Once I got over the wretched title of I Bury the Living (1958), my Arts Editor and I discovered an eccentric little horror thriller, a low-key movie about a man named Kraft (Richard Boone) who is elected chair of the cemetery committee. A nearly honorary post, he’s assured, but soon he discovers the cemetery map under the management of a man-of-all-work (Theodore Bikel), full of white pins (reserved but unused lots) and black pins (lots with the body already in residence). Soon he’s replacing white pins with black pins and watching the bodies pile up.
Is he, in some occult way, responsible? The movie takes the question seriously, and as we build to the dénouement, he quite logically removes the black pins he has placed (symbolizing his supposed ‘victims’) and replaces them with white pins, in the belief that, if he can end someone’s life by placing a black pin on their plot on the map, he can restore their life by changing their pin back to white. So at this point, we wonder if we’re about to see a legitimate predecessor to the various zombie movies & plays of today?
But no…
This is not a movie of a man moved beyond his abilities by some power, but rather a man overwhelmed by a power, within or without him, and its arbitrary requirements of him, and all he’ll do – or not – to satisfy it. Eating away at the edge of insanity, as he watches his life fall apart around him, a moral man whose very life appears to violate those very moral norms of traditional society. What is the solution? A gun? A mad urge to dig the bodies up? He becomes a rag doll to the competing demands of morality and power. In deep ways, questions of responsibility become paramount, and this movie deviously leaves those answers to the viewer.
