This is a dude who likes his tools. Hell, his coffin is spring-loaded with an ejector seat!
Or maybe it’s an ejector seat to hell?
Premature Burial (1962) is typical of the 1960s horror pieces, full of period dress, manners, and dry horror around every corner, although perhaps not that envisioned by the storytellers. Guy Carrell lives in a big, big house with his sister, Kate, his butler, and his fears. His means of support? Unclear. What does he do? He paints, and he sweats over his belief that, like his forefathers, he’s doomed to catalepsy: a disease in which doctors cannot differentiate death from paralysis.
Doomed to being buried alive.
So what attracts the beautiful Emily Gault, owner of a thousand bizarre hair styles, to Guy? He may be tall and courtly, but he’s a real maintenance-gig as well. Guy holds her at arm’s length for a while, but who can resist the multitudinous hair-buns and big, big dresses? So soon they’re married, with a whirlwind trip to Venice planned – but they never go.
Because Guy is suffering from delusions. His friend Dr. Judson cannot help, which is a shame since he’s so earnest and sure of himself. But Guy is not a complete victim. He exerts himself to build his own mausoleum, complete with various escape mechanisms, not to mention a bit of music & wine for a moment of lounging following one’s faux-burial.
Following a nightmare that he has been buried alive and the mausoleum stripped of his escape mechanisms, Judson and Emily combine forces to assure Guy that this is another symptom of his illness, and soon enough the mausoleum is used for dynamite practice, which Guy had obtained for the rather impractical purpose of blowing a hole in the side of the wee building. Another delusion, involving a whistling gravedigger, motivates Guy to prove to his family and friends that his father was really buried alive, and the resultant shock kills him.
Or does it?
Nope, and off to the burial ground we go. Too bad for Guy.
But he’s not entirely luckless, as Dr. Gault, Emily’s Dad, happens to enjoy performing autopsies, so he sends his minions to retrieve his late son-in-law’s body for a bout of midnight madness, but Guy has recovered from his seizure, destroys the gravediggers, and has a lovely bit of vengeance on the doctor. The rampage continues, and in the final act we discover this has been a contrivance of Emily’s.
It’s a mildly creepy story, but the plot holes vitiate it. For example, we never know Emily’s motivation. She’s just a wide-eyed innocent lass who has no apparent grudge against Guy, nor an appetite for ill-got gains. That’s a head scratcher. And Kate, Guy’s sister, claimed to have known all along what was going on, but “I couldn’t tell Guy, he’d never believe me,” she weeps at the murder scene, after shooting him herself. All very wishy-washy. If she knew, why didn’t she plan to foil Emily – or just blow her up with one of those sticks of dynamite?
And Guy just isn’t that sympathetic a character, nor repellent. He needed more depth so we could feel a tug of horror when he’s buried – or when we witness what he, in the end, becomes.
It’s sort of fun, sort of not. If you’re a Ray Milland completist, yada yada yada. Or does “yada yada yada” qualify as an anachronism when reviewing a play set in the 1800s? That’s a head-scratcher, too.
