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I Bury the Living , 1958, directed by Albert Band. Richard Boone, Theodore Bikel, Peggy Maurer, Howard Smith.

Synopsis: Robert Kraft has taken over the management of the Immortal Hills Cemetery. In the caretaker's shack, there's a map of every plot in the cemetery, each marked with a pin: a black pin denotes a plot that is occupied, a white pin denotes a plot owned by someone who has not yet shuffled off this mortal coil. By accident, Kraft puts a black pin in the plot of his newlywed friends; shortly afterwards, they are killed in a car accident. Experimenting, Kraft discovers that every time he places a black pin in the plot of a living person, that person dies. Horrified by this he is driven to take his own life, until he reasons that if he has the power of death with the black pins, then he must also have the power of life with the white pins...

Nothing New Under the Sun: To the list of movies that appear to have influenced George Romero's Night of the Living Dead, we can add this unassuming shocker from a decade earlier. Watching films that seem to anticipate the foundational films in any given genre can be a fascinating experience. Often, one can immediately see what sets such films apart, even when their raw materials are old hat. Often, it's a case of taking the next step, of going farther than previous filmmakers, of following things through to their logical conclusions. I Bury the Living anticipates the cemetery setting of NOTLD's first scenes, including the funereal deadpan of its filmmaking. It also suggests that the influence of E. C. Comics was beginning to be felt in the culture at large, and it even suggests the grave giving up its dead. Indeed, for its first hour, I Bury the Living suggests worse and worse things, as our leading man, the craggy Richard Boone, begins to unravel.

At roughly the 60 minute mark, the film turns away from its awful implications, and in a spectacular failure of nerve, begins to explain away its mysteries instead of taking that next step. This, of course, is why this film is an obscurity, while Night of the Living Dead is one of the seminal films of the horror genre. This film was made by Albert Band, a filmmaker better known as the founder of several fly-by-night production companies that have occasionally produced interesting horror movies. He's a cut-rate Corman, if you can believe it, though the filmmaking accumen on display in this film is better than competent. Like Corman, Band himself never took the next step that some of his proteges have taken, and like Corman, his commercial instincts have led him away from real art. The rationalist cop-outs at the end of I Bury the Living may have made short-term sense in the drive-in marketplace of 1958, but in the long term, they hamstring the movie. Which, of course, is a pity, because the raw materials were there for the hands of serious artist. Unfortunately, none was involved with the film.

A note on editions: there are many public domain versions of this film. The best edition I've seen is MGM's now out-of-print Midnight Movies edition, to which I've linked on the off chance that Amazon has used copies available (at this writing, there are several).

2/11/07