Format: DVD from Northern Illinois University Founders Memorial Library on laptop.
With a name like I Bury the Living, I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect. It’s a great, lurid title from 1958, the sort of thing that feels like a cheap horror movie that will feature cheap thrills of a dubious nature designed to shock audiences of Eisenhower’s America. Even if the film turned out to be nothing special, the title alone would make it noteworthy.
It’s a bit of a mixed bag, honestly. On the one hand, it’s not a film that really lives up to what is implied by its title. Based on those four words, this seems like it should be a movie where a crazed maniac captures people and inters them until he (it’s always a he) is finally captured by the police and his final victim, probably the love interest of the stalwart detective, is rescued at the last minute. This couldn’t be further from the truth. The reality is that the film is far better than what that lurid title would suggest. It has the feel of one of the hour-long Twilight Zone episodes, and with its running time of 77 minutes, even the length feels right for that comparison.
