Gerald Fried (b. 1928), composer, and Frederick Gately (1909 - 1988), cinematographer, are the instigators of a wonderful film of sound and vision, and with this Louis Garfinkle (1928 - 2005) penned story, who, some twenty years on, was to pen The Deer Hunter (1978), have created a tense 1950's Noir style thriller.
...the theme of psychological horror, director Band destroys his work with a cop-out ending.
Richard Boone plays Robert Kraft, the newly elected director of a cemetery who finds himself involved in a morbid mystery when people who have plots in the cemetery begin mysteriously dying, especially when Robert realizes that he mistakenly put a black pin(for dead) in place of a white pin(for living) on a big map representing all the burial plots in the cemetery, for people who subsequently died. This doesn't seem to be a coincidence, since every time he does it, someone else dies...
I Bury The Living/1958. The cast and crew cranked out this fun and entertainingly twisted, somewhat unnerving low-budget thriller in a mere 9 days and it all comes together pretty effectively.
Businessman Robert Kraft (a solid and credible performance by Richard Boone) becomes the newly elected director of a cemetery. Kraft discovers that he can cause the deaths of living owners of funeral plots by simply changing the push-pin color from white to black on a large wall map of the graveyard.
If this had come out just one year later, it could have made a great episode of "The Twilight Zone". The idea is certainly interesting, but at feature length the story feels padded and repetitive after the third black pin and the third death we have already accepted the film's premise but Richard Boone keeps sticking the pins on the map, which would make more sense if his character turned evil, but he doesn't.
Hugely effective, 50's B-horror from one of Hollywood's most prolific genre producers. Suspenseful, paranoiac and downright eerie, 'I Bury The Living' is everything one could wish for from a modestly budget horror quickie.
This is quite a spooky little B-drama with Richard Boone ("Robert Kraft"), who owns a local department store, nominated by his peers to take charge of the the local cemetery. Once in post, he discovers a map on the wall with all the townsfolk represented by a pin - white if they are alive and black if not.
Then try the men who run the cemeteries where the work of those usually tall, lanky Lurch like men ends up, if not in some crematorium. Creepy cemeteries have haunted audiences ever since the silent movies, and this one is a definite rise above the cardboard headstones of "Plan Nine From Outer Space".
