I Bury The Living!

It's almost unheard of for me to chance upon a movie I have no context for. I've either read or seen something for just about every movie out there that I'd be interested in. That's not to say I never run across new stuff, but that's the point I run across it and then I go see the flick if I can.

I Bury the Living starring Richard Boone (Paladin) is a movie for which I've only read the title. I knew nothing about this 1958 flick before I got it in a batch of cheapies. I watched without pre-conception and found it a most remarkable and creepy movie.

The premise is pretty simple. A fundamentally good but busy man finds himself having to manage a local cemetary in his spare time. He meets the Scot gravedigger and learns that a map full of pins marks the purchased but empty gravesites and the occupied ones -- white pins for the empty and black pins for the inhabited. Our hero accidently puts black pins in empty sites on the map and those folks die. The details are interesting, but it keeps happening and despite his attempts to report the impossible events and his desire to accept the grim responsibility no one in authority appears to believe him. His struggle with this offers Richard Boone a grand acting opportunity and he makes the best of it.

I won't say more for fear of spoiling this pretty dang good movie, but I was convinced the map, a key visual element of tasty movie would turn out to be a spell of some kind. You have to watch to movie to see if I'm right, but it's worth the effort.

Great flick!

Rip Off