This 1958 horror swapped its ghost ending for a realistic one

I Bury The Living: Colorized is a colorized edition of a 1958 horror film directed by Albert Band, and it is a ghost story whose makers talked themselves out of the ghosts. According to TCM, the film's writer, Louis Garfinkle, wrote a supernatural finale, and Band had him rewrite it so the deaths had a real-world explanation. The change still divides viewers.

The setup is the reason people remember it. Richard Boone, the star of the television western Have Gun, Will Travel, plays Robert Kraft, the newly appointed chairman of a cemetery committee. A wall map of the grounds marks filled graves with black pins and plots that are sold but still empty with white pins. Kraft puts black pins on plots whose buyers are alive, and the buyers die soon after. He begins to believe the pins are doing it.

Why does a pin on a map feel so frightening?

The film turns paperwork into a curse. Nothing in it is a monster or a haunted house: a man in an office moves a pin, and the people on the map pay for it. Kraft is not a villain, only a conscientious official who comes to believe he holds a power he never asked for.

Critics have compared the premise to an episode of The Twilight Zone, the television anthology series that began in 1959, the year after this film appeared. Most of the film plays out in a few rooms, with the cemetery office at the center, which is how a small production made the idea feel large.

What happened to the ghost ending?

TCM reports that Garfinkle's original script ended with Kraft cornered in the cemetery office by the people his pins had killed. Band had Garfinkle rewrite it, and in the released film the deaths turn out to have a human cause: the cemetery caretaker, played by Theodore Bikel, had been the killer. In the 1950s, the argument goes, a realistic ending looked like the safer commercial bet for a horror picture.

This is the film's most debated choice. Stephen King, the bestselling horror novelist, discusses the film in his 1981 book Danse Macabre, where, according to secondary accounts, he lists it among the scariest films ever made but criticizes its ending. TCM's writer disagrees with King and defends the rewrite.

Why does a 1958 B movie still matter?

Because it has stayed with other writers. King's 2015 short story "Obits," about a writer whose obituaries kill the people they describe, is introduced in The Bazaar of Bad Dreams with a citation of this film, according to the review site Reactor. The story went on to win the 2016 Edgar Award for best short story.

The film also marks the early career of Band, who was born in Paris in 1924, worked as assistant director on John Huston's The Asphalt Jungle and adapted The Red Badge of Courage for Huston's 1951 film. His son Charles Band later built Full Moon Productions, a studio devoted to cheap genre films.

The film went out on the exploitation circuit, the network of theaters that sold low-budget films on sensational advertising. It was promoted with the tagline "Out of a time-rotted tomb crawls an unspeakable horror!", which TCM says misrepresented the film. It later became a staple of public domain home video.

Where does it sit on Relay?

Relay carries the film as a colorized edition of the 1958 original, alongside 55 horror films made in the 1950s. It is a quick watch, 76 minutes, and the kind of Halloween film that relies on a premise and a performance rather than gore.

It suits viewers who like Twilight Zone-style stories, readers of Stephen King curious about where "Obits" began, and anyone who wants to decide for themselves whether the realistic ending ruins it.

Horror