Your Favourite Mortician: I Bury the Living

Unless you spend your death care days working as a full time embalmer sequestered in the dark recesses of a funeral home’s prep room or on an eight hour cigarette break working as a crematory operator, you’re going to be a funeral director who is very acquainted with the local cemeteries.

Around my neck of the woods we have every type of cemetery you can think of: a National Cemetery, one of the biggest mausoleums in the country, numerous Catholic and Jewish cemeteries, hundreds of high priced commercial cemeteries, thousands of city maintained Pioneer Cemeteries, and an astronomical amount of backwoods cemeteries that are used half the time by derelict yokels for target practicing the local vermin and empty flower vases.

All of these types of cemeteries comes with their very own eclectic mix of owners and caretakers ranging from business professional yuppies waiting to take as much of your money as possible, to bumpkins who ‘can’t remember if we buried Ethel here or over there.’ One of my favorites that I had the pleasure of working with was the befuddled old caretaker I met at Laurel Hill Pioneer Cemetery. He became quite upset with me when I pointed out his illegal method of grouping his outer burial container and the opening and closing charge as one ‘Cemetery Fee.’ See kids, when cemeteries require an outer burial container for their cemetery and the crooked old bastard only accepts them if bought through their own cemetery, that’s a clever way to charge clueless consumers whatever they want. After I pointed this out to him, he blubbered on about some non-sense through his jack-o-lantern teeth and every subsequent conversation I’ve ever had included both he and his wife getting on two different phones in their home and reciting bible verses mixed with threats about never recommending our funeral home. Those kooky old bible thumpin’ caretakers.

The horror flick that got me reminiscing about cemeteries is 1958’s I Bury the Living, which just happens to be based in the ostentatiously named Immortal Hills Cemetery. And yes, that cemetery has a kooky old caretaker named Andy McKee, but ol’ Andy isn’t nearly as nefarious as the aforementioned law breaking evangelist.

Andy is the grounds’ stalwart being around Immortal Hills Cemetery for over forty years of service. His list of skills acquired over those forty years reads like a true renaissance man: digging graves, chiseling headstones, picking up dead flower arrangements, and locking the gate. He is a lighthearted old timer and is quite excited to meet the newly appointed Chairman of the cemetery, Robert Kraft, of Kraft Department Stores. When Robert arrives at the cemetery his dapper appearance and flashy car, no doubt bought at the Nazi Party’s going out of business sale, contrast Andy’s drunk Irish stereotype look, and he’s covered in mud! They both hit it off well and Andy immediately starts showing Mr. Kraft the stunning attributes of his work shed with the same zeal as a dirty caveman showing an alien fire.

The first thing on Mr. Kraft’s list however isn’t a tour, it is to discuss Andy’s retirement with full pension for years of hard work. Andy isn’t too keen on that idea and tries to reason with Robert against the offer saying that will basically kill him because he’ll have no purpose anymore. They say youth is wasted on the young, but life is wasted on the elderly. I don’t care what kind of pride I might have doing any job, getting a full pension upon retirement as a cemetery’s caretaker is a pretty good score for Andy, because judging by his looks he’d probably end up some frozen guy found behind a grocery store after a snowstorm.

Back at Kraft’s Department Store the other board members level with Robert about his role in the cemetery and how important that role is in perpetuating their good standing in the city regardless of the non-gratis salary that comes with being Immortal Hills’ new Chairman. Although Kraft’s is a department store, this is something that happens a lot in funeral homes and it’s a side of the funeral industry, amongst scores of other issues, I absolutely hate.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLPvJCqx-8c

When you are low on the totem pole trying to get through school or an apprenticeship you get forced into doing crap like this all the time instead of the owner whose name is on the front sign. Whether it’s volunteering time after hours to visit retirement homes to host some ridiculous Q & A session catered with coffee and See’s Candy or getting stuck at another drunk driving assembly at the High School, all of these so called community service functions are awful, glad handing, brown nosing nightmares with the purpose of keeping the mortuary’s name in the public view hoping that the payoff will be dragging another customer back to the funeral home once the Almighty swoops in.

So under duress Robert Kraft accepts his fate as the new Chairman and stops by the cemetery to go over some more paperwork with Andy when his friend and new wife stop by to select graves in the family plot. Because? They just got married! An odd request but Robert’s friend insists he choose the plots right then because he is not going to get a cent from his family trust unless he selects the graves for him and his new wife, logical enough. But Robert accidentally puts two black pins, indicating someone is dead and buried, in their two plots on the gigantic cemetery map instead of white pins, which are placed when someone has purchased the grave plots in advance. Eerily, the young couple violently die shortly after and Robert can’t help but feel it could be more than a coincidence.

Now if that had happened to me, I would get a little freaked out and probably steer clear of the gigantic map of the cemetery in the work shed, unless it killed people who didn’t use their blinkers-I hate that. Robert Kraft on the other hand decides to replace another white pin with black, and that person dies. And then he does it again, and they die. After that the police officer Robert contacts insists he does it again, and they’ll keep an eye on the person, but they die too! Finally the fellow chairmen of Kraft Department stores also, incredulously, convince Robert to switch the pins on all of their own plots just to show him he’s crazy, and you guessed it, they die.

After the pile of bodies mounts Robert Kraft gets the brilliant idea of taking all of the black pins out of the graves and replace them with white pins again to undo all the death he is recklessly responsible for. I Bury the Living was made in 1958 remember, so this is a pre-George Romero timeframe and Robert doesn’t have any precedent of the hell that resurrecting the dead could bring. Do the dead come back to life? Does Robert find out what powers he ultimately possesses?

What I will say is there are some good twists through the rest of I Bury the Living and Your Favorite Mortician, ME, was very entertained. There are a lot of well shot scenes full of authentic headstones from a very profitable period in cemetery sales. I also enjoyed the genuine aesthetic of the groundskeeper’s shack full of old flower easels, bible stands for pastors, a lot of dirt, and a slew of traffic signs to guide the bereaved through the cemetery driveways.

So next time all you potential apprentices out there are thinking about going to a cemetery to ponder suicide, take selfies staring at the ground with mascara running down your face, or take nudes draped over some moss covered headstone, weigh out staying at home and watching I Bury the Living instead. Trust me, all the cemetarians out there are tired of your morose loitering and discarded Djarum Blacks amongst the headstones.