I Bury The Living (1958)

This story is about a man named Bob Kraft who takes care of the business at a cemetery, the cemetery chairman. It's his job to manage the burial plots and to do all of the paperwork when someone dies. To keep track of all of the purchased graves, he keeps a big map of the cemetery in his office with little pins sticking out of all of the graves. The white pins represent purchased graves of living people, and black pins represent the graves of dead people.

The day after a young married couple comes into to buy a pair of graves for themselves, the die. When Bob goes to change their white pins to black ones, he finds that the pins are already black. He gets a sort of eerie feeling, like he marked them for death. To make sure it was just a coincidence, he switches a white pin for a black pin on the map. The next day the person whose pin he switched also died. He then starts getting worried and suspects that there's something suspicious about the map and tries to tell someone about it. Of course no one believes him. The police officer and reporter laugh off his worries and the former chairman, his uncle, just thinks he's been working too hard and asks him to switch more pins to make him see that he's imagining everything. Of course the following day, the people whose pins were switched die of unknown causes. Is Bob really responsible for these deaths? And if so is there anything he can do about it?

This film was really well done. The plot was decent and the acting was phenomenal. As it is with some of these older suspense/ thrillers, there is a wonderful sort of realization of horror undertaken by the characters that isn't so common in modern film. A slow dawning of the fact that there is something truly horrible happening, and there's nothing he or she can do about it. Worse, they might even be the cause. Even though the plot sounds kind of flimsy at the outset, they really do a great job at making it come to life.