I Bury The Living

I Bury the Living
***/5

********SPOILERS********

This was a very strange low budget horror flick. A prominent guy, Kraft, is newly appointed as chairman to run the cemetery in a small town. He accidentally mixes up the colored pins used to mark on a map whether a plot is purchased or full. The people he places the black pin for then show up dead. He soon descends into a madness where he becomes convinced that he has a power to kill anyone whose pin he has access to. In the end, it turns out the elderly cemetery keeper (McKee) killed them all because he didn't want to retire.

There are a lot of plot holes here. Firstly, every person died in a different way, as pointed out by the police. There is a line at the end that indicated the people all died of fright before he could strangle them, but then why did one have a cerebral hemorrhage and another have heart failure? Another question that arises is why didn't McKee commit similarly motivated murders when Kraft's predecessors made the same mistake in placing the pins? It wasn't entirely clear why he committed the murders in the first place. Also, how did McKee even end up dying? Are we to consider that perhaps Kraft does have some kind of power?

Despite this, there is a lot to like in this film. The distorted sequences are surreal and creative, very similar to the dreams in The Elephant Man. They are well thought out and avoid seeming like other “weird” dream sequences, which often have a very rigid way of being. My favorite detail of this film is the “killer” map itself. At times when Kraft feels he is most out of control, the map glows and is larger than in reality. At one point it takes up the whole wall, backlit. The glow becomes brighter and brighter until Kraft is standing silhouetted against a white screen as he puts a gun to his head. The moment is intense. The next time you see the map, someone else is in the room, and it returns to its normal proportions. All this is handled smoothly and skillfully, not unlike the first shot in the film. Credits roll over a general texture, much like in an Ozu film. Only, in this film, once the credits are done, the camera pulls back and you realize the texture is that of a wall, the wall around the cemetery. The shot is paced well and not excessive or overly dramatized. It is smooth and engaging, showing you the space that the film will take place in.

Overall I liked the film, but I feel like there was a real missed opportunity in explaining why McKee did anything. What I think they were getting at, with all the comments on his devotion to the cemetery, was that when he saw the pins marking the grave as full, he took it upon himself to make sure the map was correct. If the map could be wrong, what good was the map, and therefore the cemetery? At least, this is the answer I like. In the end, when Kraft tries to make up for his deeds by switching the black pins for white, McKee goes about making the corrections, digging up the bodies.

This obsession with consistency and a perceived truth is an idea I find myself liking more and more. Perhaps it has something to do with my own obsessive tendencies. I like the idea that he is so obsessed with this map that he would rather murder someone to fill their grave than change the pin to its proper white. It is a similar idea to one touched on in a comic called Rip Hunter: Time Master. It's a fun 60s comic with some unintentionally fascinating aspects. Much like McKee in this film, Rip Hunter is obsessed with the truth of history. His job is to go back in time and document important events on film. Constantly he screws up and has to defy the apparent course of things to make sure history is the way he “knows” it is. A good example is an issue where Rip realizes that Caesar is supposed to be in Egypt the next day, but according to reports, he is in India. Rip uses his ship to remove Caesar from what he was doing and bring him to the “proper” place. Because of his obsession with keeping history correct, he creates situations that never could have taken place naturally, creating the history he knows and loves. What would happen if Rip were ever to realize his folly, could be potentially crushing to him. But one of the interesting things about a character like this is the inability to see it any way but theirs.


Recommendations:
Diary of a Madman