- Director: Roger Corman
- Writers: Charles Beaumont, Ray Russell
- Stars: Ray Milland, Hazel Court, Richard Ney
- Run Time: 1 Hour, 21 Minutes
- Link: https://amzn.to/2PNUswD
Synopsis
A group of men stands by while two workers dig up a grave. They hit the coffin. They open the lid. There are bloody fingernail prints on the inside of the lid. The man inside clearly wasn’t dead when they buried him! Credits roll.
Emily goes to see Guy, who tells Kate that he doesn’t want to see her. He explains, “I do love you. Now please go away.” He’s been having nightmares since the exhumation. “There can never be a marriage between us,” he says, leading her downstairs to the family crypts. He tells how his father was buried alive, and now he takes Laudanum to help him sleep.
Guy lives in fear of being buried alive. “Every member of my family died a horrible and violent death. Now, I await my turn.” His older sister is Kate, who insists that the story just isn’t true.
Eventually, Guy and Emily get married anyway. Family friend Miles is there, as is Dr. Gault, Emily’s father. Guy gets a headache and leaves the party early to go lay down.
They find the family dog outside dead and make plans to bury him. Then the dog gets up; he was only stunned. Guy freaks out because he was about to bury the dog alive.
Guy won’t let Emily bring flowers into the house. Ever. Emily tells Miles about her marital problems. “Guy is ill,” referring to a mental illness.
Guy’s been building a huge marble mausoleum on the property. It’s a nice place, with brandy, a piano, chairs, secret exits, and all the comforts of home in his morbid man-cave. The coffin has a drill, hammer, saw, and other escape tools on the inside of the lid. The wall and lid are spring-loaded and open at a touch; he really has thought of everything. It’s all ridiculously excessive, but with this setup, he’s no longer afraid of being buried. As a last resort, he’s got dynamite stored in there to blow up the walls, and as a last-last resort, he’s got poison to make sure his suffering ends.
Miles rents out a room from Guy to perform his medical experiments. He demonstrates how to use a battery to make a dead frog twitch.
Every once in a while, Guy just needs to get out of that morbid, deathly house, so he goes for a walk in the cemetery, which is so much better. On one of these walks, he hears a gravedigger whistling the tune he remembers from the pre-credit sequence. He gets a scare and dreams he’s in the mausoleum, but none of the gadgets work.
Miles and Emily find him laying the cemetery, with no sign of the gravediggers. They all talk about Guy while he rests, and Kate swears her father rests in peace; no one has ever been buried alive in their family— it really is all in his head.
Finally, Emily gives Guy an ultimatum; her or his mausoleum. She insists that he destroy the building. Boom! He dynamites the place and invites Miles to a party Friday night. Kate starts looking sideways at Guy as if she has something up her sleeve.
Friday night at the party, they all hear the cat, who seems to be trapped in the walls. This gets Guy all upset again and prompts Miles to make a challenge: to go down to the crypt and open Guy’s father’s tomb. They open it, and the skeleton falls out right on top of Guy, who dies from shock.
Yeah, right. Sure he’s dead. Dr. Gault pronounces him dead from a heart attack.
We hear Guy talking inside his head, but no one else can hear him. Miles gets out his battery and shocks the “corpse.” There’s a funeral. Instead of the creepy crypt, they take him to a freshly dug grave and bury him.
Kate asks how long until Emily is going to leave, and there’s a bit of a fight. Meanwhile, Dr. Gault has ordered the gravediggers to dig up Guy for his experimental research. Surprise— Guy’s back, and he’s not happy! He kills both gravediggers and Dr. Gault as well.
Meanwhile, Emily and Miles are getting a little closer in her bedroom. After all, they buried her husband just a few hours earlier. The butler takes Miles down to the lab to see the bodies, and Guy finds Emily in her bedroom.
Next thing we see is Guy carrying Emily through the cemetery. He wants revenge for all this, but she blames Kate. He buries her alive as retribution. Miles and Guy fight over the open grave, and just as Guy is about to behead Miles, Kate shoots him in the back, killing him for real. By the time they dig up Emily, she’s dead too.
Kate explains that Emily made it look like Guy’s father was buried alive. She had been feeding his fear all along— the cat in the wall, the grave robbers chasing him. Emily was behind it all.
Commentary
This is what happens when rich people have too much time on their hands. The whole idea is pretty ridiculous. I’m sure there have been people who have had bury-me-phobia, but not taken to this kind of extreme.
It’s all a little far-fetched, but the acting is pretty good, and the sets are impressive for all being done on a stage- no real cemeteries were used in this film.