  Albert Band

Screenplay:  Louis A. Garfinkle

Starring:  Richard Boone, Theodore Bikel, Peggy Maurer

Running Time:  76 minutes

Genre:  Horror

Businessman Robert Kraft (Boone) finds himself appointed as head of a commission that oversees a large cemetery.  The cemetery caretaker, Andy MacKee (Bikel), uses a huge wall map of the cemetery, the plots which have been bought, but are unoccupied, are marked with a white pin, and the plots that are occupied are marked with a black pin.  When Kraft absent-mindedly places black pins instead of white to mark a newly purchased plot, the owners die suddenly and mysteriously.  Soon Kraft becomes convinced that he can kill people by sticking black pins in their cemetery plots.

I Bury the Living is very much a low budget B-movie, filmed on an obviously minuscule budget, with few sets and less special effects.  Richard Boone looks convincingly fraught as the film goes on, and Theodore Bikel almost manages to get past one of the worst attempts at a Scottish accent in film as the amiable old caretaker.  The film does have some stylish noir photography, and effective music by Gerald Fried, who had already done the music for Stanley Kubrick's early films and would go on to compose the scores for numerous TV shows, including the famous "fight music" from the Star Trek episode "Amok Time".  Director Albert Band also does well with making a large plan with pins stuck in it look threatening and sinister.  In fact this is a really neat little psychological thriller, for about the first hour, and then it all falls apart with a dreadful climax, that feels like something out of Scooby-Doo.  It almost ruins the film, but the preceding hour is good enough to still make it worth watching.  

    Theodore Bikel and Richard Boone in I Bury the Living