The Itinerant Occultist

Dead and Buried (1981)
directed by Gary Sherman
rating: 4 out of 5 cravats
watched instantly on Netflix

Recent horror trends might dull the impact of its conclusion, but Dead and Buried should be better known. It is spooky and atmospheric, evenly paced and strange. I once advocated the credits that Woody Allen used - always simple, always the same - but refute that now. Great credits start your night right (it took Midnight in Paris to do it but even Woody Allen changed his mind) and the ghostly score and easy opening here left me unprepared for the unsettling act of violence that splinters in.

The death scenes - all of them - are brutal. Each home, each hallway is silted with fog, and the hotel staircase has cobwebs on its sconces. Even the plates at the cafe are grey, a color as weak as the light from a flashlight always low on batteries. The man who plays the sheriff is a good actor, perfect for this role, and all of your suspicions about his wife make that house eerier each time he goes home. One mystery becomes two - a second layer - and the doctor sets about his lab work in a room like Victor Frankenstein's.

I like that the hitchhiker, pretty thing, has never heard of Antonio Bay Potters Bluff, the town just up the road. It makes it seem like the sheriff's wards all occupy some liminal space that appears and disappears with the fog. And I like that opening scene, where two strangers meet on a beach and create names so as not to use their real ones. Each is a little disappointed in what the other comes up with, but plays along. She's pretty, and if the fantasy isn't quite what he thought, he still wants to believe it enough to stick around longer than he should.